New Conversion Tactic: Lies and Trickery | God is Pretend

If I hear another person ever claim that Islam is a “religion of peace”, I am liable to lose my shit.

The last line of the video makes me shudder, and I’m squarely in agreement with God Is Pretend’s comment above.

(via Atheist Media Blog)

I’m torn on this.  On one hand, I tend to think that Islamic extremism can be something that society should avoid at all costs, and on the other I very much appreciate that my freedom from religion comes from others’ rights to have freedom of religion.

Thoughts?

Here’s the Intelligence Squared debate on “Atheism is the new Fundamentalism” starring Richard Dawkins, Anthony Grayling, Richard Harries, and Charles Moore.  Dawkins and Grayling do a fantastic job of handling the tired and ad hominem “arguments” from the theists.

THE war of words between atheists and religious believers has entered a new chapter with the launch of Northern Ireland’s first ever humanist advertising campaign.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) yesterday unveiled a billboard with the slogan:

Please Don’t Label Me. Let Me Grow Up And Choose For Myself.

Located on one Belfast’s busiest routes, the poster is a follow-up to its atheist buses campaign that ran earlier this year in parts of the UK.

[..]

Reverend David McIlveen from the Free Presbyterian Church ranted:

It is none of their business how people bring up their children. It is the height of arrogance that the BHA would even assume to tell people not to instruct their children in their religion.

What Reverend McIlveen is missing is that this campaign isn’t telling people not to teach their children their beliefs, but rather to leave the labeling and indoctrination out of their childrens’ lives.  It’s a fine line to draw, for sure.  I liken it to teaching historical religions (I think most of us learned of the Greek gods in school, no?).

I don’t feel as if it’s wrong to tell a child, “Mommy and Daddy believe X, but we want you to decide for yourself what’s right.”  Yes, of course the child will likely seek to emulate his or her parents, but keeping this open line is important in development, always reinforcing the child’s individual right to choose.

This is all secondary to the campaign’s primary message: Stop labeling children for something that they cannot have decided that they are.  It pigeonholes social and mental development in the worst way, forcing children into particular lines of thought before allowing their own powers of reason to decide what’s right for them.

I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim. A paranoid or depressive person—of whom we have many millions in our midst—does not have to end up screaming religious slogans while butchering his fellow creatures. But a paranoid or depressive person who is in regular touch with a jihadist “spiritual leader” is presented with a ready-made script that offers him paradise in exchange for homicide.

I have nothing to comment on this article that isn’t in direct agreement with Hitchens…

CNN: Spreading Islam in Britain ~ Atheist Media Blog

“Alcohol will be banned, drugs will be banned, pornography will be banned, gambling will be banned […] We do expect to enter into a struggle, if you like, of words and maybe even more than that before we can see the fruition of the Sharia, really, on state level.”

Maybe even more than that? Way to blatantly promote violence in the name of your supposedly “peaceful” religion.

Commentators are working overtime to explain away the Fort Hood shootings as a personal breakdown rather than what it obviously was, three conservative columnists argue today: a terrorist assault by an Islamic extremist.

The explanation for Major Hasan’s actions should be crystal clear to anybody not afraid of offending Muslim sensibilities, Dorothy Rabinowitz argues in the Wall Street Journal. “It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments.”

Is it really so difficult to see this for what it likely is? It’s not someone “under stress”, it’s someone following what they believe is the correct interpretation of Islam.