Atheism blog

The Soccer Riots – Egypt Crumbling Over Soccer?

March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The new, enhanced wave of protests and violent riots all over Egypt is communicated to the west as a part of the “football verdicts riots”, which is technically true because the reason that the Egyptian street is on fire for the past month is mainly to do with the verdicts of those who are accused (and now convicted) of murdering dozens of a rival team supporters in a game – many months ago.

These riots expose the great lie that is the Egyptian society today, its a fragmented and torn apart society in which every group wants complete and total control over what seems to many a “wild west” country, even though a new government has been established.

Add to this the growing anger and amazingly low trust levels towards the new elected president of Egypt and you have a dangerous mixture. This erupts in popular riots against anything, and so we see thousands of Egyptians protesting in all the “Canal” cities, which are poor and desperately looking to improve their living standards, in a cry out against anything that is labeled “Cairo”.

In Cairo itself the fragmentation of groups is astounding, leading the list is the respectable group of secular Egyptians who led the first wave of the revolution two years ago, they have been pushed out of the picture and they can not live with the idea that their country is turning into a new Iran rather than into a model of a Western country. The radical religious fanatics are not too far behind, claiming that all the religious moves of the past year are not enough – and need to be expanded and enforced even stronger.

A revolution is a long process, there is no doubt that Egypt is going through the turmoils of a rebirth, only that it is still frightfully unclear how the new Egypt will look like, what would it believe and how it would behave towards its citizens.

Time, and Time Again.

February 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Desire to Kill – How Primate Nature Still Drives Us

February 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

When talking about religions we find ourselves often deconstructing arguments, these sometimes simply end in the will of humans, since the dawn of time, to control things. Many of the most terrible things humans have done to each other was when the falsely accused others of natural phenomena, witchcraft falls neatly into the category of humans killing other humans just because something happened to them (or they were afraid of something) to our disgust we discovered that the practice of burning witches has not yet passed from this world, even in 2013.

The following story happened only a few days ago, when a young woman (a mother) of 20 years have been burned alive for the suspicion that she was something she simply can not be, because witches do not really exist. Papua New Guinea is the place, it seems, where people still think that they can take out their sadness and frustration on other people, by killing them.

However insane this sounds to you, imagine a calm English village, in the 14th or 15th century, where witch hunting was a popular hobby of most people, and if you happened to be a older woman living alone or a man who likes to be alone, or even a child who plays in the field, you had a pretty good chance of getting yourself into serious trouble. In that village it was common knowledge that witches did exist and were in fact a very serious threat to normal life, if we had a chance to talk with these people they would probably be shocked to discover that we dropped the whole witch thing long ago.

This shows you how many wrong ideas humans can have, can be seriously passionate about, can even kill other humans because of those beliefs, and how difficult it is to part from those beliefs. Just like religion, witchcraft is superstition, and a very dangerous one indeed. Even though Papua New Guinea has tremendous challenges in moving into the 20th century it is a shame on its whole population that people are slaughtered in this way, and an example for the rest of us of what happens when you let superstition rule your life.

World Still Here, Next Doomsday Date Currently Unknown

December 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The world did not end on December 21st, 2012, it just kept spinning around the sun (and itself) the good old way it has been doing for a long, long time. Those who took this “prophesy” seriously must have been pretty disappointed only to be really happy to find out they got more time to find a new end of the world scenario in which everyone dies etc. etc.

For those keeping an eye on this whole thing one thing became clear as the days to December 21st came closer, and that was that the actual living decedents of the Mayan culture put up a serious effort to distance themselves from the doomsday approach and were more than happy to tell anyone who would listen that the fact that the calendar ends is just that – and never was more than that.

So who injected this sense of impending doom to an ancient calendar expiration date? Would it be too big a surprise to find out that it was the good folks of the west that quickly connected the dots?

We try and have a sense of control on our lives, and the more desperate ones go to great lengths to invent catastrophes only to have a sense of knowing of them in advance, its still a huge waste of time and resources, just imagine how much could have been done instead of the pointless debate on the Mayan 2012 Calendar end.

East Europe Doomed to Repeat It

September 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana)

Estonian Gas Vulgar Antisemic Jokes — Estonia – Its a Gas

If there is one thing that stands out in todays Eastern Europe is the way that World War II is perceived and treated, while the rest of the world did not do a very good job at learning the difficult lessons of WW2 it seems that the eastern countries of Europe have forgotten all about its bloody past, its victims, its slavery to a totalitarian philosophy that crashed them and murdered their people, and all that remains of that war is the Nazis and the Jews.

A couple of weeks ago we learned of a tasteless advertisement that came from Estonia’s gas company, trying to advertise its services of gas and heating it choose as a preferred location the concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland. The humor here (in case you missed it) is that gas was used to murder hundreds of thousands of people in that Nazi death facility.

This might seems like a wild guess, but it looks like Estonia would not joke about the mass deportation of its own people by the soviets in the 40s’ and 50s’, however since WW2 is categorically marked as a Nazi-Jewish affair its a subject that is much easier to make mockery of.

The lessons have not been learned. Segregation and racism still rule most societies, and the understanding that it was babies and children, pregnant women and old people who were brutally murdered daily in the Nazi death camps does not sink in, they were of many nationalities and many religious and ethnic groups, spoke many different languages and worshiped different gods – they were not, by far, all Jewish, but they were all human beings.

Yesterday another piece of news came from Estonia, again use of a concentration camp for advertisements (they say), only this time the “ad” is actually a wild parody who is aiming its arrows at the Etonian gas company. It seems that at least a part of the Estonian people finds it repulsive to use places of bloody massacres as a tool to enhance sales and promote services.

The sad thing is that this satirical ad was taken as a serious one, mainly because its easier to believe that Estonians simply joke about World War II then to appreciate inter social Estonian criticism.