Atheism Corner

Humanity in Progress

Charlie Hebdo Has the Solution

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The French magazine “Charlie Hebdo” is at it once again, its people told the press yesterday that they plan to take out the weekly edition with caricatures of the prophet Mohammed and go another round with the local French muslims, who by the way burned the offices of Charlie Hebdo last time the magazine published offensive content.

This could be the solution to the everlasting hurtful feelings of some Muslims, simply getting them used to the sort of creative critic the rest of the world enjoys for a hundred years now, maybe it is their persistent exclusion from this sort of films/magazines/novels that creates this violent insane response across so many Islamic countries.

In any case it is remarkable that more and more people are joining in on the fight for free speech and opinion, and the right to state your mind, no matter how “offensive” someone finds it, people can easily learn to live with opinions that they do not like, even hate. This is turning to be an expansive month,first we needed to back Tom Holland’s documentary on Islam‘s origins by buying his books, now we need to head to the newsstand to buy a new copy of Charlie Hebdo

New Mohammed Cartoons by Charlie Hebdo Out This Week

The West Battered Person Syndrome

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This “Battered person syndrome” which is actually and originally called battered wife syndrome is exactly how Islamic anger is met through out the Western world, here is what it means (form the Wiki page) –

Additionally, repeated cycles of violence and reconciliation can result in the following beliefs and attitudes:
▪ The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.
▪ The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.
▪ The abused fears for his/her life and/or the lives of his/her children (if present).
▪ The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

And there you have it. Now you know how to call every person out there that thinks that it is more important not to aggravate the believers and limit the expressions of others, these are people who think that its always the West fault, that responsibility for violence does not lie with the people who commit it, people who live in constant fear and thinks that the opposition is too strong to deal with.

This is why, every time Islamists pick up reasons for inflicting violence and damage on others, world leaders stand up and say that we should not do anything to upset Muslims, because even the stupidest thing, said in the most remote and non Muslim corner of this world would, under the right circumstances, send them into a frenzy of blood and riots.

We say it is more simple to do it our way, we say whatever we want, whoever wants listens and can object, anyone is free to be offended and live with it, no one will turn time back to the dark middle ages and limit our thoughts and speech.

 

The Ignorance of Middle East Muslims

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Things are heating up, as they always do following the believers of Islam going wild over one insult or another. The news can been seen as trivial and banal, same old anger over the same old topics, some can see it as intended aggravation of a group of people known for being easily angered over anything to do with their religion, others might see it as yet another attempt to force the West into giving up its core values – “or else”.

This morning some news channels set up a live stream broadcast of “demonstrations” in Cairo, I’m no expert but all I could see were small groups of what seemed to be like young men throwing things at a group of armored vehicles and police. Attacking Egyptian police over a movie produced in the U.S. is as ridicules as attacking an American embassy over that same movie.

The only real excuse for attacking people who are clearly not related in any way to a production of a movie that angers them, Muslims can only say that they do not know (or realize) that people in the West are free to create and produce whatever they want as long as they do not infringe on the rights of other people. If Muslims actually think that the whole of the U.S. with its vast population is under continuous authority scrutiny and that any creative process is a result of permission and not basic liberty than they might have a real argument in going against the US embassy in Cairo.

This exposes these Muslim thugs for what they are, ignorant and without any idea of what real democracy means. Here is a short quotation from yesterday’s news “if your freedom of expression is without limits you must accept our freedom of action”.

A Clear Threat – With No Understanding of Democracy

This sentence alone shows how ignorant these people are. A clear threat is made and it puts two very different things on the different sides of the equation, one the one side freedom of speech and on the other violence and aggression on whatever whim it may be.

Freedom of expression is without limits because it directly follows thought, the idea behind the freedom to speak your mind is that ideas can be let out into the world without fear, this is what makes this current civilization great – the free and fast exchange of ideas, the adoption of some of them and the ridicule of others, but nonetheless free and constant exchange of thoughts which are expressed by speech. To claim that if you “force” freedom of speech (on people in Cairo – from a film produced in California U.S.A. mind you) the other side can literally force physical damage upon the speaker is outrageous and dangerous.

And this is how these people think and how they act. There is no difference between murdering someone who thinks differently to you to that same person expressing his mind about that topic, in the end it all means that same thing, Muslims do not accept the freedom of speech and much worst than that they actively search for things that may insult them in lands far, far away from their own to orchestrate murderous festivals.

 

Who Made the Muhammed Movie – and Why?

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Its appears that a man named Sam Bacile is the writer-producer-director of the film that set Egypt and Libya on fire yesterday, even though the film’s teaser was uploaded to YouTube 2 months ago – took them so long to find out? or was it just a certain day was preferred for the “protests”?

Anyway, Bacile told a few sources (link to some of the info here) that he got the money for the film from “Jewish” investors and that he managed to get $5 million for it. It seems safe to say that anyone over 12 years old who watches this “teaser” can say that this aint no $5 million movie, it is a good amateur theater club production no doubt, with no known actors, no professional acting, no real camera movement and no professional sound (you can easily see how sound has been edited on this short 15 min clip) one has to wonder if this produced knows how to count (money, that is).

Furthermore, Sam Bacile told the press he was an Israeli Jew who had family in Egypt, which is borderline fiction since all Egyptian Jews who live in Israel have been there for many years already and left no one behind. What adds to the notion that this person is in fact Egyptian is that the begging of the teaser shows current day Egypt with Muslims storming Copts (or Christians in general) and the police doing nothing about it.

No need to say that hiding the truth at this point only makes the makers of this rather poor and vulgar teaser look even less respectable than they looked at the start of this thing, however it is important to note that in a normal world no one would have heard about this man or his “film” and that this thing would have been left to dry on the Youtube servers with 12 views.

As usual the issue here is not the quality of a film but the right of anyone to express an opinion, vulgar as it may be it does not pose any threat to anyone out there, you can simply ignore it and go on with your life, the freedom of expression is not just about expression but about freedom of thought, and this is the one single thing that brought Western civilization to enlightenment, let us not forget this.

Do You Believe This Thing Cost $5 Million? We Don’t

* Update (September 14th)

Nakoula Basseley seems to be the real name of the producer of this movie, which started under a working title “Desert Warriors” and ended up being much more about the Islamic faith. The produced is not Israeli or Jewish (as was suggested before) but an Egyptian Christian Copt.

Actors in the movie say that they did not know anything about it being so tied to religion, that they were told that this is a movie about old time in Egypt, some claim that a voiceover was edited onto their lines in post production.

It seems that as more is discovered about the maker of this film the more it looks like one religious believer defaming another religion, and even though this is something that is not elegant it kind of makes sense that an Egyptian copts would have very strong feelings against Muslims in light of the past year’s violence against the Christian Copts in Egypt.

Anonymous Ideas Are Not Always Great

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Anonymous Target The Internet Over SOPA

Yesterday news told one story about the hacker group “Anonymous” wanting to shut down internet traffic, or at least make it very slow, on the end of March this year. We have, in the past, covered some of the actions of this group with admiration, because many times they stand up against systems and ideas that are well worth the opposition, however this time it looks like a generally bad idea.

The first thing is that it might not work at all, they want to target the servers who direct traffic across the internet to the domains (sites) visitors are looking for, by damaging those servers they could slow or even stop internet traffic, but these companies have too much on the line here and it is very unlikely that they will fall down without a proper fight.

The reason for all of this? SOPA. Good reason no doubt about it, but killing internet traffic to stop SOPA is almost like killing a patient to protest slow ER procedures. And much more… the US government has already signaled that it does not really need SOPA to act, as it did just a day after SOPA was put on the ice. If there is anything worth flighting about right now it much be ACTA, which is even more scary.

So we will need to wait and see what really goes down on March 31st, and if it does work out for Anonymous we should try and suggest better moves and better targets.