More and more alike every day

I have been arguing that the Christianists and the Islamists are becoming more and more alike. Both are intolerant and both will use violence to get what they want. The only restraining feature on Christians is that the cultures in which they live are creations of the Enlightenment and Englightenment values fight against Christianist values making it more difficult for them to act violently. But the tendency is there. The assurance that they have divine truth leads the faithful to the conclusion that they must impose that truth on others. They are willing to defend the faith by violence and that will become more apparent as time goes by. We are in age of rising intolerance and authoritarianism. The West is threatened by it. It is threatened by the Christianists within society and by the Islamists as well.

America's threat is the lunatic fundamentalists who control the Republican Party. Europes soft underbelly is the welfare state subsidising the cultural isolation of Islamists. Both Europe and the US ought to be aware of these threats. Neither apparently is. Europe is burying it's head in the sand and chanting multiculturalism as if that means shit to the Islamists who hate such values. Americans may chuck out the corrupt and tyrannical Republicans but not because of the theocratic elements that control the party but because of the imcompetence of the Bush administration.

Now here is another example of how these "faiths" are moving in similar directions. Nicholas Almeida is a Catholic and former government official in Mumbai, India. He has offered a reward of $25,000 "for the head" of Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code.

A far more constructive approach is that of the Catholic Social Forum which said that unless the movie is banned they will launch "a death fast". One should encourage them and hope the film has a very long run in the cinema. The Mumbai Catholic Council has said that unless the Indian government uses state force to ban the film that they, these loving Christians, will forceably stop it themselves. Maybe they should strap dynamite to their bodies and blow up the cinema.

Archbishop Stanislaus Fernandes, Catholic, drones on irrationally. "Every individual has a right to his religious belifes and to enjoy the respect to them from the followers of other religions." The first half is true the second half is not. No one has a right to "respect" from others. And it is rich that the monsters in the Catholic Church think they automatically have a right to respect at all. They don't respect the truth but cover up their crimes. And when they have the power to do so they do everything possible to supress the religious views of other faiths. They are not advocates of "respect" for beliefs except when they are being challenged.


HL Mencken put it this way: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." And in closing I will again quote the great Mencken:

"The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame."
"True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge."