How true this even today!
”A really complicated and illogical way of saying ‘ I am scared of death’. ”
We know now why dinosaurs were not on Noah’s Ark.
I know about it so well.
Yep. You can’t go against anyone’s religious right.
That’s cool. Don’t eat.
Religion is the biggest bane for any democracy. – Taslima Nasreen
Bangladesh’s biggest right-wing party Jamaat-e-Islami has been banned from contesting future polls by the Bangladesh High Court in Dhaka, which cancelled its registration in a landmark ruling on 1 August, leaving the once powerful fundamentalist party with an uncertain future. Author Taslima Nasreen who has been living in exile for over two decades in India tells Agnivo Niyogi that taking a cue from the verdict, parties in India should also shun religion-based politics.
What are your initial reactions to the court’s decision to debar Jamaat from fighting elections?
It is indeed great news for all secularists that a religious organisation that doubled up as a political party, has been finally banned from fighting elections. Although Jamaat is called a right-wing political organisation, it is no less than a terrorist outfit. Dissent had no place in the reign of terror unleashed by Jamaat.
The religious fundamentalists have left the Bangladesh society bleeding. Allowing them to engage in political activism is thus an insult to the principles on which Bangladesh was founded. Jamaat used foreign funds in brainwashing innocent kids at madrasas, gave them military training and unleashed their brute force on their own countrymen who refused to toe their line. A ban on such an organisation is a welcome step indeed.
Do you think the Awami League government will now reinstate the 1972 Constitution and establish Bangladesh as a secular nation?
I do not think so. Although this court verdict is a step in the right direction, the society at large is not secular in Bangladesh. If the government suddenly decides to do away with Islam as state religion, the masses might go against them. Sheikh Haseena wouldn’t want to make such a gamble with her poll fortunes. Awami League wouldn’t want to be painted as anti-Islam in the election year.
What do you think will be the possible repercussions of the ban on Jamaat?
The Jamaat was a banned organisation at the birth-hour of Bangladesh. After the 1971 Liberation War, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came to power, he banned the organisation that sided with Pakistan against their own brothers and sisters, raped thousands and killed even more. But after the death of Mujib, they were given a new lease of life by a few military men, solely for political motives. Thus began the process of Islamisation of a secular nation, which is on till now. To return to the Constitution of 1972, we need a societal change, for which this ban was necessary.
Do you hope this verdict will pave the way for your return to your motherland?
Several parties have come to power since I was exiled. Faces change, but the nature of the ruler doesn’t. Be it Awami League, or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, everyone needs the support of Islamists to stay in power. The state machinery in Bangladesh is afraid to stand up for freedom of expression; they lack the conviction to take on the fundamentalist forces in the country. We cannot expect the society to change overnight. The Islamisation that has happened for decades in the country cannot be undone by just one verdict.
The Awami League government may be more secular than other parties, but we must not forget that the same government arrested atheist bloggers during the Shahbag protests. Hence, I don’t see any hopes for my return to my homeland anytime soon.
The Jamaat-e-Islami may hit the streets to protest against the court decision. Do you feel that the secular masses will rise again, like in Shahbag, to facilitate the process of formation of a secular state?
When Hefazat-e-Islami had unleashed terror on the streets with over five lakh people taking law into their hands during an anti-government demonstration, the administration had dealt with them with an iron hand. If the government is ready to take the Islamic fundamentalists head-on, there is no need for the people to take to the streets. I have faith that the government will once again assume an unbiased role, for the cause of the nation.
Do you think the ripples of the Bangladesh verdict will be felt in India too?
Bangladesh is too small a nation for the Indian government to take note of. India is more concerned about the daily happenings in Pakistan. However, I feel that India must give Bangladesh the credit it deserves for showing the resolve to fight religious fundamentalism. Islamist organisations based in India should take a cue from this verdict and mend their ways. Moreover, parties in India should shun religion-based politics. Parties cry foul in the name of democracy when their religious intents are exposed. However, according to me, religion is the biggest bane for any democracy.
Some Islamists are quite smart.
Tariq Ramadan is.
Mehdi Hasan is.
Mehdi Hasan looks smart, he sounds smart. He knows smart street-magician-tricks. He studied at smart universities. He is smart when he debates, he argues, he attacks. But his smartness ends here. Like any moron, he sincerely believes all the Islamic fictions as facts. For example, he believes Muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse. He can not be truly sharp and smart. He foolishly tried to be smart by revealing his beliefs in Islamic fairy tales and superstitions while interviewing Richard Dawkins.
I am surprised how the same Mehdi Hasan, the Islamist, the believers of buraq, the winged horse, won the oxford union debate on Islam is not a peaceful religion.
He says Islam is a peaceful religion because not all Muslims believe in violence, and once upon a time some Muslims were mathematicians. Nobody denies the facts that most Muslims do not commit violence and once upon a time some Muslims were mathematicians. We do not deny that Islam was a powerful force for change, expanding throughout the world and winning the hearts of the multitudes. Islamic civilization was the richest and most advanced civilization in the world during the early Middle Ages, particularly in the mid-eighth through the mid-eleventh centuries, and perhaps reached its peak during the ninth century. In comparison, the culture of Europe crept far behind. But it does not prove that Islam is a religion of peace. It does not delete the pages of the Quran that asks to kill infidels and non-Muslims. Now, even if 99.99% Muslims do not terrorize the world and o not kill infidels and non-Muslims, it is still not a proof of Islam being peaceful. The truth is, there is no difference between the Islam of the 7th century and the Islam the terrorists use today.
Mehdi Hasan said that some Muslim philosophers helped Europe to be enlightened. But he did not say why those philosophers did not help Muslim countries to be enlightened! The Bible teaches that the children of adulterous women should be killed ( (Revelation 2:22-23 ). But the truth is, the vast majority of Christians do not kill the children of adulterous women. It doesn’t mean that the Bible doesn’t teach that adulterous women’s children should be killed. It means that the vast majority of Christians do not think it is a good idea to kill the children of adulterous women. Similarly most Muslims do not think it is a good idea to terrorize the world and kill people. Most people of all religions just want to live their life comfortably and peacefully. Their wishes of not being involved in terrorist activities are not related to the teachings of the Quran and the Hadiths. The credit for most Muslims being non-evil, should not go to religions, but should go to the people who have been influenced by the golden rule and a century-long human rights movements, the credit should go to the people who have learned to restrain themselves from doing religious crimes.
Mehdi Hasan, the followers of a charlatan’s religion, does not deserve to win the Oxford Union debate. But we all know that shit happens.
The Hindu god Shiva was washed away by heavy flood. Thousands of pilgrims, priests, people were washed away too. Kedarnath temple is one of the holiest Hindu temples dedicated to the god Shiva. The temple is located on the Garhwal Himalayan range near the Mandakini river in Kedarnath, Uttarakhand. It is now standing alone surrounded by death and destruction. The loss of human lives in the flash floods, cloudbursts, and landslide after heavy rainfall for 3 days since June 16 is amidst the worst in its history.
Instead of mourning the countless deaths, many god-believers are now getting deep into the euphoria because they’ve heard that a rock on the mountain prevented the Kedarnath temple from getting washed away during the horrifying flood..
Early Sunday, the tragedy began when a cloudburst happened upstream in the valley. What followed was incessant rains leading to huge floods that took everything along with them . A cloud burst happens when clouds come under huge pressure due to getting stuck in a valley. The result is them’ bursting’ thereby causing the entire water in them to drain down in an instant!
Due to this burst , huge rocks also broke away from the Kedar dome and started rolling in the valley. One of them apparently stopped just before the stone temple, thereby breaking the flow of the muddy water into two. This lead to shops, houses basically everything around the temple to be washed away in natures’ fury, but the temple survived!
Believers are busy thinking about the temple. How the almighty god apparently saved his temple and thus re-established the faith of his followers through this act! They thank god for saving the temple but they are not angry with god for destroying everything else and killing thousands of believers. They are not doubting about the existence of god, if there were a god, he would not have been so terribly monstrous.
Religion business will not be stopped at Kedarnath. The rock that fell from the mountain and saved the temple from being washed away is strongly believed by millions of people as an act of god. Now people will most likely start worshiping the rock. Blind beliefs are more crazy than flash floods, cloudbursts and landslides together. I thought Kedarnath tragedy would make people give up their faith in god, but in reality their faith became stronger than before. They’ve now got an extra idol to worship. The rock.
Mexican Archbishop Fabio Martinez Castilla says, “abortion is much more serious than rape of children by priests.”
Enough is enough. Time to stop appointing pope, bishop, cardinal, priest etc. They are just stupid people sitting in a big chair preaching hatred, misogyny, lies and illusions.
I like Islamists much more than I like so called non-Islamists, secularists and modernists in the Indian subcontinent. Islamists are less hypocrites than many other groups of people. They speak their minds. When they want to kill, they say they want to kill. They do not claim they are good guys, they are against violence. Others kill secretly. Others wear masks. Islamists kill publicly. They do not say things they do not mean. Others often do. Tehreek-e-Taliban gave an interview. See how honest they are.
”What is your opinion about the upcoming elections?
Tehreek-e-Taliban is an Islamic militia organization to enforce the Islamic system in the country. We do not believe in democracy because democracy is secular. We stand against this system and ideology. Whoever supports democracy violates Islam. We want Islamic law in this country because this country got independence [from British rule] on the basis of Islamic ideology. We will never support democracy.
Why does your group attack politicians and their supporters?
Three parties [Pakistan Peoples Party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement, and the Awami National Party] are openly calling themselves secular and liberal. They do not realize that secularism represents a set of beliefs abhorrent to Islam. These parties have essentially declared themselves non-Muslims, and so we have every right to attack them. They have the blood of the innocent Muslims of Swat, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Karachi, Balochistan, and the tribal areas on their hands. They consider the U.S. war [on terror] their own war. So we will target them. They will reap what they have sown.
How opposed is your group to women running for public office?
Islam gives a specifically valuable position to women. We are not against women. We are against democracy, and we will attack anyone, male or female, who supports it. Women must veil themselves and act in accordance with Islamic code. They should be content with what Islam has already given them. Whoever is part of the U.S. war—whether it’s a woman or man, journalist or propagandist, security officer or ideological sympathizer—we have every right to attack them.
The Taliban appear to be soft on Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan. Is this accurate?
We will not support anyone who believes in democracy. We have declared our war against three political parties because these parties are vicious and imposed brutalities on innocent people. We cannot make any assessments about the parties which were not in power when the government was targeting the Taliban. People shout popular slogans before coming into power. Once they get power, they change their tune and forget to implement their promises. We will carefully watch what [Sharif or Khan] does when in power. We will see what policies they have toward the mujahideen of Islam and toward the U.S. We will be in a position to comment only after their real policies are made clear.
As you said you don’t believe in democracy and elections are going to be held on May 11. Are you going to disrupt the elections on May 11?
We are against the system. This is not specific to just one day. Whether it’s today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, our way of protest is very clear, it is through militancy, and we will continue to record our protest. ”
Bravo. I congratulate Islamists for telling the truth. They are clearly saying that democracy is against Islam. They prefer to impose theocracy. They want 7th century’s laws. They want women to wear veils and be submissive to men. Women must not have equal rights and freedom. Islamists are not hypocrites like most secular politicians in the subcontinent who say secularism is not against Islam. Islamists are not hypocrites like most secular politicians who promise to secularize state and society and to do everything for women’s equality, but do not really do anything. Islamists hate secularism, they know very well that secularism, democracy, women’s rights are not compatible with Islam. Islamists kill, destroy, terrorize the world. They do not deny that Allah asks them to kill infidels, and non-Muslims. They do not lie, they do not say terrorism has no religion, they do not claim that Islam is a religion of peace.
People were killed. Many were injured day before yesterday. Islamists threw stones at police, set fire to private and public property.
There were rows of bookstalls selling old books there even until Sunday noon. Hifazat-e Islam’s violent blockade of Dhaka on Sunday has gutted almost 40 of these decades-old bookstores along with thousands of its collections.
The bookstores on the opposite footpath and also those under the over bridge, seemed to have shared the same fate.
The loss continues with Hifazat supporters setting fire to another 11 stores located beside the south gate of the National Mosque Baitul Mukarram during their program Sunday. Followers of Hifazat who claim to be the keepers of Islam did not even spare the Holy Quran, books of Hadith and other religious books. The blackened pages of the holy scripture of Islam now lie scattered as ash under the pedestrian feet.
The bereaved booksellers said supporters of Hifazat-e Islam had set fire to almost 55 bookstores. Beyond 50,000 books worth approximately Tk 10 million have been destroyed in the abrupt arson attack on Sunday.
The people who had gathered to see the sight were erupting with disgust for those who assert themselves as ‘keepers of Islam’ but are also desecrators’ of the holy book of Islam.
They burned everything that they found around the streets, buses, trucks, shops. They burned thousands of copies of the Quran. The burning of the Quran, I believe, is the best thing they have ever done. No ordinary Muslim would dare to burn the Quran. But the Islamists are brave enough to do whatever they like. Who knows more than the leaders of the Islamists that the words of the holy book are not really holy. All they want is the crown. They use holy books to build a ladder to reach the crown.
Here is the full story of how good boys turn into bad boys because of religion.
The family started struggling since 1940s. Joseph Stalin was their enemy. They were uprooted from their own land and were forced to live in exile. They were ethnic minorities everywhere. Despite all their exiles and insecurities, good boys were sent to good schools to become better boys. They called themselves Muslims but they were not practicing Muslims, they were not even veiled Muslims. Then Islam came in its unpolished form and destroyed everything. It brought blindness, veils, unreason. Good boys became bad boys. Very very bad boys. They became mass murderers.
Religion is such a powerful evil!
Muslims have been praying that the perpetrator of Boston Marathon Bombings is not Muslim. But we know that nothing fails like prayers. Yesterday when it was all over reddit and twitter that the suspects were Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Tripathi, Muslims were so happy! They were happy because the names of the suspects were not Muslim names.
But we now know that it was Muslims who terrorized America again. They were influenced by Islam and the Islamists. Someone told me today, ‘at least Tsarnaev brothers were not brown’. Yes, the terrorists are pure Caucasian this time. Ignorant white racists would not hate all the brown people in the world and they might not kill turbaned Sikhs like they did after 9/11.
All religions have the potentials to make terrorists. But non-reformed Islam is the number one culprit among all. You can not say illiteracy and poverty are the roots of religious terrorism, we already witnessed how highly qualified doctors, engineers, academics terrorized the world as suicide bombers.
The world will continue to be terrorized as long as religion is treated as the guiding force of society. And one day I am afraid the world will be burned to ashes if the long arms of religionists reach the buttons of the nukes we created.
Our universe didn’t need any divine help to burst into being, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night (April 16).
He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”
After outlining the historical theological debate about how the universe was created, Hawking gave a quick review of more scientific cosmological explanations, including Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold’s steady-state theory. This idea hypothesizes that there is no beginning and no end and that galaxies continue to form from spontaneously created matter.
After giving a brief historical background on relativistic physics and cosmology, Hawking discussed the idea of a repeating Big Bang. He noted that in the 1980s, he and physicist Roger Penrose proved the universe could not “bounce” when it contracted, as had been theorized.
Therefore, time began at the moment of singularity, and this has likely occurred only once, Hawking said. The age of the universe — now believed to be about 13.8 billion years — fits that model, as the number and maturity of observed galaxies seem to fit in the general scheme.
In another observation of modern religion, Hawking noted that in the 1980s, around the time he released a paper discussing the moment the universe was born, Pope John Paul II admonished the scientific establishment against studying the moment of creation, as it was holy.
“I was glad not to be thrown into an inquisition,” Hawking joked.
Hawking closed the event with a familiar plea for continued exploration of the cosmos: “We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping our fragile planet.”
There are believers who criticize Stephen Hawking for playing the role of Richard Dawkins. They like to hear about science but not the truth that god doesn’t exist. They love the first line and the last line of Hawking’s book. ‘We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing about the world’, the first line and ‘if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God’, the last line. The believers love to believe that ‘god’ of the last line of Hawking’s book is the god that lives in the sky. They love when scientists believe in god. To them, scientists say god exists means god exists. They get more convinced when scientists say god exists than god says god exists.
Stephen Hawking is not giving the believers the delusional pleasure anymore. They are now angry. You can read their angry comments. They would have been angry with Einstein too if he were alive today and explained that his god was not the god that lived in the sky, and more importantly he used god in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. There are some scientists who say that god exists. I do not think all of them believe in god. They say it for different weird reasons. One of the reasons, Richard Dawkins says that scientists who want to get fund for scientific research do not say that they are atheists because atheists are often prevented from getting fund.
Religionists are using religion all over the world to fight against equality, justice, women’s rights, human rights, freedom of expression and hundreds of nice and necessary things. I think scientists should take responsibilities to save the world by telling the truth about creationism how freakishly false belief it is. Science is the best weapon to fight religion. Every time scientists discover a star or a planet or a galaxy, religionists come to claim that god mentions about it in their holy books. Most reformers fight the bad parts of religion by using the good parts of religion. It ultimately makes people more religious as they get attracted by the good parts of religion. But it is always better to believe in science than religion or parts of religion, because religion with its good and bad parts, is a complete myth, not a fact. It is always better to believe in truth than in lies. And it is always better to believe with things evidence than without evidence. Science does not talk without evidences, religion talks. Would you believe me if I say I grow two horns on my head? You would not. You would sure ask me to show you the proof. But you are not asking your most powerful god to show you the proof of his existence. You are too merciful. Your mercy has been extended to god big time.
Is it fun to live in this flaky world!