Joe Cobb

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Please see [click here to watch] “Fitna,” the bold film against tyranny by Geert Wilders, produced in the Netherlands.

“This film contains very shocking images.”
- [warning at the beginning of the film]

This controversial film identifies Islam as “submission.” That is what the name means, as Muslims are the first to tell you. Submission is not voluntary. Watch the film and appreciate the enemy – the antithesis of libertarian values.

Free will, reason, the scientific method, and liberty are the opposite of “submission.” Submission is the voluntary abnegation of your own will, mind, spirit, and personality. You become a drone of the higher authority, and you are forced to follow the holy priesthood who claim to know how you must submit correctly.

Human slavery takes this form: The child/young adult is taught submission/obedience to the masters, and he or she becomes a voluntary slave for a lifetime. This is a serious form of child abuse.

Surah 4, Verse 56: See Basmallah, the three-and-half-year-old girl (minutes 3.50 to 4.17), who has been indoctrinated in this hateful cult. Weep for her because they will mutilate her genitals in eight years and keep her locked up for life.

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept.23, 1800

[inscribed in the dome of the Washington, DC, Memorial]

Amen.
There is no reason to tolerate this evil worldwide movement for submission of the free human will to dogma and ignorance.

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
- Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, 1391

Sam Harris has a good argument: We must confront this nonsense and fight it. It does not deserve respectful treatment, as “religion.” It is just ignorance and hate and conservative social customs written into “divine law” from an imaginary god, delivered by an illiterate (according to tradition, but probably false) prophet in Mecca.

Allahu NOT Akbar !!!

by Joe Cobb

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a strong speech at the Bush Center in Houson, December 6, 2007. He defended his religious beliefs, but he also made a strong, false statement.

He accused opponents as promoting “Secularism.��?

Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong. – Mitt Romney

But “secularism��? is not a religion. It is a point of view that says any religion is merely a private affair. Religion is a matter of opinion. Honest men and women can disagree about the nature of God and his heavenly hosts.

It is not a religious belief to agree that intellectual honesty is the most important value to begin with. Then we can agree we want to be objective, scientific, and reasonable in looking at evidence and arguments. That is not a religion.

The issue really isn’t religion. Whenever, or if, your God is different from my God, you need to leave me alone, and I must leave you alone in this sphere of ideas. This is social pluralism. It is a progressive achievement of the 20th century. And it is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

Later this weekend, December 7-9, the “McLaughlin Group��? PBS discussion program featured the Romney speech and Patrick J. Buchanan repeated Romney’s claim that “ ‘Secularism’ is a religion.��? This is something all of the authoritarian conservatives are beginning to repeat to each other and to the general public.

It looks like they want to spin this “religion in the public square” idea. If they can make “Secular��? the same kind of group, or special interest, as today are the Baptist church of Mike Huckabee and the Catholic church of Rudy Giuliani, then we are all just members of social clubs who have different ideas.

Yet, if different religions become just other kinds of social clubs, and “Secularists” are one among many groups of minority opinion, the implication is: if secular symbols can be displayed in the “public square,” then also should religious symbols. Even, religious law (torah, sharia) should be enforced on members of those respective groups, just like the old Ottoman Empire had different courts for different religious groups and some Muslims in Canada are getting separate legal protection. Even brutal practices, like female genital mutilation, would have to be protected by law.

But intellectual honesty, objectivity, scientific methods, and using reason to look at evidence and arguments is not just another social club ritual.

This is an official act of the President and Congress of the United States. This treaty was signed by President John Adams and submitted to the Senate for ratification. It was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved on June 7, 1797. (Annals of Congress, 5th Congress)

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Article 1. There is a firm and perpetual peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and subjects of Tripoli, of Barbary, made by the free consent of both parties, and guarantied by the most potent Dey and Regency of Algiers.

Art. 2. If any goods belonging to any nation with which either of the parties is at war, shall be loaded on board of vessels belonging to the other party, they shall pass free, and no attempt shall be made to take or detain them.

Art. 3. If any citizens , subjects, or effects, belonging to either party, shall be found on board a prize vessel taken from an enemy by the other party, such citizens or subjects shall be set at liberty, and the effects restored to the owners.

Art. 4. Proper passports are to be given to all vessels of both parties, by which they are to be known. And considering the distance between the two countries, eighteen months from the date of this treaty, shall be allowed for procuring such passports. During this interval the other papers, belonging to such vessels, shall be sufficient for their protection.

Art. 5. A citizen or subject of either party having bought a prize vessel, condemned by the other party, or by any other nation, the certificates of condemnation and bill of sale shall be a sufficient passport for such vessel for one year; this being a reasonable time for her to procure a proper passport.

Art. 6. Vessels of either party, putting into the ports of the other, and having need of provisions or other supplies, they shall be furnished at the market price. And if any such vessel shall so put in, from a disaster at sea, and have occasion to repair, she shall be at liberty to land and re-embark her cargo without paying any duties. But in case shall she be compelled to the land her cargo.

Art. 7. Should a vessel of either party be cast on the shore of the other, all proper assistance shall be given to her and her people; no pillage shall be allowed; the property shall remain at the disposition of the owners; and the crew protectedand succored till they can be sent to their country.

Art. 8. If a vessel of either party should be attacked by an enemy, within gun-shot of the forts of the other , she shall be defended as much as possible. If she be in port she shall not be seized on or attacked, when it is in the power of the other party to protect her. And when she proceeds to sea, no enemy shall be allowed to pursue her from the same port, within twenty-four hours after her departure.

Art. 9. The commerce between the United States and Tripoli; the protection to be given to merchants, masters of vessels, and seamen; the reciprocal right of the establishing Consuls in each country; and the privileges, immunities, and jurisdiction, to be on the same footing with those of the most favored nations respectively.

Art. 10. The money and presents demanded by the Bey of Tripoli, as a full and satisfactory consideration on his part, and on the part of his subjects, for this treaty of perpetual peace and friendship, are acknowledged to have been received by him previous to his signing the same, according to a receipt which is hereto annexed, except such as part as is promised, on the part of the United States, to be delivered and paid by them on the arrival of their Consul in Tripoli; of which part a note is likewise hereto annexed. And no pretense of any periodical tribute of further payments is ever to be made by either party.

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Art. 12. In case of any dispute, arising from a violation of any of the articles of this treaty, no appeal shall be made to arms; nor shall war be declared on any pretext whatever. But if the Consul, residing at the place where the dispute shall happen, shall not be able to settle the same, an amicable referrence shall be made to the mutual friend of the parties, the Dey of Algiers; the parties hereby engaging to abide by his decision. And he, by virtue of his signature to this treaty, engages for himself and successors to declare the justice of the case, according to the true interpretation of the treaty, and to use all the means in his power to enforce the observance of the same.

Signed and sealed at Tripoli of Barbary the 3d day of Junad in the year of the Hegira 1211 – corresponding with the 4th day of November, 1796, by

Signed and sealed at Algiers, the 4th day of Argill, 1211 – corresponding with the 3d day of January, 1797, by

And by the agent Plenipotentiary of the United States of America,

American diplomat Joel Barlow negotiated the treaty with Algiers and Tripoli in 1796 and President Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy and Marines into battle five years later to enforce the treaty against pirates operating from Tripoli.

from the University of Chicago News Office

Although most religious traditions call on the faithful to serve the poor, a large cross-sectional survey of U.S. physicians found that physicians who are more religious are slightly less likely to practice medicine among the underserved than physicians with no religious affiliation.

In the July/August issue of the Annals of Family Medicine, researchers from the University of Chicago and Yale New Haven Hospital report that 31 percent of physicians who were more religious — as measured by “intrinsic religiosity” as well as frequency of attendance at religious services — practiced among the underserved, compared to 35 percent of physicians who described their religion as atheist, agnostic or none.

“This came as both a surprise and a disappointment,” said study author Farr Curlin, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. “The Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures all urge physicians to care for the poor, and the great majority of religious physicians describe their practice of medicine as a calling. Yet we found that religious physicians were not more likely to report practice among the underserved than their secular colleagues.”

Physicians have many compelling reasons to avoid spending the bulk of their time caring for the poor. It can mean forgoing professional prestige, free time and academic opportunities. It often comes with reduced salaries, decreased support staff and constant bureaucratic interference.

But physicians who care for the underserved receive intangible rewards in exchange, such as a sense that they make a difference in society, have a positive impact on the lives of large groups of patients and have aligned their jobs with their altruistic aspirations.

To find out which religious, spiritual and personal factors were most often present in doctors who care for the underserved, Curlin and colleagues surveyed 1,820 practicing physicians from all specialties; 1,144 (63%) responded.

The survey contained questions about what the researchers called intrinsic religiosity — the extent to which individuals embrace their religion as the “master motive that guides and gives meaning to their life.” Physicians were asked if they agreed or disagreed with two statements: “I try hard to carry my religious beliefs over into all my other dealings in life,” and “My whole approach to life is based on my religion.” They were also asked how often they attended religious services.

The survey also included questions about whether the physicians considered medicine a calling, whether their religious beliefs influence their practice of medicine, and whether the family in which they were raised emphasized helping those with few resources.

The researchers found that 26 percent of physicians reported that their patient populations are considered underserved. These physicians tended to be younger and were more likely to report working in an academic health center and receiving loan repayment in exchange for working where they do. Physicians who receive educational loan repayment are often obliged to work in underserved communities.

Physicians who strongly agreed that their religious beliefs influence their practice of medicine were more likely to report practice among the underserved. However, physicians who were more religious in general (as measured by their intrinsic religiosity or their frequency of attending religious services) were not more likely to practice among the underserved. Even the more religious physicians who reported that their families emphasized service to the poor and that, for them, the practice of medicine was a calling, were no more likely to practice among the underserved.

Curlin and colleagues also noted that those who identified themselves as very spiritual, whether or not they were religious, were roughly twice as likely to care for the underserved as those who described their spirituality as low. “Part of this divergence between religion and spirituality can be traced to a rift between Christian denominations in the late-19th and early-20th centuries,” explained Curlin, who describes himself as an orthodox Christian in the Protestant tradition.

About a hundred years ago, he said, many of the mainline and liberal Protestant churches began “to emphasize efforts to right social injustices, while the more conservative churches tended to stress doctrinal orthodoxy. Research indicates that those who consider themselves spiritual but not so religious are more likely to be formed in the more liberal denominations.”

Policy makers and medical educators hoping to increase the physician supply for underserved populations should take these results into account cautiously, said the authors. “No one knows how to select medical students in a way that would actually increase the number of physicians eager to serve the underserved,” Curlin said, “but our findings suggest that admissions officials should ignore both the general religiousness of candidates and their professed sense of calling to medicine.”

The Greenwall Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program funded this study. Additional authors include John Lantos and Marshall Chin of the University of Chicago and Lydia Dugdale of Yale New Haven Hospital.

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070730.curlin.shtml

Last modified at 11:58 AM CST on Tuesday, July 31, 2007

University of Chicago News Office
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Chicago, Illinois 60637-1473

by Sam Harris
Los Angeles Times, Dec.24, 2006

Several polls indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

Myth 1: Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

Myth 2: Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Myth 3: Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Myth 4: Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

Myth 5: Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

Myth 6: Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

Myth 7: Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

Myth 8: Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Qur’an reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

Myth 9: Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

Myth 10: Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Qur’an — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Qur’an more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Copyright 2006 Sam Harris