I'm really annoyed with my friend/Blah blah blah Islam

I dont go outside...



So I get all my world news from you guys.

This heap emerged from reading this article.

I'm not exactly standing by the height of vitriol this reached, especially since Muslims in general have a really shitty bias against them to deal with.

To be honest, this was just me venting about this friend of mine who is just obsessed with Islam. He's very religious in general and frequently tries to rope me into conversations about these things. He does this thing where he'll say a name, typically some biblical scholar from a hundred years ago, and presumes I know who it is, but in reality he's just regurgitating facts out of his mouth that his mind consumed and has no use for. It's incredibly annoying.

He doesnt sound like a likable guy at all.

All religion is wrong, manipulative and therefore harmful. That's the point of religion.

Pity you've got such a "friend" who does such things to you.

I hope you don't live in a place where you can get hurt by publicitly saying anything bad about Islam in particular.

What Varrok said.

No, no, no. I'm not gonna be the guy you are making me out to be. I am not threatened by any kind of retribution for stating what I did here because my whole point is that the things really wrong with Islam aren't everyday outrage (such as offence taken at face value from Charlie Hebdo).

My point was brought about by the Saudis yammering on about homosexuality because Islam doesn't account for it. It's fucking disgusting and indicative of how fucking terrible things are in the places Muslims immigrate from.

I posted this because it was fun to write; I was 'stretching my Mac muscle'. It does not belong on my every day 'polite' social networks because there are people unlike me who would write something like this and still feel awesome about it the next day, and I don't want people to misinterpret it and think this is how I feel all the time and get all pissy. I don't feel awesome at how prejudiced this got, and it has nothing to do with feeling like I don't have a right to say 'what I really think' about Muslims. It has to do with being courteous and understanding about a massively varied culture that draws a lot from one particularly shitty old book.

Nor am I stating religion in general is utterly poisonous. I'm leaning heavily in that direction, but I can't in good conscience state that everything about it is irreversibly terrible. The church/mosque/temple still has a place in the community. Not a great one, and one I hope we fill with something better before my life is over, but it serves a purpose.

I think of church as a sort of casino; ideally you want someone with a gambling addiction in therapy, however if that person is unwilling you don't want them out in the streets looking for shady backroom operations. A casino is a safe place for their addiction to persist. It's not really good for them to continue perpetuating this behavior, but it's as healthy an outlet as we can give them without forcing them to confront all that's wrong with what they do.

So too is church a safety net for a specific kind of person. I think if there was an off switch for religious institutions, it would cause immediate mayhem. I think we need to start burning the system down at the very top rather than blasting the people at the bottom just for believing what they do.

I mean, everyone is just pissing their pantaloons about Pope Francis being such an alright guy, but he hasn't changed anything. He's still a fabricated entity to perpetuate the empire of Catholocism and likeable or not, that instituion is still detrimental simply by being so massive and blindly influential.

Yeah, this blog reads with a lot more hate than I actually feel in my day to day, and it's a shame I decided to start pontificating this way when Muslims are genuinely prejudiced and punished just for being 'Not Christians' in my part of the world. It's mental garbage to get this kind of vitriol genuinely stuck in your craw.

i agree with you, Mac. personally i've never believed in God or any other equivalent, even as a child. i was never christened either, which i'm actually sorta proud of. means i wasn't automatically added to the ranks of the religious without even considering whether i would like to or not. christening babies and the like before they can make a competent decision has never sat well with me. it's your parents/guardians making a decision about your life for you before you can even comprehend and decide for yourself. i'm glad my mother thought of this and stopped the cycle with me. i'm a heathen!

I was, in fact, very religious at some point, hence I see how dangerous religion might be. I wouldn't wish that kind of misguidance on a child on my worst enemy.

I mean, that's the root of the problem. People force that bullshit in parallel to normal science knowledge into the kid's mind till he no longer can understand what's real and what is not. And it's harder to change something that was so firmly believed to be real from nearly the beginning of life.