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This Must Stop: Cruelty is evil

Originally posted 2013-10-11 11:44:54.

camel halal must stop
A camel being killed by ‘halal’

I am proud to be a European. Our culture has many faults, yet at the same time it has given the world so much. Science and democracy, equality under law and social inclusion simply would not exist without it. And across culture, art, science, engineering and technology, our culture remains a brilliant star, without which light, we would still be in the Dark Ages. I am very proud and lucky to be a part of that.

Despite this, I believed, for many years, that other cultures were equal.

But I was wrong. Culture is not a level playing field. The very qualities that define Western culture represent a system of morality, which allow us to judge other cultures. And we definitely should judge them.

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Ley-lines: how an English Gent launched the New Age movement

Originally posted 2013-07-06 00:30:35.

Ley-lines were invented by an Englishman called Alfred Watkins, who had spent much time cycling around the  countryside near his home. In 1925, he wrote a book called “The Old Straight Track”, in which he described a revelation he’d had while looking at a map of Herefordshire four years earlier. He had suddenly seen a network of straight lines that connected points of human activity, such as

 “Mounds, Long-barrows, Cairns, Cursus, Dolmens, Standing stones, mark-stones, Stone circles, Henges, Water-markers (moats, ponds, springs, fords, wells), Castle, Beacon-hills, Churches, Cross-roads, Notches in hills,”

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God proposition: god true or god false?

Originally posted 2013-07-03 16:53:42.

The god proposition is supported not by fact, but by faith. At the end of the day, the final word that the religiously-disposed have is to say that “It is so because I believe it to be so,” before covering their ears. For them, this trumps everything.

 This is the hook that caught Descartes when he confronted the issue, and then backed off very quickly. “I think,” he said, “Therefore I am.” This is fine. He is self-aware therefore he is sure he exists. He cannot be entirely sure that he exists as he perceives himself or that anything that is around him is as he perceives it, but he does make a very convincing argument, based on the progression of rational logic, that it is so (and thus takes several hundred pages to confirm what any pragmatist already knows. But that’s an aside.) However, when confronted by the idea of God, God must exist, he says “Because he cannot imagine a world in which he does not.” Oops.


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Merry Christmas!

christmas

Originally posted 2013-12-24 13:48:26.

Merry Christmas, Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Holidays…it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, because the meaning is the same: this is the time of renewal, when we slough off the old year and the wearisome encrustations that have built up and look forward to the new. It is the time when our sun, Sol, which has been slipping lower and lower in the sky, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, stops, and begins to rise again, bringing with it the promise of warmth.

books by rod fleming

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The first Jesus? Sul and Enlil

Originally posted 2013-12-21 13:29:54.

Today marks the first day in one of our greatest annual cultural events: the winter solstice. From now until the 25th, the sun will appear to hesitate before it once again begins to climb into the sky. That of course, is the reason so many solar deities have their birthday on the 25th—Mithras, Dionysus and Jesus Christ being but three.

But what you may not know is that while these three ‘dying and rising’ gods, every one of them an agricultural deity, are clearly men, the very first was not; she was a woman.

The earliest version I have found is in the Sumerian tale of the goddess Sul or Sud. This is not a Sumerian name and it’s unclear where she came from, but that doesn’t matter. As befits a goddess, Sul was staggeringly beautiful and at the peak of her fertility; she knew it was time for her to choose a partner.

books by rod fleming

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The Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari

Originally posted 2016-07-25 11:58:15.

The Hadith constitute the third pillar of Islam. They are ‘commentaries on the life of the Prophet.’ They are second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. The other pillars are the Qur’an  and the Sirah . Together with the Sharia these form  the ideological basis for the ‘religion of peace’.

Muslims believe that the Qur’an is  the literal word of Allah. The Angel Gabriel transmitted it, exactly as spoken, to Mohammed. He memorised it because he couldn’t write. You make your own judgements as to how accurate his recall was likely to have been. (The Qur’an was not actually written down until some 80 years after Mohammed’s death, which is also worth considering.)

The Qur’an is confused.

The Qur’an is at best confused and mysterious.

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Something Greater

Originally posted 2013-12-11 23:59:41.

I am part of something greater, in a very real and immediate sense. It’s not so much a question of believing but of accepting the evidence in front of me. I am part of the Earth. The Earth is not just a core of molten iron covered in a crust of rock and water, with an outer gaseous atmosphere, though it is these things. It is a living system, an entity. And I am—we are all—part of that entity.

Consider what you are: you are composed of billions of individual living things called cells.

books by rod fleming

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Qur’an: Read It Yourself

Originally posted 2016-06-10 12:11:09.

The Qur’an is the base text of Islam, which is today followed by approximately 1.2 billion people.

Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?

Just this week, new reports arrived of how the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) murdered 19 Yazidi women by burning them to death in steel cages because they refused to become sex slaves. In Pakistan a mother burned her daughter to death for marrying without consent. These are but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of atrocities that never stop.

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Sharia: Halal and Haram

Originally posted 2016-06-03 19:10:03.

The Muslim legal code called Sharia specifies everything that is ‘mandated’ and ‘forbidden’.

In Arabic they are ‘halal’ and ‘haram’. Sharia — contained in a manual called Sharia Law. (The Reliance of the Traveller) actually extends to over 1200 pages of text which specify every imaginable action or aspect of life. Everything from how to brush your teeth or how to put on your clothes, to how to beat your wife or kill your enemies. It is, literally, not just unnecessary for Muslims to think for themselves, it is haram (forbidden).

Muslims are obliged to follow Sharia all the time. There are punishments for transgressions ranging from fines to floggings to forced amputations to death. To reject Sharia wholly is de facto to become apostate, which demands a punishment of death.

Sharia Law. (The Reliance of the Traveller)

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