May 31, 2008
My post The “Stop the Madrassa” Coalition and its campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy has been quoted on the FrontPage magazine site in an article titled Fantasizing “The New McCarthyism” by Phil Orenstein, FrontPageMagazine.com, Friday, May 23, 2008.
Islamism (the totalitarian ideology) does pose a real threat. But it’s a threat that needs to be addressed with surgical precision, not blind hysteria.
Alas, Phil Orenstein’s article comes across to me as hysteria-mongering: a flood of accusations against various people, combined with a blatantly fallacious dismissal of the civil rights concerns of Muslims. But his article has inspired me to research several topics more deeply this past week, including hate crime statistics and the recent history of bigotry against both Jews and Muslims.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, New York City, anti-semitism, jew-haters | No Comments »
Tags: Daniel Pipes, Debbie Almontaser, Khalil Gibran International Academy, Phil Orenstein, politics, religion
May 11, 2008
This weekend, I did quite a bit of online review of the events leading up to the Iraq war, especially with regard to U.N. weapons inspections in 2002 and 2003.
I’ve written a detailed post logging my research this weekend. I originally posted it here on WordPress, but I decided to move it to my LiveJournal blog. The post is now here.
Posted in George Bush, Iraq, U.S.A., war | No Comments »
Tags: politics
May 4, 2008
These days, too many public atheists come across as even more hostile toward liberals and religious moderates than toward fundamentalists. This is unfortunate, because, in my opinion, atheists and religious liberals and moderates need to stand together against the worldwide trend toward theocracy.
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Posted in Against Theocracy, GLBT, LGBT, atheism, bisexual, crime, gay rights, religious trends | 1 Comment »
Tags: atheists, politics, religion
April 29, 2008
When I first ran into the “Stop the Madrassa” Coalition’s blog last week, I was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt that they may have had a valid church-state separation issue regarding the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA). I do think it’s important to uphold separation of church (mosque) and state.
However, the more I’ve looked into this matter, the more it seems to me that the “Stop the Madrassa” Coalition is crying wolf. Their one valid complaint is the Board of Education’s unwillingness to provide complete information about the curriculum to the general public. On this matter, their arch-scapegoat, the Khalil Gibran school’s founder and former principal Debbie Almontaser, agrees with them, as I learned last night. She too wishes that the Board of Education and the school’s current administration would be more transparent, to allay public fears.
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Posted in Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, New York City | 1 Comment »
Tags: Khalil Gibran International Academy, politics, religion
April 27, 2008
Recently, there seems to have been revival of classic libels against Jews, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ye olde blood libel, in many parts of the world.
I’m not Jewish, but I have a personal interest in this topic, as a member of another, much smaller religious minority which has frequently been a target of what can best be described as warmed-over anti-Jewish propaganda. Also, I live in New York and have had quite a few Jewish friends.
Below, I’ll discuss some classic anti-Jewish claims, with links to sites refuting them.
I do question whether these beliefs have become quite as widespread as some folks claim. Pro-Israel hawks have seized upon the promulgation of anti-Jewish libels as a justification for their own intransigance, which makes me wonder whether some of them might be exaggerating just a tad. Nevertheless, the revival of traditional anti-Jewish nonsense does indeed seem to be a real and growing menace.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Against Satanic Panics, Israel, Jewish, Judaism, Palestine, Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion, anti-semitism, jew-haters | No Comments »
Tags: politics, religion
April 26, 2008
In a news story from the Tenerife Canary Islands in Spain, Gruesome goings-on in Arona’s cemetery, Fortnightly Tenerife News, Spain - Mar 27, 2008, the first sentence says:
Voodoo, black magic or Satanism, call it what you like, the gruesomely shocking results have scandalized the residents of Arona and have angered and horrified the relatives of those whose bodies have been desecrated by some profoundly unbalanced individuals.
No, don’t “call it what you like.” Find out what it is. Don’t just go randomly slurring nonmainstream religions.
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Posted in Africa, Against Satanic Panics, Satanism, Spain, Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion, Voudoun, Western Europe, anti-Satanism | No Comments »
Tags: religion, Satanist
April 25, 2008
New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry will oppose both Islamism (the political ideology of Sharia supremacy) and bigotry against Muslims, as stated here (as well as opposing bigotry against people of various other religions too).
As I now envision our activism, it will include, among other things, both (1) participating in political actions against torture and in favor of indicting Bush, Cheney, et al for war crimes, and (2) attempts to reason with anti-Muslim bigots, who often seem to be motivated by valid concerns about Islamism.
In trying to reason with anti-Muslim bigots, I’m inclined to argue from a pragmatic point of view, rather than an abstract moral point of view. Specifically, I think a good approach might be to empathize with their concerns about Islamism (which I share) and point out that there are many Muslim reformers and Muslim moderates who are not just different from Islamists but also our natural allies against Islamism and against the more repressive and retrograde forms of Islam.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, ex-Muslims | No Comments »
Tags: politics, religion
April 25, 2008
I’ve been having a very interesting discussion with “The Apostate,” who is “a Pakistani woman, raised as a Muslim in Saudi Arabia, and an atheist since the age of 17,” now 25 and living in San Francisco.
In a post of hers titled Why I Criticize Islam and Muslims, she wrote:
Nevertheless, I don’t wish to ‘demonize’ Muslims, nor to paint a monochromatic picture of them. There are Muslims who have commented on this blog who represent a kinder gentler Islam. I know they exist - I also know they are, at this point in time, few and far between. I can also differentiate between truly enlightened Muslims and those who are primitive in their religious interpretations but who have good hearts.
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Posted in Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, ex-Muslims, feminism | 7 Comments »
Tags: politics, religion
April 24, 2008
Back in 2001, shortly after 9/11, I remember seeing rhetoric about how the U.S invasion of Afghanistan was going to liberate Afghanistan’s women. Various “gay conservatives” claimed that a U.S. invasion would be good for Afghanistan’s gays, too. Likewise, various gay neocons thought the U.S. military was going to bring human rights to Iraq as well.
Some have belatedly changed their minds, at least about Iraq.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Afghanistan, Against Theocracy, Eastern Europe, GLBT, Iraq, Irshad Manji, Islam, Islamism, LGBT, Muslim, Russia, U.S.A., Yugoslavia, feminism, gay, lesbian, religious right wing, war | No Comments »
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, politics, religion
April 23, 2008
After publishing my previous post, I clicked on the “Islamism” tag to see what other folks were saying on that topic here on WordPress.com. One of the blogs I came across was Islamoscope, whose About page says:
We believe that by creating awareness of the radical element of Islam both moderate Muslims and non-Muslims from all religious and ethnic persuasions can ensure we can still enjoy the freedoms created in the West free from radical persecution.
I agree so far.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim | 4 Comments »
Tags: politics, religion
April 23, 2008
New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry will need to tread a very delicate balance as far as Islam is concerned.
On the one hand, the Muslim world seems to be dominated, to a large and very scary degree, by extremely intolerant Islamist factions. We need to take a stand against Islamist persecution of “apostates,” persecution of gays, etc. (Among other things, this means we should expose the history of U.S. government support for Islamist militants - continuing even after 9/11/2001!)
On the other hand, Muslims in general, including the more moderate and reformist Muslims, have themselves been the target of a lot of bigotry here in the U.S.A. We need to oppose that, too. We also need to oppose the egregious human rights violations, e.g. torture, that have been justified in the name of opposing Islamist terrorism.
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Posted in Abrahamic, Against Theocracy, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, ex-Muslims | 2 Comments »
Tags: apostates, politics, religion
April 14, 2008
Here on WordPress, I just now came across a blog with some fascinating, very informative, and disturbing posts about today’s African witchhunts:
They pretty much confirm what I already knew, but provide more historical details. The author is apparently South African and a believer in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
P.S.: I just now came across an old post on Marie Ravensoul’s blog, Christian Rapper Calls for the Killing of Witches and the Slaying of Demons. It seems that the song is paralleling real-life trends, alas.
Posted in Africa, Charismatic, Christianity, Eastern Orthodox, Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion, witchhunts | No Comments »
April 12, 2008
Due to other things going on in my life, I’ve had to withdraw more-or-less completely from the online theistic Satanist scene for the past 10 months.
I’m now back.
Before I left, I was in process of creating the “theistic Satanism blog network,” which, as I then envisioned it, would use a PHP script to simulate a forum using blogs. The script would automatically display links to the latest posts on all blogs, organizing the posts into five categories by topic and intended audience. The idea was to replace my theistic Satanism Yahoo groups with something as similar as possible.
At least for now, I’ve given up on the idea, because I still don’t have enough time to work on the script. Instead, at least for now, the Theistic Satanism Blog Network will be simply be a listing of blogs which link back to my Theistic Satanism Blog Network page.
If I ever do revive the script idea, I’ll need to think more carefully about the details too. For example, the topicality guidelines as I then envisioned them may be too complicated to enforce.
Posted in Theistic Satanism blog network | 2 Comments »
April 11, 2008
I’ll be linking to this post from my websites, as a place for people to post comments not pertaining to any specific post here.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 22, 2007
A same-sex marraige bill, drafted by Governer Eliot Spitzer, won in the New York State Assembly this week. Alas, it didn’t even come to the floor in the State Senate, and the state legislature’s session ended this week, so the bill is dead for this year. Nevertheless, the win in the State Assembly was an important symbolic victory, increasing the likelihood that we’ll win equal marriage rights sometime within the next two years.
The big hurdle will continue to be the Republican-controlled State Senate, with majority leader Joseph L. Bruno, who opposes same-sex marriage. Elections aren’t until 2008, but, given that the Republicans hold only a very slim majority (by 2 seats), we might possibly get lucky in a mid-term election or two.
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Posted in GLBT, LGBT, New York, gay, gay rights, lesbian, same-sex marriage | No Comments »
June 13, 2007
Punkwolf has written a Commentary on the TS Blog Network rules:
For example, it is much easier to keep a debate between Satanists and Christians rational and civil if the link to it appears on a page with a title like “Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion,” so that those theistic Satanists who aren’t prepared to deal with Christians in a friendly manner can easily avoid it.
It’s also for those Satanists who might be prepared to deal civilly with Christians, but who realise that Christians might not be prepared to reciprocate. It would be nice if there was some way to differentiate. The separate tag for the “troll playground” is along the right idea, but a lot of “interfaith discussion” can become hostile without much warning. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way to weed out the hostile Christians et al. except by relying on their own self-policing, just as the network relies on Satanists (and pagans and occultists) to police themselves and use their better judgement.
Actually, the system will rely on more than just self-policing, especially for people other than Satanists, Pagans, and occultists. Bloggers will be divided into five categories with different levels of access in their use of the network tags. See Sets of people eligible to use particular network tags.
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Posted in Satanism, Satanisms and society, Theistic Satanism, blogging | 2 Comments »
June 11, 2007
Kafele Minkabh, in a blog titled Ave Satana, has written some brief comments about the proposed rules for the Theistic Satanism Blog Network:
I have not read the page in full yet–the document is lengthy and I’ll have to set aside some time in the near future to go through it properly. I have, however, scanned the whole document and read the first few sections carefully.
I look forward to seeing your further comments when you have time to read it in more depth.
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Posted in Satanism, Satanisms and society, Theistic Satanism, blogging | 3 Comments »
June 10, 2007
Zalbarath says he finds my draft page Theistic Satanism Blog Network: Tag topicality and other rules and guidelines to be more confusing than the rules for my Yahoo groups.
This surprises me. Zalbarath, are you sure that the blog network rules are actually more complicated, or are you just disappointed that they aren’t several orders of magnitude simpler? Offhand, I don’t see any ways that the blog network rules are more complicated than the Yahoo group rules, except that some issues are discussed as gray areas rather than as absolute black-and-white prohibitions.
I would appreciate it very much if you could take another look at the page and tell me specifically what parts you find confusing - and, especially, what parts are more confusing than the corresponding rules for my Yahoo groups. Perhaps there are some specific issues on which the blog network rules need to be clarified or simplified? Or perhaps there are some ways that the page could be organized better?
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Posted in Satanism, Satanisms and society, Theistic Satanism, blogging | 5 Comments »
June 8, 2007
Yet another Pagan Witch public relations piece containing the same old historical nonsense: So…Your Friend Is a Witch?. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Consider that you’re spending time with a good friend over a nice meal, some good wine, and friendly conversation. Your friend tells you that she is Pagan. As a matter of fact, she says, she’s a practicing Witch. What does this mean to you?
[...]
It is also likely that some part of you was at least a little frightened by the word.
[...]
In the simplest of terms, your newly found (no matter how fleeting) doubt about your friend is the result of a centuries long media assault on the Pagan way of life.
No, it’s the result of 20th-century neo-Pagans deliberately choosing to refer to themselves by a scary label like “witch.” Once again, the theory that the post-Renaissance European witchhunts were primarily about persecuting an underground pagan cult of the “Horned God” has long since been discredited among reputable historians. (For more up-to-date scholarly ideas about the witchhunts, see Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt by Jenny Gibbons, another copy here.) Furthermore, Christians certainly have no monopoly on witchhunts. There are all-too-many witchhunts going on today in Africa and India, rooted not in Christianity but in local tradition.
The ongoing worldwide spread of the more fanatical forms of Christianity, and their propaganda campaign against all other religions, is indeed a significant worldwide threat to religious freedom. But, in facing that threat, let’s try not to distort history, okay?
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Posted in Pagan, Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion, witches, witchhunts | 3 Comments »
June 8, 2007
I came across an interesting post here on WordPress about Halloween, with a lot of annoted info about the ancient Celts, the Druids, Samhain, and the evolution of Halloween festivities. Written from a Christian anti-occultist “ex-witch” perspective, but much more scholarly than most. Among other things, this article points out how little is known, historically, about the religion and customs of the ancient Celts. For example, there’s not enough evidence to know for sure whether the ancient Celts practiced human sacrifice, and it’s not even known for sure whether they had a feast day called Samhain.
However, like a lot of other relatively well-informed writings, this article seems to assume that all Satanists are LaVeyans.
Posted in Celts, Christian, Halloween, Pagan, Samhain, Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion, human sacrifice, witches | No Comments »
June 7, 2007
I hope soon to launch a blog network. Once the script is finished, there will be pages on my Theistic Satanism site containing automatically updated lists of recent posts with particular tags on all member blogs, one such page per tag. My script will be able to support blogs hosted on WordPress.com, Google/Blogspot, and LiveJournal. For more information, please see my pages about the Theistic Satanism Blog Network.
The owner of a blog called Ave Satana recently pinged my post on “Taking elements of” older religions and “warping them into something else”. In that blog there is a post titled Satanism as a uniform entity which talks about, among other things, the need to raise the public visibility of theistic Satanism. Hopefully my forthcoming blog network will help to accomplish just that. At the very least, hopefully it will do a better job of this than my Yahoo groups did.
Posted in Satanism, Satanisms and society, Theistic Satanism, Traditional Satanism | No Comments »
May 26, 2007
On both the blogs To slam a revolving door and A Blog of 2 Witches, there is an entry titled “10 Things Everyone Should Know About Witches, containing the following:
4) We are NOT Satanists (a Satanist actually takes elements from Christianity and pagan traditions and warps them into something else. Satan is a Christian myth, so it is NOT something associated with witches)
Well, this is a little better than the commonly-heard claim that all forms of Satanism are “just upside down Christianity.” At least there’s an acknowledgment here that most Satanists draw ideas from other sources besides just Christianity.
However, the intended point here seems to be that modern Pagan Witchcraft, supposedly unlike Satanism in this regard, is supposedly a pure and pristene ancient pagan tradition - which it most definitely is not.
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Posted in Pagan, Paganism, Satanism, Satanists and Pagans and occultists only, Wicca, witchcraft, witches, witchhunts | 9 Comments »