Wednesday 30 April 2014

Let's Think....30 April 2014

Islam the religion of "peace" and story of Umm Qirfa
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Umm Qirfa was an old Arab woman contemporaneous to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. She belonged to a pagan tribe named Banu Fazara at Wadi Al-Qurra. This old woman who was also a chief of her clan was brutally killed when Muhammad and his followers raided her tribe and overpowered them. The incident took place almost six years after Muhammad’s Hijra (هِجْرَة Migration) to Medina in 622 AD.
Ibn Ishaq, the first authentic biographer of Muhammad gives us the details in his Sirat Rasul Allah:
“And he killed her cruelly”. The cruel method used by the holy warriors of Muhammad to kill Umm Qirfa is described in Al-Tabari:
“By putting a rope into her two legs and to two camels and driving them until they rent her in two........”

Saturday 19 April 2014

Think Again

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Voltaire

Friday 18 April 2014

Let's Think....Saturday 19 April 2014

"How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions."
- Baron d'Holbach, encyclopedist and passionate Enlightenment atheist in Good Sense, 1772

Let's Think....Friday 18 April 2014

Homeopathy? Does it Work?

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/04/a-homeopathic-bit-of-breast-cancer-scien/

Monday 14 April 2014

Let's Think....14 April 2014

"The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. 

It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. 

The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. 

I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery."

Bertrand Russell "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?" (1930)