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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 08/20/2008 : 03:43:42
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Here's an interesting article by A.C. Grayling. It's main thrust is that the fundamantalist, religious freak-outs most feverent desire is to drag the world back to the Middle Ages, but we already knew that, didn't we?
I think the secondary point it makes is in asking the question of: what benefit has any religion ever been to anyone? Excepting the various preachers, priests, mullahs, gurus, deacons, monks, shamen, bishops & popes, divines, mojo-men, ayatollas, seers & sooth-sayers, poo-bahs, prophets and other, like flim-flammers of course.
"AC Grayling guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 29 2008 12:00
BST Article history
I enjoyed the subtlety of the Guardian's page 13 layout yesterday. It was the first page of the international section, and it contained two stories, the first about legal moves in Turkey's constitutional court to disband the country's ruling AKP party on the grounds that it is threatening Turkey's secularist constitution, the second about complaints by Polish holidaymakers who find the nudity on German "free body culture" beaches disgusting.
To the alert eye the connection is direct. Admirers of the Catholic culture of Poland will assuredly be delighted by its success in making the unclothed human frame an object of disgust. Admirers of Islamic culture will be delighted to find that Turkish Islamists are encouraging more women to hide that automatic trigger of unbridled male lust, the tresses on the female head.
These are tips of icebergs. In fact the influence of religious attitudes in distorting and limiting aspects of human life, even to the extent of perverting, imprisoning and poisoning them at the extremes, is too well known to require rehearsal. It was against the domination of life by religion that Mustapha Kemal Atatürk acted, founding a secular republic which sought to move religion from "the realm of the state to the realm of belief" – which is how Turkey's current deputy prosecutor, Omer Faruk Eminagaoglu, puts it in explaining the basis of the case against the AKP, which has – even by the admission of some of its own MPs – been conducting a non-too-subtle yet hypocritically disavowed campaign of re-Islamicisation."
And so forth....
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Edited by - filthy on 08/20/2008 07:28:05
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Brian's Sandal
