Individual Christians in the name of what they take to be Christianity do good, and have done good throughout the history of Christianity, but critical examination of the religion itself does not support its claim to benevolence or truth.

Its theology is absurd. While it can plausibly be argued that all theologies are absurd, Christianity’s is particularly abstruse and internally inconsistent as well. The doctrine of the Trinity, in what claims to be a monotheistic religion, defies logic and challenges even the fuzzy sort of rationalizing which passes for reason in religious thought.

Its mythology is lethal. Its founding myth anathematized the people of another religion with a potential, and ultimately actual, genocidal result.

Its morality is unjust. By advocating love for all human beings including those who commit evil, it abnegates justice.

Its history is bloody. While it is true that the mission of the Church to gain adherents was often peaceful, there were ages in which it tried to impose its orthodoxy by force. With totalitarian ambition, Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages unleashed one of the cruelest instruments of force in all recorded history in the form of the Papal Inquisition. The Crusades, often defended by Christians as a just war of defense and reclamation of the ‘Holy Land’ from Islam, also massacred Jews against whom there was no question of necessary defense. Furthermore, internecine wars continued to rage within Christendom well into the twentieth century.

By its treatment of the Jews, Christianity as a movement can only be judged, in the light of its own declared moral values, a failure, a deception, and an hypocrisy. That terrible history alone and in itself makes nonsense of Christianity’s claims to be a religion of love and gentle forbearance, and reveals such injunctions and ideals, by which it characterizes itself, to be merely sentimental .

Christianity extinguished the intellectual light of classical Greece and Rome, and brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. In the last two hundred years or so it has become a gentler religion – even Roman Catholicism has become more tolerant – but has been in slow decline as scientific enquiry raised doubts about religious belief in general, and as humanism and science together make Christian reverence for suffering look both sick and obsolete as a source of comfort, substituting cure and palliation for resignation and endurance, and the happiness of survival for the morbid virtue of martyrdom.

Jillian Becker   May 20, 2009

Christians in Islamic states are being continually and ruthlessly persecuted and slaughtered.  Heads of the various Christian churches, Western Governments, the big political parties, and the mainstream media are pretending it’s not happening.

Click on the video (from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) to learn how bad it is.

Meanwhile, because European governments and political parties are refusing to acknowledge that there is any threat to the survival of their indigenous cultures as Muslim numbers grow by birth and conversion, neo-Nazi parties are gaining support among the electorates. Angry voices are calling for the forceful expulsion of Muslims. There is reason to fear outbreaks of Muslim and anti-Muslim violence this summer in many parts of Europe. The stench of genocidal hatred is in the air.

What should be attacked are not Muslims but the ideology of Islam. Not people, but ideas. The fight should not be with clubs, fists, boots and guns, but with words. Islam should be argued against, rationally, strongly, persistently in every public forum, actual and electronic, that our civilization has at its disposal.

Yet the UN is trying to stop all criticism of that cruel, intolerant, oppressive, murderous creed.

Furthermore, it’s hard to argue against the nonsense Muhammad taught without also pointing out that all other religious belief  is equally absurd. True, Judaism and Christianity do not preach moral evil as Islam does.  But Christianity has practiced it (both the Catholic and Protestant branches have burnt their heretics), and besides, any insistence on irrational belief is corrupting.

But as the Taliban take over Pakistan and its nuclear arms; as Ahmadinejad prepares his nuclear bombs to destroy the Jewish state; as the Sunni fanatics of Hamas gain support from the Shias of Iran (as well as from Obama’s administration); as Hizbollah takes control of Lebanon; as Turkey turns Islamist; as Somalia ferments jihad on the high seas; as terrorists train under Somali and Pakistani jihadis in camps scattered through the US; as Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan; it would seem clearer than ever that the  human race would be better off without religion.

There isn’t really a choice. Iran, with the active help of the UN and the passive help of the decaying West, will win. Lebanon will be a bunker. 

 From the Investor’s Business Daily:

The Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing also killed 22 others and sparked a nationwide protest that became known as the Cedar Revolution.

It soon forced the withdrawal of Syria’s army after decades of de facto occupation of a neighbor it had refused to formally recognize, a sovereign nation it viewed as a lost province of a Greater Syria.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a U.N. commission was formed to determine who killed Hariri and to bring them to justice. Most fingers pointed at Lebanon’s former occupier, Syria, which not surprisingly failed to cooperate in the investigation.

The initial report by Detlev Mehlis, the chief U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, said the decision to kill Hariri, who Damascus feared would rally Lebanese opposition to Syrian influence, "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials" and their Lebanese operatives.

On Wednesday, it became clear that Hariri’s assassins might never be brought to justice and that the U.N. isn’t serious about dealing with that assault on Lebanese democracy — part of a long series of assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists.

Judge Daniel Franzen ordered four Lebanese generals suspected of involvement in Hariri’s murder freed on the grounds there was insufficient evidence for keeping them jailed. In fact, it was not so much a lack of evidence as it was a lack of will by the international community, which refused to press Syria on the issue.

After Hariri’s assassination, the formation of the international tribunal into his death and the withdrawal of Syrian forces gave a boost to those hoping Syrian influence and control were at an end and Lebanese democracy was safe. But much has changed in the last four years.

In 2006, the terrorist group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and added more while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

The campaign culminated in early 2008 with Hezbollah laying siege to government buildings and storming pro-government militia headquarters in West Beirut. The violence subsided after talks in Doha, Qatar, gave Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) its long sought veto power over government decisions in a new Cabinet of national unity. But Hezbollah wants more and in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

Sources in Lebanon say that in recent months Iran has smuggled upward of a billion dollars into Lebanon to help its puppet creation, Hezbollah, buy the election. "Hezbollah intends to win these elections at all costs," says Toni Nissi, secretary-general of the National Council for the Cedar Revolution. "This election victory will allow them to transform their illegal institutions into legal ones." …

Many fear this election could be as disastrous for Middle East peace as the 2006 election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

"The choice is between Lebanon as a beach and Lebanon as a bunker," Middle East expert Amir Taheri recently quoted a Lebanese businessman as saying. "Lebanon could either become an extension of Europe in the Middle East or a bridgehead for Iran in the Mediterranean."

All that will be needed for Iran to triumph will be for the West to continue to do virtually nothing.

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media which long since stopped reporting truthfully from the Middle East, but Christians there, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, are suffering severe persecution by  ‘the religion of peace’.  Many seek asylum in Israel. 

This month Pope Benedict is to visit what both Christians and Jews call the Holy Land. Denis Maceoin, in an article that first appeared in the Catholic Herald, has some advice for him.

An urgent matter on the pope’s agenda must surely be the plight of Christians in the West Bank and Gaza. Harassed by militant Islamic groups, the Christian population there has been dwindling. In 1990, Christians made up 60% of the population in Bethlehem; today, a mere 19 years later, they number just 20% and that figure is shrinking rapidly. Christians in the Palestinian territories have fallen in numbers from 15% of the population in 1950 to less than 1% today. Calls have been made for their extinction, and attacks are regularly made on institutions and individual Christians. More and more Christians pack their bags and flee. In Israel, their numbers have risen from 34,000 in 1948 to more than 140,000 today. If the pope does not speak out and make this an issue of international concern, the bombings, the beatings and the intimidation will continue, and before very long the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem will be left to the tender mercies of Islamic Jihad.

Here’s a first-hand account of the goings-on in that devilish covern, the deceptively named UN Human Rights Council (read more here):    

The Inquisition is back, and this time it has set up shop at the United Nations. Consider the resolution “Combating the Defamation of Religions” passed by a comfortable margin last week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva (and passed by the General Assembly every year since 2005).

The resolution decries a “campaign of defamation of religions,” intensifying since 2001, in which “the media” and “extremist organizations” are “perpetuating stereotypes about certain religions” (read: Islam) and “sacred persons” (read: Muhammad). It urges UN member states to provide redress “within their respective legal and constitutional systems.” Capitalizing on cartoon riots and Western anxieties over the excesses of the war on terror, the language conflates peaceful criticism of Islam with anti-Muslim bigotry and seeks to stifle speech in the name of “respect for religions and beliefs.”

In my capacity as UN representative for the secularist think tank Center for Inquiry, I spent a surreal two weeks at the Council participating in the negotiations over the language of this resolution, sponsored by a 57-member intergovernmental body called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC.

After one of these sessions, I found my way into a private conversation with the chair of the negotiations, a delegate for the government of Pakistan. We were soon joined by the representatives of the US, Canada, and the European Union. There we were, “the West,” standing at the front of an empty conference room, gingerly trying to reason with this feisty, yet solicitous, Pakistani diplomat.

The American delegate noted that, “History shows that criminalizing speech doesn’t work,” when the chair interrupted her to propose a case he hoped would hit home. Suppose someone were to say that the Virgin Mary was not a virgin but a promiscuous woman? What could be the purpose of this statement, he asked, except mockery?

Canada pointed out that ‘defamation’ has a specific legal meaning—involving the spread of falsehoods that harm some individual—which is not applicable to cases of religiously offensive speech. For starters, religious personages like Mary and Muhammad are not alive, so they’re not, legally speaking, persons who can be harmed. Undeterred by the Canadian’s reductio ad absurdum, the Pakistani delegate responded that this is precisely why we need the authorities to protect them against insult: they are not around to defend themselves.

Never mind how one would demonstrate, in a court of law, the falsity of a scurrilous rumor about a far-distant and long-gone (and quite possibly never-there) religious figure. Ironically, all the world’s heretics could never do more damage to the reputations of gods, saints, and prophets than has already been done by their devoted followers. The odd thing about God is that no matter how much He is slandered, his livelihood never seems to suffer as a result. One of the perks of being a necessary being, I guess, is that you never lose your job no matter how unpopular you become. In that respect God may be the ultimate bureaucrat. I didn’t bring this up.

It would all be absurdist comedy if it didn’t have such grave consequences. Defamation of religions resolutions are far worse than useless; they are a direct threat to human rights. While they will have no impact on blasphemy in western democracies (which already censor themselves far too often), they serve to legitimize the suppression of peaceful political and religious dissent elsewhere—first and foremost in the Islamic states themselves.

 

 AP reports: 

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that … the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state. "No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study’s authors said.

This means that 85% of the people of the United States are religious. But does ‘being religious’ necessarily mean ‘believing in God’? Many attend church out of habit, as part of the pattern of their social lives, and feel no need to question philosophically the beliefs that their church is founded on. Some do question them, and are convinced if secret atheists, but still adhere to this or that ancestral religion for the sake of continuity. This is charade rather than hypocrisy, and if it makes for goodwill, neighborliness, and a general pleasantness of life, it cannot be a bad thing.

It is the new religion of Environmentalism, the belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming, that is the dangerous one now. Its devotees strive for totalitarian power to change the way we live, to make us poorer and take away our freedom.

Jerry A Coyne, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, reviews two books – Saving Darwinism: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl W Giberson; and Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Kenneth R Miller – which try to reconcile science and religion, and fail of course. 

Read the whole review in The New Republic.

An extract:

The most common way to harmonize science and religion is to contend that they are different but complementary ways of understanding the world. That is, there are different "truths" offered by science and by religion that, taken together, answer every question about ourselves and the universe. Giberson explains:

 

I worry that scientific progress has bewitched us into thinking that there is nothing more to the world than what we can understand…. Science has perhaps gotten as much from the materialistic paradigm as it is going to get. Matter in motion, so elegantly described by Newton and those who followed him, may not be the best way to understand the world…. I think there are ways, though, that we can begin to look at the creation and understand that the scientific view is not all-encompassing. Science provides a partial set of insights that, though powerful, don’t answer all the questions.

 

Usually the questions said to fall outside science include those of meaning, purpose, and morality. In one of his last books, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Stephen Jay Gould called this reconciliation NOMA, for "non-overlapping magisteria": "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values–subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve." Gould offered this not as a utopian vision, but as an actual description of why the realms of science and religion do not overlap. As a solution to our perplexity, this is no good. In a spirit of pluralism it ignores the obvious conflicts between them. Gould salvaged his idea by redefining his terms–the old trick, again–writing off creationism as "improper religion" and defining secular sources of ethics, meanings and values as being "fundamentally religious."

The NOMA solution falls apart for other reasons. Despite Gould’s claims to the contrary, supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin noted:

 

Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.

Britain’s Channel 4 invited the cruel, primitive, hate-filled, ignorant, Muslim tyrant Ahmadinejad to deliver its Christmas message.  Leo McKinstry comments in the Daily Express:

 

Channel 4 has long revelled in its puerile desire to shock but now it has plumbed new depths of indecency, perpetrating an act of sickening and gratuitous offen siveness.

 

On the most significant day in the Christian calendar it broadcast a so-called “alternative Christmas message” by Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an Islamic fundamentalist whose regime is notorious for oppression, cruelty and anti-Semitism.

 

C4 has displayed utter contempt for the values of our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, treating a precious moment in our religious heritage as an opportunity for the usual anti-Western, Marxist point-scoring which passes for thinking in Left-wing circles.

 

In the context of issuing a Christmas broadcast it is hard to imagine a less appropriate figure than President Ahmadinejad, whose vicious theocracy has never shown the slightest inclination towards peace and goodwill. To hear him last night preaching about justice and the need to fight tyranny was nauseating in the extreme. His government has promoted a brutal form of militant Islam, persecuted women, hounded Christians, and sponsored terrorism. Despite presiding over mass poverty it has sought to build its own deadly nuclear arsenal, creating permanent tension in the Middle East.

 

Ahmadinejad, himself drenched in the crudest form of anti-Semitism, has called for Israel to be “wiped off the face of the earth”…  

 

The station has an unedifying track record of deliberately stirring up rows, particularly through the psychological freak show known as Big Brother. It has also frequently used Christmas Day as a chance to parade its disdain for the traditional values of our culture. 

Two years ago the Christmas message came from a Muslim woman trumpeting her right to wear the full veil. But the Ahmadinejad broadcast is a desperate new low. The channel has moved from mere controversy into a sneering, treacherous rejection of all that decent Britons hold dear at this time of year.

Only in the warped mindset of an ultra-trendy, oh-so-progressive TV executive would it be deemed suitable to allow one of world’s most dangerous and fanatical leaders to spout his deceitful nonsense about peace. What do C4 have lined up for next Christmas? Robert Mugabe on compassion? Kim Jong Il of North Korea on freedom and democracy?

One can imagine the excited conversations which must have taken place within C4’s management before the decision was made to invite the Iranian President. “What can we do for a real outrage this year? ­Ahmadinejad? 

The Holocaust denier, talking on the day of Jesus’s birth? Brilliant. That’ll really make a stir.” The station’s executives are like a bunch of adolescent, Left-wing students, titillated by the justifiable anger they provoke, revelling in their self-created image as daring iconoclasts who challenge the establishment.

Read the whole comment and watch the video here.

 Burt Prelutsky writes:

Liberals are so intolerant they often can’t even bear to have people say “Merry Christmas” in their presence. In fact, they can’t even bring themselves to recognize it as a celebration of a specific event. Instead, they dismiss it as the holiday season or the winter solstice. Isn’t it funny how nobody feels the compulsion to exchange gifts or attend church services or decorate their homes for the summer solstice? Well, in spite of Kwanzaa and Chanukah, this is Christmas season because most Americans are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Even though I’m Jewish, even I have to acknowledge it’s a special occasion, and those who feel entitled to disparage it are worse than Scrooge. They are bigoted, intolerant, ignoramuses.

We entirely agree with him. 

And we think that the Jewish mother who protested about the singing of ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ at her kid’s school was being narrow, intolerant, stupid, and wrong.  

However, about that atheist statement next to the Christmas creche in a government building in Washington, D.C., and the comments being bandied about that Christianity should be treated with respect, we have this to say: No religion has to be treated with respect. While it is good to treat people with respect, there isn’t an idea ever conceived that should not be criticized, with whatever emotion the critic feels, including contempt and disgust. Religious ideas are only ideas like any others, and trying to protect them by law (as the UN is now trying to protect the horrid ideas of Islam) is narrow, intolerant, stupid and wrong. 

 Burt Prelutsky writes:

Liberals are so intolerant they often can’t even bear to have people say “Merry Christmas” in their presence. In fact, they can’t even bring themselves to recognize it as a celebration of a specific event. Instead, they dismiss it as the holiday season or the winter solstice. Isn’t it funny how nobody feels the compulsion to exchange gifts or attend church services or decorate their homes for the summer solstice? Well, in spite of Kwanzaa and Chanukah, this is Christmas season because most Americans are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Even though I’m Jewish, even I have to acknowledge it’s a special occasion, and those who feel entitled to disparage it are worse than Scrooge. They are bigoted, intolerant, ignoramuses.

We entirely agree with him. 

And we think that the Jewish mother who complained about the singing of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ at her kid’s school was being narrow, intolerant, stupid, and wrong.  

However, concerning that atheist statement next to a Christmas Nativity scene in Washington State’s Capitol in Olympia, and the comments being bandied about that Christianity should be treated with respect, we have this to say: No religion has to be treated with respect. While it is good to treat people with respect as a general rule, there isn’t an idea ever conceived that should not be criticized, with whatever emotion the critic feels, including contempt and disgust. Religious ideas are only ideas like any others, and trying to protect them by law (as the UN is now trying to protect the horrid ideas of Islam) is narrow, intolerant, stupid and wrong.