Bacon & Beer: April 2006

Iran has missiles that can reach Europe

Maybe now the Europeans will finally wake up and smell the Muslims.

Stupid Fatwah Monday! "Holy Fashion Gaffe, Batman!"

God will not talk to you if your pants go below the ankles. Infidel bastards! Or, in the inestimable word for the Koran', "losers." That's so poetic I just want to kill somebody.

God Loves Flood Pants

Here is a recent photo of the Imam issuing his Fatwah:

Muslims don't like St. George

Fuck 'em.

Love in Islam v. Love in Judaism/Christianity

This is a sorta schlock way to make my point, but I did an online search of the K'o'ran' for the word love. There were 83 hits. Almost all are "Allah loves believers," and "Allah does not love unbelievers." It's about half and half.

Love in the Koran.

There are 508 references to the word "love" in the Bible.

Love in the Bible.

To avoid reading all of these to see whether any say "God does not love" something, I ran a search for "does not love."

"Does not love" in the Bible.

Typical of the 8 entries found was this:

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:7-9

Still being careful, I then ran a search for "God hates." There was one result.

Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole [a] beside the altar you build to the LORD your God, 22 and do not erect a sacred stone, for these the LORD your God hates.

That's it. The Jewish/Christian God, apparently, really, really doesn't cotton to rocks that are worshipped. Other than that, He's all about love.

These are, I submit, very different understandings of God. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament does it say God hates a human being. In the Qur'a'n' it say about half the time that God hates human beings, namely, those who don't obey Allah. The Quran (woops! ') also depicts Man as God's servant, not his companion or friend. The Islamic view of who God and Man are is radically different from the Jewish/Christian view, and not for the better (from now on in these essayss about the Korahn I'm not going to say "Jewish/Christian" and the like. I will say "Christian." Please understand that that includes Judaism. It couldn't not.). Typical of the Christain view of God is this:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:8

I dare you to find anywhere in the K'Q'o'ra'n' where God offers to walk with a human being. And that means something.

By the way, this is all just soil-tilling for my upcoming reviews of the Koran (I'm not screwing around with that word anymore either. Too much trouble.).

If Jesus ran against Bush

Stupid Fatwah Monday! "If he accepts Islam again, then fine otherwise he will be killed."

Ladles and Jellyspoons, for your enjoyment; a definitive explanation about why it's okay to kill apostates!

En Joie!

If he accepts Islam again, then fine otherwise he will be killed.

Is Islam the most ridiculous (i.e. "worthy of ridicule") religion in the history of Man, or can you think of another? We'll get into why "ridiculous" is correct in the next umpteen installments.

Here is a recent photo of an apostate.

The 'Qr'an' Part Two: (A) Tozer on the Q'u'ran'''

Okeedoke, Here we go.

Surah 1:

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of Worlds:
Most Gracious, Most Merciful;
Master of the Day of Judgment.
You do we worship, and your aid we seek.
Show us the straight way, the way of those on whom you have bestowed your Grace,
those whose portion is not wrath. And who go not astray.

Okay -- Not a bad start. This little prayer is, I understand, said at the beginning of every prayer service five times daily. There is little here to disagree with. There is something to question, and I will shortly do so, but, assuming "Allah" simply means "God," this ain't all bad.

Problem 1: The Q'ran is always saying things like, "Oh yeah, if this isn't from God, find a better poem." Already have. Take just about any of the Pslams or any snippet from the Jewish prophets, and they beat this into pulp.

Psalm 18:

I love you, Lord, my strength,
my rock, my fortress, my Redeemer ... read the rest for yourself.

Psalm 8:

How great is your name, O Lord our God, through all the earth!

Your majesty is praised above the heavens; on the lips of children and babes You have found praise to foil your enemy, to silence the foe and rebel.

When I see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you arranged, What is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?

Etc. read the rest for yourself.

Short answer: the Jews whalloped your little Surahs thousands of years before you showed up.

Problem 2: Where the hell is Love? I see no love in Surah 1. But the Christian (and Jewish) God IS love. Where is that in the Q'r'an'? As we will see in coming installments, it ain't there. And that's a Problem.

"The God Who Wasn't There"

There's a new movie coming out by this title that makes the argument that Jesus never existed. You can find trailers at thegodmovie.com. Anyway, I viewed the trailers and there's really nothing new in this movie that hasn't been argued before, and it's typical of the muddled thinking the "Jesus Seminar" and its members. By that I mean, they tell part of the Christian story and then attack that part standing alone, then attack another part standing alone, misportray aspects of Christianity, and selectively put up straw men as the defenses that Christianity has to these arguments.

They never have, and can't, attack an accurate portrayal of the entire Christian story.

Anyway, the main premise of the movie seems to be that because there were lots of gods prior to Jesus who healed people, rose from the dead etc, etc, that therefore the Gospels were written not as historical documents, but mythological ones. The historicity of Jesus came later.

What they forget to tell you is that the Gospels are not the only Christian documents. There is Acts, and the letters. Acts tells the story of the followers of Jesus after his resurrection. Well, gee, want to tell me who these followers were following if "He Wasn't There"? And the scholarship says that Acts was in fact, as Christianity has always asserted, written by the same guy who wrote the Gospel of Luke. And the letters of Paul tell of his personal experience of Jesus, and occasionally asks his readers to check his words with the still-living witnesses in their midst. Who's Paul talking about?

So, that's the kind of stuff they leave out because it can't be answered. Which, if you think about it, is just flat dishonest scholarship.

For a straw-man example, they say that the Christian answer to this "prior Christs" "problem" (which as I will shortly argue isn't a problem at all) is that the devil knew what was going to happen and so put it into people's heads thousands of years prior in order to give less credibility to the story when it actually happened. They quote one guy from 300 A.D.

Frankly, I had never heard that explanation before, and I read a lot about this kind of stuff. It sounds like a wrong-headed explanation, but I'm not going to get into that.

In fact, I think (and I probably got this from Chesterton, Barth, Lewis or A.W. Tozer, I just don't recall) that the "prior Christs" fact actually enhances the story of Jesus. Remember -- all things were created through him. So, shouldn't it be the case that the natural world has imbedded into it so deeply "who Jesus is" that all people all over the world were able to look at the world and glean from it the idea of a suffering and ultimately triumphant savior? In other words, these prior Christ stories don't make the Jesus story less likely to be true; they simply show that even the natural world breathes with that story; that even pagan tree worshipers understood that something was awfully wrong and needed to be fixed, and it could be done only through something much like what actually happened.

The movie doesn't (or at leasst not in the trailers) bring this argument up -- because I don't think they can defeat it, and these days it seems this kind of intentially deceptive omission is everywhere. Instead, the movie simply says that "the devil did it to trick people" argument "is the same answer the Church gives today."

Honestly, I've never heard that argument before and I have been going to Church for 45 years and read just about everything. And, it's a weak straw-man argument that the movie then dutifully sets about disarming. Because they can't assail the real response.

Here is a recent photo of the movie's director:

All The Jihad News That's Fit to Give you Fits

I'm not going to post anymore news items about Islam. It's too easy, and I'm bored with it. I put a link to Jihad Watch on my links and recommend you got there for such items. They do it better there anyway. There's a link there also to Dhimmi Watch, which is worth your time.

In a couple days I'll try to get started fleshing about my comments about the Q'r''an'.

"Let there be no compulsion in religion"

That's a verse in the Q'r'a'n' that Muslims use to suggest that Islam is a tolerant religion. I bet these people beg to differ:

Apostates threatened by Muslim Group

Okay, time to get off the anti-Islam horse for awhile. It's too easy.

Stupid Fatwah Monday!

So, "pictures" are forbidden by Sharia law, sculpture, too, and now ...

Music!

Here is a recent photo of the Imam issuing his stupid Fatwah!

The Quran, Episode One

I am about halfway through the Koran, or Quran, or whatever. My findings: Mohammed was a shyster and an amateur poet. The Psalms, any one of them, beats this guy's "Sura"s into the dust. His history is laughable, his recital of Jewish mythology is discombobulated, and he is a major doofus, who could only have risen to a position of respect in a backwater society of illiterates and murderers.

I will follow up with substantiation. The Q'u'r'a'n, regardless where you put the apostrophes, ought to embarass any society that called this their highest accomplishment.

Here is a recent photo of Bill reading the Q'u'r'a'n.

If Bill had sold used camels in the 7th century, anno Domine, he would have been sold down the river.

Fixing what we broke

The other night I was having drinks with some Church friends (I stick out in this Church like a sore thumb as the "Lone Conservative;" well okay, except for the other conservatives, but we're a minority) when Iraq came up, and a friend of mine, though liberal, agreed that we need to stay in Iraq "to fix what we broke."

At the time I didn't disagree because 1) I was surprised that he agreed we needed to stay, and IX.) I didn't think it was all that innaccurate.

But I've thought a little about it since then, and think now that that's a slight mischaracterizarion, though an understandable one.

I don't think we "broke" anything when we invaded Iraq, other than the yoke that Saddam had hung around the necks of those unfortunate people. What I do think we did was "loose" something. And I don't think we anticipated the fury of what we loosed because we don't hold -- or even begin to understand -- these ancient hatreds that run back 600, 800 or more years. We're a young, pragmatic country that generally looks at social conflict as an opportunity to change something for everyone's benefit. Certainly not, at any rate, as a reason to massacre people. Put simply, and maybe too crassly, where's the profit in that? If I kill them, I can't sell them my widgets!

So, being who we are, we expected the Iraqis to accept the conquest and begin to act like us, and pragmatically work to rebuild their nation so we could get out. (And, in fact, many many Iraqis have in fact taken that tack.) What we did not expect -- well, at least I didn't -- was the virulent, irrational "payback" between Sunnis and Shiites based on perceived wrongs going back generations.

Anyway, mea culpa. That's what happened. That's what we loosed. So I guess I'd have corrected my friend, had I thought of it at the time, that we don't need to stay in Iraq because of what we broke, but because of what we unwittingly set loose.

Small difference, but I think more accurate. Here's a recent photo of a small difference being more accurate:

What if someone came back from the future?

This is a very interesting story. I hope the author is wrong.

The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a husky voice that he was a Time Traveler come back to talk to me about the future.

Being a sometimes science-fiction writer but not a fool, I said, “Prove it.”

Islam's Imperial Dreams

This is exactly what I think, except it took this guy 4 pages to say it instead of 60.

By Efraim Karsh, Wall Street Journal

When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies, businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the words that often accompanied the riots--words with ominous historical echoes. "Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it," declared Khaled Mash'al, the leader of Hamas, fresh from the Islamist group's sweeping victory in the Palestinian elections:

This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good.

Read it all at Karsh Article

Here is a recent photograph of Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al