by Michael Ryan
…(Actually All Religion’s Suck)
“Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
My OCD really kicked up yesterday around noon after 3 shots of espresso, so I thought I might learn all about Islam seeing that the known world is now fixated on that Religion. Also, I felt I should be able to come up with an informed opinion about this very popular Religious Philosophical System if I just spent a little time on research.
I was up ‘till 5:00am this morning, combing the desert…AKA the Internet… reading parts of the Koran, the Hadiths, the Sunnahs…studying the life and times of that “wild and crazy guy” Muhammad. I studied the meaning of words like Shura and Sharia…learned the differences between the Shia, the Sunni and their many sub-sects like Salifism and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat…(spent quite a bit of time researching the latter which is not even considered a part of Islam by the other guys…the Sunni and Shia.)
I spent a really big chunk of this “orgy of learning” trying to figure out just what the hell “Jihad” means today, (what it meant yesterday), and what the mind numbingly varied “schools” of Islam had to say about it.
I read stuff from all sorts of sources… from the opinions of the Infidel detractors…like Robert Spencer… to the blessed and enlightened writings of the various Imams, Mullahs, and Ayatollahs. I found myself at times directed to web sites I would have never, in a million years, looked at. I found myself at sites propounding everything from what we in the West would call liberal Islam or secular Islam, to the far right extremist Islamic radical sites. I diligently followed every link to every other site that had to do with my research into the secrets of Islam. I sucked down huge quantities of coffee, smoked a pack of Pall Malls, (actually took a break to watch the unedited roast of “Flavor Flav”) and ultimately compiled a huge list of references…And quite frankly, all the while maintaining a “researcher’s objectivity.”
Here is my opinion after all that objective research: ISLAM SUCKS!!!
Now before I get into “defending” my opinion about Islam, I must say that I think ALL RELIGIONS SUCK! Verily Amen…My opinion about the suckiness of Religions in general came from almost 40 years of research and experience from my early indoctrination into the Catholic miasm to psychedelic forays into “Eastern Mysticism.” Plus…I’ve read it all Brutha… the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, various Apocryphal-non-Canonical Text from both the Jews and the Christians… the Zohar, the Bible, again various versions including the Vulgate. And from the more ’secular’ arena : Plato, Aristotle-( Da Man), Pythagoras… St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Erasmus…Locke, Berkeley, Hume…Kant-(Stands alone he does)…Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein….Mills, Bentham, Hobbes…Rousseau-(Stands alone he does)…Peirce, James, de Saussure…Even read the newer guys like Nozick, Rawls and Baudrillard…After gorging myself on all these deep enlightened attempts to answer the simple question “what the *bleep* are we doing here” and “who has the best shot at the ‘right’ answer,” I came to the conclusion that…HERE IT GOES: EVERYONE IS PROBABLY WRONG!
Back to Islam. First of all let me just say that my first impression was that the Muslims have more divisions than a 7 level complex fraction. (If you took some Math in College, you may know what I’m referring to). In other words, there are SERIOUS DIVISIONS within Islam…mucho mucho mas than even the other “Great Religions.”
2008
If You Pay Me, You Can Kill Me!
by Michael Ryan
It is World War I, 1916… the Battle of The Somme. Approximately 57,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded during an assault on German lines after 8 days of artillery bombardment by the allies. The German’s, fully prepared for the advance after the failed artillery campaign, laid waste to the British infantry using the Maxim machine gun.
Hiram Maxim’s patents for this devastating weapon were filed in Britain, which meant that the German’s paid a fee to the British for each Maxim machine gun they manufactured!
In effect, the German’s paid the British for the rights to slaughter 57,000 British soldiers!!!
Ahhh…The Genius of it all.
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