No love. No mercy. Nothing but my loud and sickeningly ugly and monstrous whims.
I call it pinhead atheism. If there’s a God, he’s a cruel idiot because we know better what he should be doing. God as asshole.
The Muslims have the market cornered on this kind of divinity. Why, I think, the secularists and atheists are so protective of Islam. Allah is the poster child for god haters. As long as Muslims are stoning rape victims, erasing the identities of their wives and daughters, murdering gays, and blowing up everyone who disagrees with a permanent state of theocratic tyranny, they are the best possible argument against religion of any kind. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. No other major religion on earth has such a vicious, vindictive, violent, and vengeful god or pantheon. No other religion is starting or trying to provoke religious wars. But the American left, led by Obama, can’t find enough excuses for Islam’s unending list of contemporary crimes. How convenient. How clever. How seditious. How erudite and elite of them.
What they like most of all is that Allah is simply a different incarnation of the God of the Old Testament. They tell the same stories. Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac fathered the Jews, Ishmael the Arabs. Same family tree, right? If the one is completely fucked, the other must be, too. The same way all three brothers in the Rahm Emmanuel family are evil, foul-mouthed pricks. Nobody as perfect as the mythical Jesus could have emerged from THAT gene pool.
What gets left out, of course, is that God may still be playing to the low information voters none of the smart people care about. It’s not like low information voters have ever folded their tents and slunk away. In the case of the U.S., certain of the low-information crowd have actually managed to gain control of the dialogue.
Why an amazingly primitive metaphor might still work. The God of the Old AND New Testaments is the Harlem Globetrotters. Allah is the Washington Generals.
Perfect, isn’t it? The post-modern egalitarian relativists think the Washington Generals are equally entitled to, well, everything. Just because they always lose doesn’t mean they’re disposable.
Except that they are. Disposable, I mean. Of course they are. The Washington Generals exist only as a silly opposing force to the Harlem Globetrotters. Islam? It’s only a silly if incredibly violent, murderous, and oppressive opposing force to Christianity. The Isaac-Ishmael connection is key. By choosing Ishmael, Muslims have turned the meaning and intentions of God on their head.
The Jewish tradition led to law, morality, civilization, and ultimately to a compassionate culture which demarked a difference between faith and state. The Muslim tradition led to conquest, genocide, and religion AS state AND law. Sharia. With innumerable death penalties and unspeakable non-lethal cruelties besides. The Muslim tradition may have had a few brief moments of brilliance in the past, but there is no Muslim Shakespeare, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Bach, Pasteur, Mozart, Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Einstein, or Gershwin.
Islam is not the hoped for example of the evils of religion. It is a vivid and shockingly obvious example of religion faked by an aggressive, malicious tyrant.
I’m a writer. All I am, really. The one thing I can tell you for sure: the Koran is phony scripture, copied from the Bible by people of lesser talent. Its structure sucks, its imagery is imitative where it’s not nonexistent. It’s more like a badly executed writing assignment foisted on an untalented staff of political toadies than a work of, uh, divine revelation.
Find me anything in the Koran that reaches the poetic heights of Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Mark, or John. Nothing. It’s all pedestrian, mediocre drivel elevated only by its pretensions.
And the God that is Allah is, uh, a God upside down, cast in darkness from above and lit only from underneath, by the adoration of death minded followers.
I can only wonder why nobody else has ever stated these obvious facts.
Upside down or upside up? You tell me. But which of us is lit from above? Actually, there’s a right answer to this one. It hangs on the wall at the end of my upstairs hall. The light from above is a chandelier. THIS is right side up.
I understand if you’re all too scared to comment. It’s okay. We’re a nation of cowards now. If somebody stands up and says, “Muhammed was a fucking child-raping piece of shit God wannabe,” everybody scatters. I understand.
I’m just not going to do it anymore, Muhammed was a fucking child-raping piece of shit God wannabe. And he was a fake prophet.
My wife is terrified, I know. She’s still trying to figure out how I got the figurine at the end of the hall to look like it was upside down. I’m TORTURING her with the technology I used. She’s always been as afraid of Muslims as she is of pepper flecks in her teeth. You just brush and floss them away.
You see? Winning is simple. Not always easy. But simple.
Not scared to comment, just scared to comment without thinking first…
Funny bit of synchronicity in this post. The first two paragraphs introduced me to something I hadn’t considered before. I always figured the leftist love of Islam was due solely to arbitrary multiculturalism — anything that’s not white, male, or Christian must be okay. It hadn’t occurred to me that Islam could be useful to them as an Emmanuel Goldstein figure, albeit one they can never denounce directly. And while that name is bouncing around in my head, behold, you bring Rahm Emmanuel into it. Neat trick.
That’s what makes it “serendicity.”
Guy. btw, you got my first two brilliances. There were several more. Count them up. I astound myself. But I’m truly sad my usual prescience precipitated the news about Angelina Jolie. Poor baby. But I’m thinking she has the character to begin anew. We can only hope.
Emanuel Goldstein indeed.
The image of a boot stamping on a human face forever is a little too clear for my liking.
http://www.rzim.org/just-thinking-broadcasts/is-there-meaning-in-evil-and-suffering-part-2-of-4/
I had a college professor who, discussing Kierkegaard, described Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac as a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” (Until I looked it up, I remembered it as “exception to the ethical.” Six of one, half-dozen of the other, I guess.)
“Teleological” means, very roughly, “with a goal in mind”. (I’m sure you, RFL, know that; I guess I’m writing more for my fellow readers.) If it’s possible to have a teleological suspension of the ethical, that means it’s possible for an end to justify any means. Which is what Walter Duranty was getting at when he noted, with regard to the Soviet Union, that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.
It’s a terrible way to look at things, and Duranty was an asshole. And yet, if God has a purpose for humanity, all the horrors of history are thereby justified. It’s a puzzler.
Not a puzzler at all. God is not in the business of ends justifying the means. He gives us free will. Bad things happen. Good things happen. The good things are all the better for the bad. It’s called freedom. Nothing Stalin would recognize.
That is helpful. Thanks.
I’ve often heard about the way that the Koran just does not stack up to the Bible as a literary work. As a writer, can you expound more on that point? I did a lot of web searching but only found links from Islamic or Christian sites, neither of them being ‘objective’ about the written texts as just works of literature.
Are there any literary works that come close to the variety, beauty, and structure of the Bible? I am admittedly far less well read in the other works, though I know that there are Christians who read all the holy works by all religions before finding the Bible and its incredible accuracy in its prophesies.
Incredible ‘book end’ images on this post, that’s a gorgeous mask. I tried to do a reverse-image-lookup with it and found nothing like it. What is it from? Egyptian, yes?
Consistent with this site, it’s an Egyptian cat deity. Probably more like Izzie than Elliott.
Haven’t looked for other literary critiques of the Koran. Never cared about any but my own, to be honest. When I read it, all I thought was “How disappointing.” To quote our president, there’s no there there.