“I’m offended by your non-belief, so I’m calling for your ‘Death'”

50061a8f-86e2-4c18-8a26-ef5aca8784c5It sounds like a line from Monty Python, “You don’t believe what I believe, so you need to be killed”. Would anybody in the 21st century be that bat-shit crazy? You bet, we have religion to thank for that, or to be more precise, Islam.

Now lets be clear, do all Muslims think that non-believers should be murdered? No, of course not, but sadly many do. Last Saturday hundreds of thousands marched on the streets of Dhaka in Bangladesh doing just that. As reported in various places …

thousands of Islamists rallied on Saturday in Bangladesh, staging a “long march” to the capital, demanding execution of “atheist” bloggers under a proposed blasphemy law, amid stray incidents of violence that killed one person.

The Islamists, under the banner of newly emerged ‘Hafazat-e-Islam’, also called for a nationwide general strike on April 8 and issued a one month deadline for the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government for accepting their 13-point demand. They threatened that if the demands are not met, they would lay a siege to capital on May 5.

The demands included enactment of an anti-blasphemy law and arrest of five prominent people they called “atheist” and ban on mingling of sexes in public.

So once again the religion of “peace” demonstrates that it is no such thing by demanding the murder of people for the crime of simply criticizing bad ideas, and also demanded that everybody must conform to their bat-shit utterly insane beliefs … or else …

That tells you all you really need to know about Islam, there in that one action they have lost to argument. In fact they have no intellectual argument at all, instead it consists of nothing at all except an attempt at the imposition of their insanity by force, and death to any who dare to question them.

I have no problem with them expressing their view, that in itself is fine, but this is no simple expression. Instead, it is their attempt to blackmail the state with the threat of violence if their demands are not met — that crosses the line, not just by a few inches, but by many miles.

Is this a credible threat, does Bangladesh have a blasphemy law that could in fact be enacted and result in the murder of innocent people? No, the Bangladesh PM has stated

“They have demanded it. Actually, we don’t have any plan to [bring in the law]. We don’t need it. They should know that existing laws are enough.

“This country is a secular democracy. So each and every religion has the right to practice their religion freely and fair. But it is not fair to hurt anybody’s religious feeling. Always we try to protect every religious sentiment.”

In fact, even their existing laws that have been designed to “protect every religious sentiment” are quite frankly nuts. This is because ideas and beliefs do not have rights, only people do.

Bubbling away under the surface here is a far more complex story. The context is that the bloggers have been waging a campaign calling for the death of those charged with 1971 war crimes. Those that stand accused mostly belong to the fundamentalist group Jamaat-e-Islami which opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. Their war crimes from that time resulted in the death of millions and is listed as one of the most violent atrocities in the 20th century, 3 million were murdered. This march is in fact political, not religious, it is a push-back against the rising tide of demands for the death of the Islamists who are currently on trial because they murdered so many back in that war. The individuals taking part in the march are being manipulated by having their beliefs tweaked by the real puppet masters. The religious rhetoric has ben ramped up and half-truths deployed to motivate the blind un-thinking drones to march – they are nothing more than tools of a vast political machine that is frantically thrashing about trying to survive.

The Bangladeshi government, knowing that the march was coming, arrested four bloggers about a week ago on charges of defaming Islam, all done very visibly on camera in an attempt to appease the Islamists ahead of their planned Dhaka march. The government also announced it had constituted a cyber crime tribunal and that they were working on ways to toughen the laws to prevent both the exploitation of religion and the defamation of Islam in the internet.

Mixing any religion with politics has always been a disaster of epic proportions for humans, it is akin to permitting toddlers to play with gasoline and matches, without any need to think too long or hard you know it is not going to end well. Right across most cultures numerous and almost countless examples abound that illustrate how quickly things can escalate and spin out of control.

The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe. – Sam Harris

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