Tag Archives: Islam

Dear Mr. God, It’s Me Charlie

Dear Mr God I am Charlie

In many places around this world, I would be killed just for posting this dumb letter

THIS IS SLIGHTLY weird for me. I don’t believe that you exist, so it’s like writing a letter to Santa, except I’ve never seen you at the mall or on a can of Coca-Cola or falling down drunk on 53th Street during a Santacon pub crawl (fun!). So maybe you’re not like Santa, or maybe you are—in which case, Dear Mr. God, I will be good this year and I’d like $250,000 and a few award-winning articles in a prestigious publication of your choosing, please and thank-you.

I don’t know if you’ve been listening in on the conversations, but a lot of people are talking about you. Not directly about you. More like about people who bring up your name a lot. Some of the talk is about whether or not it’s okay to make fun of the people who claim to believe in you, and who say they will defend your reputation from offence and ridicule and criticism. In fact, some of your keenest followers object to seeing depictions of you at all. A small percentage of them appear to think it’s okay to kill people who do or say things they (you?) deem improper or objectionable, because they are doing it for you.

Now, I know what it’s like to have followers. I’m on Twitter and I have, like, tens of them. (My handle is @waynekspear, btw, if you and the baby Jesus & anyone else want to, you know.) Like you, I don’t expect to be held responsible for the behavior of my followers. Some of them probably have bed-head and can’t even parallel park or order a proper deli sandwich. Odds are that at least one of my social media followers has feet that smell like cheese. I bet some of them don’t floss. My point is that I will be very embarrassed if one of them ever decides to start a feet-cheese anti-flossing religion in my name.

Okay, so that’s the male-bonding portion of this letter. It’s amazing how quickly I sort of eased into it. See how I’m just chillin with you, like you totally exist?

I gather you’re all about the Truth, and the truth as I see it is that I’m tired of all the killing and bigotry and hatred that people commit, for whatever reasons. I’m equally sick and tired of discussions and debates about: whether or not you exist, what it is exactly that you want from us, your rules for our lives, who speaks on your behalf, and which of your many books is the right one to read. I get it. I’ve written more than one book, too, and the answer to the question “Wayne, which of your books is the right one to read?” is, obviously, get all of them. You’re just doing what any author does, which is building a good product funnel. Heck, you invented that.

So, I’m tired. Many of the people who believe in you, most of them in fact, are just fine by me. They live in peace with their neighbors. They live simple decent lives. Some of them smell nice. Then there are the people who are destroying everything. They’ve made it a nightmare to get on an airplane. They’ve made it likely that civil war and mass murder and persecution will flourish for as far into the future as we can imagine. They’ve ruined entire countries like Syria and Iraq and Pakistan, and they aim to ruin more. They hate music and education and science and books and irony and sex and wine and movies and fun and even cartoons. They love death and war and terror. I mean, that’s not funny at all.

The arguments about whether or not they are “really” believers, killing and hating despite your words, or even because of them, bores me. But what really tires me more than anything are the people—the people!—who find all sort of reasons why it’s the fault of the people who got killed. If only they didn’t make fun of religion! If only they didn’t criticize! If only they didn’t stop being all racist and phobic! Seems it’s everyone’s fault except the people who did the actual killing. Man, you people are even less clever than the killers themselves.

Because, in my view, you are a made-up thing—like the idea that there are unicorns and fairies, or that Sarah Palin “writes” books—I’m not doing this to ask or tell you anything. You don’t exist. There is no evidence for you at all, except inside people’s brains and in the books those brains have made. Homo sapien brains and nervous systems make some people pretty certain you are real, and that’s fine. I can’t prove you don’t, and I’m not interested in even trying.

Here’s the reason I wrote this: in many places around this world, I would be killed just for posting this dumb letter. I think that is wrong and stupid and sick, and I hope everyone out there agrees with me. But I know they don’t all agree with me, and the evidence is in every newspaper, every day. So, Houston, we have a problem.

Anyway, I hope I was able to make you laugh. I like to laugh. Some people, not so much. I can be silly. Some people, not so much. I admit I don’t know the truth about a lot of things. Some people, not so much. So I’m going to make fun of the some people, not because I think they will laugh (they won’t) but because I have chosen Team Fun, Laughter, and Life. [Insert fart joke here.]

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The Roundtable Podcast 70: War & Religion

Week of 24.08.2014

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Pastafarians | Ferguson, MO | Toronto Election 2014 | The Islamic Caliphate: past and present | Religion and War | Why Care What Goes on in the World?

Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit The Roundtable on Facebook.

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The Taliban Vs. Civilization

Taliban

THE NEWS from Afghanistan has been nothing but bad, and every indication is of worse to come. By the end of 2014, the Afghan people will be on their own, as they were in 2001 before the arrival — at local invitation — of British and American forces. Recall that twelve years ago the Islamist dirtbags who constituted the Taliban held Kabul, where they supervised a fanatical program of demodernization and terror punctuated by regularly scheduled mass executions. Imagine trying to re-engineer a nation of the twenty-first century along bronze age specifications, and you’ve got the idea — or, rather, don’t imagine it: the experiment was there before the eyes of anyone who cared to look. Now that the war-weary West has thrown its arms around the convenient fiction that the Taliban are ready for a negotiated re-entry (or is it entry?) to the twenty-first century, let’s review a sample of the bad tidings.

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Remembering Christopher Hitchens

I FIRST CAME across the writer Christopher Hitchens when he was a young Socialist contributing his “Minority Report” to the Nation. Very much yet in his soixante-huitard, Trotskyist phase, if not in possession any longer of his Socialist International card, he reminded me of my favourite writer, George Orwell.

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The Niqab in Living Colour

IN AZAR NAFISI’S book, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” the act of removing the veil is a metaphor for transitioning from the world of black-and-white into colour, and of shedding the state-imposed self to be liberated into one’s authentic, willed identity. “Black and white” is itself a good description of the cruel and stupid absolutism imposed upon Iran by the Velayat-e faqih, its antithesis colour indicating the actual and liveable world of vibrant diversity: irony, dialectic, humour, uncertainty, skepticism and multiplicity — whether in literary, moral, or political matters. In the “clash of civilizations,” the West is on the polychromatic side of the ledger against the monochrome despotisms.

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Living in the Age of The Endless War

ON A WALL at the National Capital’s War Monument are inscribed these words, past which I walk each day and derived from the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.” Here I shall provide some context, deferring to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation for Random House:

Fortunate, both! If in the least my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time,
While children of Aeneas make their home
Around the Capitol’s unshaken rock,
And still the Roman Father governs all.

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