Saudi Arabia has long been one of the most vocal countries to object to any insult or restriction impacting Islam in other countries. However, it continues to deny the free exercise of religion to non-Muslims. That oppressive record was on full display this week with the report of another series of arrests of Christians who were merely trying to pray. The infamous Morality Police (Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) raided the prayer meeting and arrested everyone for the crime of praying to another God.
The 28 Christians had gathered in the home an Indian national in the eastern city of Khafji and families say that they have not been heard from since.
All churches are banned in Saudi Arabia which believes only in the freedom of religion for Muslims. That position did not stop the Obama Administration (and Hillary Clinton) in working toward an international blasphemy standard for countries to criminalize insults to religion, as we previously discussed.
The Saudi government has denied knowledge of the raid, but the English-language newspaper, The Saudi Gazette, as well as several Saudi Arabic-language news outlets, have reported on the arrests.
Source: Daily Mail
Like I have said on many an occasion, humans take the best tool available and use it in the worst possible way. Religion is no different.
But I disagree. I think we should take the bait in “Rambo-in” to the middle east and see what happens. So what are they??? Friend or foe? We are supposed to fight ISIS, the terror arm of Saudi Arabia, but smile politely at the same time so our politicians can take their pay-offs? Wonder if Bandar visits his Shrub buddy in Texas these days.
The earliest definition of religion is wisdom & knowledge. Too bad that 99% of religions today are not based on wisdom or knowledge but a blind faith based on badly & confusingly written books, or self proclaimed preachers who do the same and threaten your body or your eternity if you do not obey.
There might be a big guy in the sky, But you’re a god & so am I…..
Ginger,
No, no. One is the real god, but the other two are just figments of the imaginations of [circle one: sinners/infidels]. How can you not clearly distinguish between them?
Oh, how lucky the chosen few are to be picked by Oz the Great and Powerful. Somewhere over the rainbow (picture me singing merrily in a sunny meadow traversed by an angelic path crafted from rare yellow bricks)…
Religion poisons everything (except comedy).
Whoa, my iPad can’t spell.
No Olly, its no debating or communicating. It’s complaining about the fact that here are liberals on this blog who comment from a liberal view point. I don’t expect him to agree with me, but I also think it’s silly to constantly complain day after day that people are commenting in a ‘way’ that you don’t like. He seems to be indicating that he desires an echo chambe here. He has been complaining about the liberal nature of about comments and even blog posts by Guest Blogers. So, to disagree with a comment is one thing, feel free to debate! To mererly complain about a comment that you disagree with BEING voiced in a comments section is another thing altogether. He seems personally affronted that here are liberals here, lol. Do you get what I’m saying?
“What I find infantile and tedious is when someone comes into a thread with complaints about other people’s comments.”
Annie,
It’s called communicating and sometimes people won’t agree each other. The topic is about how a government abuses the natural rights of Christians to practice their faith while supporting the natural right for others to practice an acceptable form of Islam.
zarathustraSmiles’ comment went a step further to “nuke” them all and thus eliminate ANY practice of religion. I could have added my own hyperbole and compared that with the “final solution” but that would not have been very constructive.
Maybe when JT gets a “thumb’s up/thumb’s down button I will simply make use of that. Until then, I will not hesitate to dialog with people I disagree and in the process I might learn something I had not even considered.
If the Freedom From Religion people ever get in power the same stuff will happen here. I’m channeling the haters here. I don’t believe that, but I’m trying to walk in their shoes, say the kind of whacky stuff they say, and see if I can’t empathize w/ them.
The West shouldn’t provide Saudi Arabia any credibility or support of their government.
Ummm…..you know what Blitzfick means, right, Annie?
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jbtfsplk_3114.jpg
No it’s Joe Btfsplk, not Blitzfick. That’s what I called him as a kid because I could pronounce his last name.
Since Islam respects Christianity as another religion of the Book, they are all praying to the same God. I do not see a crime here. Next time Iraq gets ready to invade Saudi Arabia, we need to walk away.
What I find infantile and tedious is when someone comes into a thread with complaints about other people’s comments. I wonder if some folk’s mother never taught them that one can’t get one’s way by pouting and sticking out one’s lower lip? I wonder why some continue to read here if it’s so tedious? I think some must like their role as a Blitzfick character, you know, the guy in the cartoon with the dark cloud continuously following him.
@JBrian
I think if we bomb the ISIL creeps, we will bring what is inside of them, out. Of course, some poor schmuck will have to scrape up the mess. . .
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
All this “I blame Bush”, “religion of any kind is evil”, and “oil is even more evil” is tedious and infantile. A lot of frustration out there. Don’t you have a dog you want to kick?
Reblogged this on veritasusa and commented:
Islam…
A quandary,
Where its adherents are taught to be peaceful in lands where they are not strong, and to portray Islam as a religion of Tolerance and Peace, or in some cases to hide their beliefs entirely;
Yet where they are strong they are taught to be conquering, warlike and intolerant of all other religions or sects.
This is Taqiyya.
Which is why Islam often seems so duplicitous depending on where you are – or should I say, where they are.
Which is why “Moderate Islamic Leaders” decry ISIS as barbaric and Anti-Islamic in the West, but the unedited beheading and decapitation videos are favorite varieties of “religious porn” among Muslims around the world – regardless of whether they are “moderate” or not.
And while there are WITHOUT a doubt Muslims who practice a peaceful form of Islam, Islam itself is decidedly not a peaceful religion.
The Saudi’s are not our friends,
They see us as a convenient and incredibly strong ally and counterbalance to the Shia in Iran and Southern Iraq which scare the Bejeezus out of them!
and until very recently a secure and stable place to sell their oil. They are unsavory business partners – the folks who made us a “deal we couldn’t refuse” after the Arab Oil Embargo and the Iranian Revolution.
Our long term (past peak oil and after fracking) energy independence is
about the most critical thing we can do for our national security at this juncture (at least until we realize what a threat Cyber, the Chinese and Putin are), but let the Arabs hold the Chinese over an oil barrel for a while.
http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war
Islam…
A quandary,
Where its adherents are taught to be peaceful in lands where they are not strong, and to portray Islam as a religion of Tolerance and Peace, or in some cases to hide their beliefs entirely;
Yet where they are strong they are taught to be conquering, warlike and intolerant of all other religions or sects.
This is Taqiyya.
Which is why Islam often seems so duplicitous depending on where you are – or should I say, where they are.
Which is why “Moderate Islamic Leaders” decry ISIS as barbaric and Anti-Islamic in the West, but the unedited beheading and decapitation videos are favorite varieties of “religious porn” among Muslims around the world – regardless of whether they are “moderate” or not.
And while there are WITHOUT a doubt Muslims who practice a peaceful form of Islam, Islam itself is decidedly not a peaceful religion.
The Saudi’s are not our friends,
They see us as a convenient and incredibly strong ally and counterbalance to the Shia in Iran and Southern Iraq which scare the Bejeezus out of them!
and until very recently a secure and stable place to sell their oil. They are unsavory business partners – the folks who made us a “deal we couldn’t refuse” after the Arab Oil Embargo and the Iranian Revolution.
Our long term (past peak oil and after fracking) energy independence is
about the most critical thing we can do for our national security at this juncture (at least until we realize what a threat Cyber, the Chinese and Putin are), but let the Arabs hold the Chinese over an oil barrel for a while.
http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war
Ergo the endorsement of religions in the US…. See how it works out David? Jefferson and others were well aware of the influence of a state mandated religion….. Sure let’s change the US constitution….
Olly, I didn’t indicate you were attempting to deprive Z’s right to free speech by criticizing him, I was merely reminding you that he has a right to free speech. And yes so do you. You said he was worse than the Saudi theocrats because he spoke in a disparaging manner toward all religion. So you hold him in lower regard than those who in actuality take away the right to one’s beliefs, the Saudis because he denigrates belief in all Gods? So as not to hijack this thread, I’ll just conclude with my assertion, no right is unalienable and all rights come from a Popular Sovereign, which is chosen by the people. We Americans chose a Representative Democracy as our Sovereign.
Of course I accept that we are all fallible.
RE: zarathustraSmiles, One small Hydrogen Bomb over Mecca, would cure enumerable Ills in that area of the World!!!, September 16, 2014 at 11:09 am:
Given that a dictionary synonym for “enumerable” is “countable,” I set out to count all the ills which I can identify that a Hydrogen Bomb over Mecca would cure.
Of course, the comment by zarathustraSmiles does not indicate that said Hydrogen Bomb over Mecca would explode or would otherwise be detonated over Mecca.
Neither does the comment by zarathustraSmiles indicate that the Hydrogen Bomb over Mecca is not in a terrorist-built intercontinental ballistic missile on a path that will take to to successful detonation over Washington, D.C.
Alas, in my view, a Hydrogen Bomb that is used to harm or kill people is an ill in and of itself, and decidedly is absolutely never a cure for any sort or kind of ill whatsoever.
A Hydrogen Bomb, detonated or othewise, is not even a cure for the ill of itself.
As much as I despise terrorism of every possible nature, vastly more do I love terrorists; for I understand, from having been atrociously abused in two public schools, the sort of child abuse that is needed for someone, or for anyone, to become a terrorist as a beyond-horrible demonstration of the psychological mechanism of reaction formation.
The trauma of my experiences of shattering child abuse, at Marshall School, during second grade, in Eureka, California, and during the first half of my sophomore high school year at Sturgeon Bay High School, in Wisconsin, eventually culminated in the three years of largely psychiatric inpatient treatment which became a large aspect of the basis of my bioengineering doctoral dissertation.
In my view, it was only my being very profoundly and irreducibly autistic, that kept me from acting out the excruciating horrors of the abuses I experienced in public school, especially during second grade at Marshall School and during the first half of my sophomore year at Sturgeon Bay High School.
From page 1 of Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 1997:
If you bring forth that which is within you,
Then that which is within you
Will be your salvation.
If you do not bring forth that which is within you,
Then that which is within you
Will destroy you.
—From Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels,, Random House, 1997.
Terrorists are, so I have long observed, people who, as children, and commonly at around the age of 18 months, were so severely and traumatically terrorized as to have developed intransigent conscious amnesia for their shatteringly terrorizing life events. Terrorists are people who unconsciously act out variegated recapitulations of their childhood amnesia-generating agonies.
Can hatred ever be else than intense love distorted viciously by beyond-overwhelming unresolved pain?
What, in the whole of my life, is the most painful class of event that I can ever recall? People, particularly at Marshall School, and almost as much at Sturgeon Bay High School, attempting to convince me to believe that I had made an avoidable mistake.
Had I ever come to believe, by mistake, by mistake driven by shatteringly abusive authoritarian coercion, that I had made an avoidable mistake, I may have come to believe that other people also have made avoidable mistakes.
Had I, in any way, come to believe that I had ever made an avoidable mistake, and, through making that mistake, had come to believe that other people also have made avoidable mistakes, I cannot imagine how my so believing would not have taken me down the path of becoming a viciously effective terrorist.
I have a hunch that the (mistaken) beliefs which cause human destructiveness cannot become the remedy for human destructiveness until humans have sufficiently come to understand that such beliefs are of apparent absolute error.
Methinks that humans will have nearly innumerable terrorists and terrorisms until we, as individuals and as human society, learn well enough how to be truthful about child abuse that we are able to remove child abuse from human socialization methods.
There was only one public school system in which I never experienced significant child abuse of any sort, that was during the last two and a half years in public school, at Detroit Lakes High School, in Minnesota.
I went to kindergarten at Columbia School, in Seattle, Washington. My family lived about a block and a half east of Rainier Avenue, on the north side of Ferdinand Street, and Columbia School was about a block and a half west of Rainier Avenue.
Rainier Avenue was, and apparently still is, a major arterial thoroughfare in Seattle, and my mother would walk with me on the way to school and came back to school to walk home with me, all in the interest of my safety, because of the danger of traffic on Rainier Avenue.
About a third of my kindergarten classmates treated me very abusively at first, in kindergarten. At recess, when the teacher was not looking our way, some of those classmates surrounded me and chanted, to the tune of “A Tisket, A Tasket,” Cry Baby, Bri Baby, Brian is a Sissy.”
In a way, they were right. I suppose it is accurate to label my being autistic as being a form of infantile autism. And, being, as I understood well before then, that I was, and remain, what is now labeled transgendered, I surely was acting like a baby and like a sissy.
Indeed, I continue, unabated, now, to act like a baby and to act like a sissy.
I act like a baby because I cannot be taught to actually believe that people actually make actually avoidable mistakes. And I act like a sissy because I cannot accept the notion that hurting children to teach them to be socially normal is anything other than of traumatic abuse.
How severe was the abuse I experienced during the first few days of kindergarten? On the third day of kindergarten, after school, walking beside my mother, my left hand in her right hand, we got to Rainier Avenue. The traffic signal was red for Ferdinand Street and green for Rainier Avenue, and a Seattle electric bus came south on Rainier and stopped in front of us to let off and pick up passengers. The light stayed green for Rainier Avenue long enough for the bus doors to be closed and for the bus to start across Ferdinand Street.
Two thoughts came into my conscious awareness within a few milliseconds. The first was that I could dive under the back wheels of that bus, and those children would never again be able to hurt me. The second was to the effect that, if I did that, I would hurt my family a thousand times more than other people could ever hurt me.
The thought of diving under the wheels of that bus was so fleeting as to not have resulted in the slightest muscle twitch. The thought of doing everything practical to avoiding hurting my family has guided my whole life.
Which may beg the question, “Who are the members of my family?”
I think that my family includes, but is not limited to, all terrorists.
Because I was terrorized as a public school child, I cannot be other than a terrorist, because only people who have been terrorized can act out their terrors through terrorism. However, I am a terrorist who brings forth that which is within me (the terrors of unspeakably horrible terrorizing experiences inflicted onto me through authoritarian coercion), through studying biology so intensively and extensively as to have, methinks, solved the biological enigma of human terror-driven destructiveness.