isms...

Today we will discuss why all isms are bad. Every time people cling to an ism, they worship it. Society needs to have more room to develop and evolve (the kind of evolution that even religious people believe in). Once a people start believing in an ism there is no more room to operate, there is no more room for improvement.

I am here to argue that there are NO good isms, not even the good ones.

I could take easy street and throw out obvious bad isms like Extremism, Fascism, Racism, Sexism, Nazism, but I will take the high road and introduce the bad side to a not-so-bad isms.

One example is Capitalism. While we can all agree that Socialism and Communism have failed, we should not celebrate that by clinging on to Capitalism. We saw the ugly side of Capitalism during this year's great depression (which people still labeled as a recession). Every issue we had during the economic downturn could be directly blamed on Capitalism, wall-street greed. Sure it didn't help that we waged two major wars at the time, but that would paint the ugly side of the next ism, Nationalism.

Without Nationalism and the sudden euphoria of Patriotism that fell upon every American after 9/11, Bush would not have dared to bypass congress and line up wars like his College cocaine habit. But we as people fell into the trap again and dazed into the beautiful idea of Nationalism and Patriotism and gave away all of our freedoms in return.

So the next time a great idea comes, please do not make it into an ism, because one day you might want to sit down and improve it.

Two Edged Sword

How should I mourn Michael Jackson? Well lets assume for a second that he is guilty by the following: The number of allegations against Michael Jackson, the response he delivered and the extreme lifestyle he appeared to live, point to one direction, MJ is guilty of being a child molester.

It might sound unfair to judge a person when there has been absolutely no conviction from neither the criminal nor the civic court regarding these allegations, but it is not. In my last blog I used the saying that seems most fitting here: "wherever there is smoke, there is fire." To mourn a man that performed such perverted acts would be almost as horrendous as those acts themselves.

Now lets assume for a second that he is innocent. How could I let one of the greatest artists ever vanish without the proper respect that he deserves? Like his music or not, MJ was a pioneer and an ambassador of his art to the world. Therein lies my dilemma, what am I to do?

Circular Reasoning

In today's blog I will prove that there is no evidence showing the Islamic Holy Book "The Qur'an" as the word of God. In doing so, I will disprove a few myths about the Qur'an that Muslims, often use to glorify the book as being too good to have been created by man. Please keep the hate messages tasteful and to a minimum.

The first "evidence" that Muslims point to when proving the Qur'an is the word of God is the poetic nature of the book. The Qur'an goes beyond a collection of poems which has fundamentally defined the literature of the Arabic language (famous for its poetry). That is precisely why when reading the Qur'an people usually tend to do it in a rhythmic voice. Muslims of today's era cannot help but tear up whenever they hear the truly seductive words from that book and wonder how can a man ever write such beautiful words? The answer to that question is fairly simple: a man can write such beautiful poetry because men of that age did speak in that matter regularly. They did not consider this type of literature rare and glorious but normal chit chat language they use everyday, so it is not beyond comprehension that a well versed man could have written this.

Another point Muslims usually bring up is that Mohammed was an illiterate, so how can an illiterate man write one of the most amazing pieces of art? I will answer this by proposing:

At the age of 25, Mohammed married the older Khadijah, who was a very successful merchant business woman. Mohammed in turn worked with her by traveling the world. It was either by that or living in Mecca, which was a holy place before Islam (since Abraham built the Kaaba), Mohammed has most likely learned to read and write and obtained a copy of other man-made-up books, the Old and New Testaments, which explains why a lot of the biblical stories from those books match the stories from the Qur'an.

Finally, Muslims always claim the Qur'an is perfect and was never altered in anyway. They claim that God spoke those words to Mohammed, through the angel Gabriel, then Mohammed memorized them until he spoke them to his friends, relatives and followers who in turn memorized some, and wrote some on animal skin. Finally about a dozen years after Mohammed died, those people who memorized and wrote those words were asked to bring them forward to put everything in a book. After they put everything in that book, they made a bunch of copies and sent them all over the world to avoid alteration. By the way, the Arabic language (at that point) did not have dots or light vowels. In Arabic and specifically in the Qur'an there are words, phrases and even sentences that would have completely different meaning if you change one light vowel or dot, let alone all of them. The language did not acquire such features until about 200 years later.

Yet Muslims continue to claim the accuracy of the Qur'an and when presented with the above argument, they respond by saying that God said IN THE QUR'AN that he sent us the Qur'an and he will protect it from evil doers. That is what you call circular reasoning.

Wherever there is smoke...

Who makes your decisions for you? TV? Radio? Google? The Pope? Your family and friends? Your Priest? A 20 something blogger who knows HTML?

Believe it or not but most people surrender their free will and decision of every aspect of their lives to one or more of the above. People are running around arguing, passionately, an issue that they themselves know little about, but they are convinced on the issue because someone convinced them with emotion and not with facts. When you are attending a Sunday sermon, you never hear the priest outlining his deductive reasoning steps into why Gays are an abomination or why Darwin was the devil in disguise, but you will hear him say it with emotion.

A person is usually smart, but people are gullible. I have heard people debate a side of an issue that when asked about it, knew little details about the issue itself. A good example is the infamous lady who stood up at a McCain rally and told McCain that she knew Obama was a Muslim, an Arab. What is more shocking is McCain's response "No ma'am he is a good man." McCain's answer aside, why did that woman think that Obama was a secret Arab Muslim? Because she surrendered her free will and decision making to the first pamphlet she read about Obama and it just happens to be one of those pamphlets that had Obama wearing an outfit like the one Bin Laden always wears on TV.

So, if you ask "If I can't trust the Church, the media or Rush Limbaugh, how do I get my information then?" The answer is very simple, use your brain. If you listen to the same story on FOXNEWS and MSNBC, chances are you will hear completely different versions of the story and chances are they are both biased to a disturbing level. But if you accumulate as many facts as possible about the story from those two sources and maybe a few more, you should be able to conclude something that is close to resembling the truth, a lot closer than any news outlet. There are only two rules to follow whilst doing this: your enemy on any issue feels just as justified as you, and chances are he is and wherever there is smoke, there is fire.