Conversion

Attempts have been made to convert me on several occasions.

The first attempt, within memory, was by a group of Christians I had out of curiosity attached myself to. They used every opportunity to convince me of the error of my ways and the wonders of Jesus. Apparently their version of Christ was just waiting to pounce upon me and fill me with-well, I guess the holy spirit. They gave me books about gangsters who had accepted Jesus and turned their lives around. I found the narratives simple and superficial.

The worst part perhaps was their right-wing politics.

Most of their stories fitted in with my hypothesis on fabrication. Celebrities who had embraced Christianity, which I knew were untrue tales of conversion. Atheists who on their death beds had embraced the Lord, assented to by clerics who had pushed themselves towards the death bed and were alone when they heard the apparent turnarounds, or who made such claims years latter.

Their doubts niggle to such a degree that they cannot believe people may not believe and have thereby to fabricate conversions!

Mostly I remember the kind of playground bullying to make me convert and the silliness of their arguments.

Two Moslems have attempted the same. Both employed the same arguments, no doubt picked up in Mosques. There is no contradiction in the Koran (there is plenty but anyway such an assertion proves nothing), the words of the Koran cannot be found elsewhere (they can, in the Torah, but such an assertion proves nothing), and present day Science can be found in the Koran-just of course both obscurely narrated and difficult to find.

Like the Christians, they tried to beat me down and bully me until I submitted. One used insults and highly dubious frames of reference which in hindsight made me understand why some people give in and convert. The process can be very intimidating, using verifiable brainwashing techniques, falsifications and aggression.

LOVER

She came into my bedroom

one winter's day

silhouetted by the moon

and chose to stay.

 

By summer she was gone

a figment or fey

I wait for her return all autumn long

wondering why she went away.

Falsification and Christ

The connection between falsification and religion can be seen in the Christian narratives. These function on several levels. They usually reflects other falsifications or myths.

1) Beginnings-usually involving supernatural beings.
2) Connections to previous spiritual or holy figures.
3) preparation
4) significance and drama of death
5) significance and drama after death


Christianity fits into Egyptian and Greek myths.

The mother and son intimacy is Egyptian. Christ's perfection of character, expressed through his relationship with others, combines Greek and other ancient myths. Christ's story revolves upon the principles of Greek drama-involving two births (beginnings), a chorus and an end.

All ancient societies engaged in falsification, perceiving it as a kind of reality.

islamaphobia

I question the term Islamaphobia as the religion poses ideological differences of a fundamental nature. Would we classify Nazism in a similar fashion? Islam is a political and economic phenomenon and not simply a religious one.

Is rejecting Islamic homophobia Islamaphobia?

Is rejecting the political use of the Koran Islamaphobia?

Is rejecting Islam, with its repetitive prohibitions, social spying, its profound negativity Islamaphobia?

bin Laden

There are a number of myths surrounding what bin Laden believed. In fact he wrote down or broadcast many of his beliefs.

He was incensed by the Palestinian matter only because he viewed Israel as a Western tool and because of his often expressed anti-Semitism. True Moslems, he held, must eradicate the Jews.  Otherwise, he rarely mentioned it. Many extreme imams share his views. A Moslem in a college I ran expressed such views to me.

Rightly, bin Laden was incensed by the USA's casual attitudes to the deaths of others, collateral damage, compared to their response if one of their own died. His bombing of the West was a response to this, sharing the USA's same attitude to collateral damage.

His real campaign against the West was a reaction to the First Gulf War and Western troops in the Holy Land, Arabia. This for him was an appalling religious transgression against the true faith.

Bin Laden wanted all Westerners, whom he likened to Crusaders, out of Moslem lands. That meant tourists as well as troops. In fact, the land he considered Moslem land was also the land of Christians, Jews and other faiths, but that did not bother him.

Bin Laden also claimed all the Indonesian islands for Islam and supported Indonesia's conquest of East Timor-a land of Christians and animists-where half the indigenous population has been murdered to be replaced by Indonesian Moslems. So, what is a crime in Palestine is not one in Indonesia. A crime for bin Laden, and many Moslems, was not a crime if perpetrated by Moslems. Expanding areas of the true faith went beyond right and wrong and as for Mohammad before him bin Laden accepted genocide if the true faith was triumphant.

Not a holy man perhaps but just another murderer like many of the politicians of the time-Bush, Blair, Putin.

Racialism

I work, or have worked, in a number of Moslem colleges/schools in the East End. In my most recent one. I resigned today, I was subjected to racial abuse by a number of male students. I was in Islamic territory. These young guys, the oldest no more than 16, are taught by parents and mosques that white people are inferior/at least those not of the faith. They are not taught about appropriate behaviour.

Issuu publication

issuu publications-stanley wilkin

Philosophy and Allah

I was recently part of an online philosophy debate on consciousness when a Moslem Phd holder became involved trouncing a complex series of arguments with references to Allah and the Koran. We are heading back to a dark age! All arguments reduced to the particularities of an unlikely supernatural force rendered in a poorly written book!

Once, a long time ago, and briefly, Islam was famous for its culture and its learned men. Now it only has poorly educated imams.

Descending and ascending

Descending and ascending, with

Nothing else to do.

Dazzled by an acrimonious sun,

Sighing for respite. An invigorated

Population returning, like penguins,

Squabbling back to the sea.

 

That said, evolution was a lie!

As hopeless as the resurrection

That destroyed the afterlife for everyone

But god. Whichever way you look at it,

We are still part of a master plan.

 

We go, come back, arrive

With no true knowledge of a destination.

We die in order to live

As if dying  was not by itself  enough

And, in the end, exhausting.

We cannot it seems

Just eat, sleep, fornicate without

Singular purpose.

We demand not one big bang, a discrete

Example of energy formation, but a whole

Lot of little ones, which we confusingly

Call life.

Falsification: Mohammad as last messenger.

Falsification within Islam also concerns the notion that all other messengers or prophets are subsumed within Mohammad. That he is the final messenger.

One outrageous difficulty here is Mohammad's failure to relate to or mention the ethics of the Jesus figure, and mention at all Paul of Tarsus, the major Christian personality after the Jesus figure. Mohammad does not know what Jesus said and his own beliefs and his understanding of Jesus contradict those of the Jesus figure. Mohammad's beliefs remain closer to certain forms of Judaism.

frankenstein's monster

https://www.academia.edu/23867192/Frankenstein_Anatomists_Body-Snatchers_and_the_Monster

cold

A cold wind

A cold wind blew
when the light went.
An accumulation of warmth
came from copse and hill,
cheap spawned and self created,
as the night renewed.
He walked home, careless of his stumbling steps,
and softly threw his bags to the
floor, demons on the hearth-rug,
coiling snakes and insects everywhere.

It was all behind him now.
A sullen fist of half-remembered regret,
the weather-laden wood carrying his dreams
in each silver flaked leaf.

A half-remembered face, an
age destroyed beauty.
It was time to go now!
Time to go!


The frost enthralled clouds interlocked
when time slowed,
leaving half dead leaves languishing or intermittently
crashing to the ground.
Few left or returned,
combating time.


A half-remembered life
spun from seconds.
Sad voices in half-remembered intervals.

frankenstein, anatomists, bodysnatchers and the monster

https://www.academia.edu/23867192/Frankenstein_Anatomists_Body-Snatchers_and_the_Monster

gladiator-stephen francis

 

A Greater Man

I had held myself as a greater man,

A soldier aloof from the whims of life.

The only things I cared for were the gladius in my hand

The screams of my enemies

As their blood dripped from my blade

And they lay clawing at my feet.

I went whoring with the boys

Played with them games of dice

Laughed at their jokes.

It was all lip service.

I did not care for their ways,

The ways of lesser men.

I was a soldier whose only lust was for blood.

I was better.

The new recruits came

With their beardless faces.

They huddled together for comfort,

Some cried to their mothers

Others prayed.

Those simpering wrecks were of no interest

Except for one

Erasmos.

With the stature of a god

The confidence of a titan

He stood amongst his peers

As a man stands amongst children.

It was not long until we sparred.

As good soldiers there was no need for words.

We both knew what was obvious

What was as certain as life and death

We were brothers in arms

Of the same breed

We were as one.

The fight came.

Outnumbered ten to one

We fought

Until blood soaked our faces

Our enemies and our own

Until crimson flooded our eyes

Our noses

Our mouths.

Before night fell we were the only two left

Alone in a field full of ravenous beasts

Of coprses waiting for the crows

Left to rot in some far flung land.

Their gaping snouts salivated

Waiting for the chance to sink their blades into our flesh.

A new emotion filled my veins.

I was no longer fighting for myself

To satisfy my lust for death

But for my kin standing next to me

The god made flesh

It was as we stood back to back

As I felt him stand firm against Fortuna’s whims

That I knew I was finally what I claimed to be

For Erasmos

My love

Has made me a greater man.