Can We Live With Islam?

Regarding the vexed question of whether to condemn Islam as a whole, that is of course best left to the individual conscience.

But hark ye! Here is how I answer it. We are talking about a notional god whose religion and prophet somehow, after fourteen hundred years, here in the second half of the first decade of the third millennium since the birth of another hotly disputed prophet or god or avatar or whatever you hold Jesus to have been--whose religion and prophet, I say, Islam and Mahomet, seem to necessitate perpetual discussions over whether or not it is lawful and virtuous to behead those who do not submit to them, or those who mock them, or those who first submit and then fall away, or those who cause others to doubt them, or any number of other transgressions, all of which involve whether or not one believes in something that is, first, unprovable, and second, only one among many things that may be believed with greater or lesser sincerity by men and women of greater or lesser intelligence and capacity for spiritual and other kinds of experience.

And to all this I say quite simply that it is unacceptable at this stage in human development for there to be any discussion at all about whether such beheadings or killings or punishment of any kind whatsoever are lawful and desirable under any circumstances whatsoever, and that any "religion" or "cult" or "system of belief" that engages in and encourages such questions (that is, engages in them as anything other than a fanciful speculation that is a priori to be answered in the negative) is illegitimate and to be rejected, crushed and stamped out.

In other words, just because some Mahometans imagine that their belief in the big, jealous, angry god with personality issues and an anger management problem entitles them to speculate about what punishments to apply to those who do not share their submission to such an entity, whether or not he in fact exists, does not mean they are so entitled or that the rest of us are obliged to abide these threats with good grace.

I will even go much further than that and state unequivocally that even if their god exists he should not be submitted to by any self-respecting creature, because he is not a god but a tyrant.

And the same goes for any brand of "Xianity" or any other religion that arrogates to itself similar rights.

Enfin, to Islam I say what M. Arouet said repeatedly and with gusto and vehemence about the Church Militant and Triumphant and its claims to temporal authority:

Écrasez l'Infâme.

Permit me to introduce myself: I am Cato the Elder. The worthy Pastorius recently invited me to join the Alliance. I hope you will enjoy my contributions. Whether you do or don't, I look forward to hearing from you about it!