The Loving God
5 August 2007 by Bob
Rains Compound India’s Monsoon Misery
BARABANKI, India - Torrential rains overnight compounded the misery of 2 million marooned Indian villagers, killing another 11 people and raising the death toll from house collapses and floods in South Asia to 240, officials said Sunday. [...] At least 240 people have been killed in India and neighboring Bangladesh, and 19 million driven from their homes in recent days. The South Asian monsoon season runs from June to September as the rains work their way across the subcontinent, a deluge that scatters floods and landslides across the region and kills hundreds of people every year.
Hey, come on: we all know all this cool stuff builds better souls…
Ah, the joys of soul-building…
5 August 2007, on 10:06 am
Every year, you’d think they’d relocate…
5 August 2007, on 12:51 pm
When I was growing up, Minot ND flooded two years out of every three! And each time, the fools would return to their homes and go on with life. Even as a child, I could see that that was crazy.
However, natural disaster is one of the Four Horsemen. And these Four were only the personification of a meme: big disasters were a self-correcting population-control mechanism. And, like modern medicine, we’re circumventing the mechanism and breeding like fucking rats.
My overpopulation rant-for-the-day…
5 August 2007, on 1:25 pm
I thought of a comedy skit to spoof Bangladesh. Everything is under water and all of the people walk around with scuba gear on and have to communicate by holding up signs.
5 August 2007, on 2:40 pm
Has anyone seen the “B” movie Idiocracy wherein the intelligent folks breed little to none, and the dumbasses breed like rabbits. The average national IQ gets lower and lower, etc. An interesting take on overpopulation, and the general dumbing down of society.
5 August 2007, on 3:16 pm
Moeneigh
That’s a movie? I thought it was real life!
The Quiverful Duggars just had their 17th kid:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20097968/
5 August 2007, on 3:49 pm
The misery inflicted on the populations of Banladesh and Northern India is a sure fire sign that God is really pissed at some other people somewhere else.
5 August 2007, on 4:16 pm
I thought that horrible natural disasters happen because god hates fags.
5 August 2007, on 4:44 pm
And amputees…
5 August 2007, on 8:42 pm
and free thinkers…
6 August 2007, on 4:37 am
A bit OT, but I ran across a couple of books about India and Pakistan. Remember that on the partition of India, over a million people were killed on purely religious grounds. 9 million hindus had to leave now Pakistan and 6 million muslims had to leave India.
Those who talk about religious moderates don’t take into account what happened. “Moderates” of the two religions had lived together more or less peacefully for centuries. But at the partition, these “moderates” attacked neighboring villages of the different faith and murdered their inhabitants, solely because of religion.
Women of the opposing religion were raped and mutilated in the name of religious purity.
V.S. Naipaul has a book about islamic imperialism, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among The Converted Peoples.
” In conclusion, back to Naipaul’s sober words from the Prologue of his book:
“Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of the converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.” ”
http://www.islam-watch.org/Others/Tale-of-Two-States-India-Pakistan.htm
In another book, Anwar Shaikh’s Islam: The Arab National Movement, the same sort of thing is described.
“Naipaul’s choice to exclude references to publications that focus on similar topics weakens his book. He could have cited, for example, the widely discussed books of Anwar Shaikh, which brought a fatwa on the author’s head. Anwar Shaikh, a U.K.-based philosopher of Pakistani origin, wrote in Islam: The Arab National Movement (U.K., The Principality Publishers, 1995. ISBN: 0- 9513349-4-8): “Islam has caused more damage to the national dignity and honour of non-Arab Moslems than any other calamity that may have affected them, yet they believe that this faith is the ambassador of equality and human love. This is a fiction which has been presented as a fact with an unparalleled skill. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad divided humanity into two sections, the Arabs and the non-Arabs. According to this categorisation, the Arabs are the rulers and the non-Arabs are to be ruled through the yoke of Arab cultural imperialism: Islam is the means to realise this dream because its fundamentals raise superiority of Arabia sky-high, inflicting a corresponding inferiority on the national dignity of its non-Arab followers. From the Arabian point of view, this scheme looks marvellous, magnificent and mystifying . . . yet under its psychological impact the non-Arab Muslims rejoice in self-debasement, hoping to be rewarded by the Prophet with the luxuries of paradise. The Islamic love of mankind is a myth of even greater proportions. Hatred of non-Moslems is the pivot of Islamic existence. It not only declares all dissidents as the denizens of hell but also seeks to ignite a permanent fire of tension between Moslems and non-Moslems; it is far more lethal than Karl Marx’s idea of social conflict which he hatched to keep his theory alive.”"
http://www.indiastar.com/wallia15.htm
Finally, there is another book mentioned at the site,
“Iqbal’s background is detailed in Ram Nath Kak’s Autumn Leaves (New Delhi: Vitasta, 1995, ISBN: 81-86588-01-9): “His grandfather, Sahaj Ram Sapru, a revenue collector, [allegedly] embezzled funds and when discovered, the Afghan governor, Azim Khan, gave him the choice of death or conversion to Islam. Sahaj Ram chose life, and assuming new names, he and his family moved to Sialkot in the Punjab. Later, Iqbal never acknowledged his native Kashmiri and Indian tradition that his grandfather had been forced to renounce. Perhaps this reveals that terror wins.
The victims wish to be like their tormentors.”e
6 August 2007, on 8:50 am
Well, if you live places like Bangladesh your movement from one place to another isn’t something that you just do without the sanction of authority. Just look at what happened to some of the people who tried to escape Katrina, here in the ‘Land of the Free’. True, they were on foot and thus not as worthy of survival as those with cars. Plus, if most of your country consists of a river delta, one place is pretty much like another. If you actually leave, what happens then? Becoming a begger in a country which is already starving might not be the best move.
6 August 2007, on 9:56 am
Which is why progress and development will help them, if moving is out of the question.
6 August 2007, on 12:53 pm
Bernarda, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes the same argument in “Infidel”, which is that Islam is really Arab cultural imperialism, and that fundamentalist Muslims are trying to freeze people into a 7th century Arab desert culture.
6 August 2007, on 1:44 pm
Bernarda, you’ve left out a really crucial part of the massacres following Partition. England, a monarchy with a combination secular/Christian perspective, occupied and ruled India for nearly a century before Indian achieved independent. A central tenet of their rule was divide and conquer, which they used to great effect with the large Muslim and Hindu populations of (then) India.
This Muslim bashing has got to stop, not only here but on other supposedly progressive websites. Sean would never have stood for it.
6 August 2007, on 3:49 pm
catherine, I didn’t get muslim bashing so much from bernarda’s comment as I did islam bashing, and bashing religion, any religion, is part of what we’re about.
In the same way that most xian denominations tend to exalt Caucasian/Western European/US culture, society, and identity above all others, islam tends to do the same with Arabic. Both religions (abrahamic like their ancestor judaism, after all) first tear the individual human being down (as Star has said before, “you’re bad, bad, sooo baaaad”) before rebuilding him/her in their particular form of sheeperson (”only by believing what we tell you and following our orders will you ever make up for being so baaad”).
That said, my main problem with all religion is the ready-made control structure it provides for power-hungry True Believers (TM) and the handy justification it provides for extreme violence against fellow humans. Sean recognized these among many other factors in stimulating islamic terrorism, but he certainly didn’t cut the religion of islam itself any slack.
6 August 2007, on 3:54 pm
catherine, I didn’t get muslim bashing so much from bernarda’s comment as I did islam bashing, and bashing religion, any religion, is part of what we’re about.
ditto. While Sean was for civil rights for muslims and people everywhere despite their sky daddy beliefs, he did his fair share of bashing the beliefs of Islam.
Eve summed it up well: “my main problem with all religion is the ready-made control structure it provides for power-hungry True Believers ™ and the handy justification it provides for extreme violence against fellow humans. Sean recognized these among many other factors in stimulating islamic terrorism, but he certainly didn’t cut the religion of islam itself any slack.”
6 August 2007, on 4:09 pm
Muslims give themselves enough of a bad name that we don’t need to bash them anyway.
6 August 2007, on 7:13 pm
Catherine, before the British started their divide and rule game, the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb, a Muslim fanatic, abandoned the tolerant policies of his predecessors, causing many Hindu maharajahs to rise up against him.
6 August 2007, on 8:48 pm
Kill’em all and let decomposition sort’em out. And that goes for the xians, too.
6 August 2007, on 9:30 pm
Why do we bother communicated with them? That’s right, the Christians! They want to convert everybody just like Muslims. Do you see how they live? If we give them modern technology, we with have “The Crusade” again! I just want to be left alone from these nut cases but these idiots want to push X faith on to me. What makes this worse is that Christians and Muslims cannot see this. They only support anything that puts their belief in a positive life.
7 August 2007, on 6:16 am
catherine, the whole point of my post was about religion, particularly the ideology of islam coming from its arabic origins and its impact on conquered peoples whose cultures were suppressed by it.
Those people are also now muslims. Naipaul and the other writers maintain that these people, like in Pakistan, have suffered from this ideological subjugation. Naipaul is not bashing them.
Hinduism is also bad. Hindus participated in massacres at the Partition as well, as I indicated that these massacres were based on religion on the two sides.
You might accuse me of misandry for islam is basically a male religion. The evil of islam was created by males, totally ignorant males at that.
I know quite of few men and women of muslim heritage. I have some as friends, but one thing I have learned is to never trust a male muslim who actively believes and goes to the mosque to pray. They are misogynists, male supremacists.
There are many lapsed muslims and there is rarely a problem there.
7 August 2007, on 5:13 pm
bernarda: Hinduism is also bad.
When I was researching my post on the Hindu goddess Kali and her pre-Hindu prototypes, I came across one website in particular dedicated to the discussion of early Indian language, literature, and belief systems. It was a fascinating place to lurk, because apparently there is a movement in the country to distinguish native/aboriginal/indigenous Indian culture from later extra-Indian “invasions” like Hindu Sanscritization.
I don’t know which side is more right than the other, but basically the nativists argue that India’s true original language and culture is Tamil, and that Sanscrit and its attendant religion of Hinduism with such abusive concepts as caste is an intrusive, aggressive invader whose proponents used it to try to erase/destroy Tamil culture. The debates and arguments often got very heated, more so on the nativists’ side, since they see and experience themselves as a long-oppressed minority (perhaps with reason; I don’t know enough, I’m afraid).
Tamil literature and mythology is fascinating and while some supporters claimed rather too enthusiastically for my taste that it is the first language ever developed by human beings, overall I was glad to see Indians seriously grappling with Hinduism’s hitherto-largely-unchallenged claims, including concepts like caste and such.