Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Conservatives and Free Speech

Welcome friends!

I had a little window into the conservative mindset the other day.  As a lark I looked at the blogger site names “liberal” and “liberalism” and I found to my surprise that there were blogs established under both names but they were both empty (and I’m talking about absolutely no content at all) and inactive since 2002 and 2004 respectively.  Seems Google doesn’t have a policy about releasing and recycling inactive site names so those particular site names are effectively out of circulation permanently.  That seemed a little weird.  Are there really no other liberals out there writing blogs?  Just joking.  No, clearly we have a couple of conservatives out there who are just trying to stifle the conversation as much as they can by taking certain site names out of circulation.  Just to be fair, I checked out the blogger site names “conservative” and “conservatism” and sure enough I found they were active blogs giving the conservative viewpoint.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that I imagine there are many people out there looking for blogs to read by manually typing in blogger site names, but I thought it did show a sort of overall mindset that I associate with conservatives, which is that the free exchange of ideas is a horrible idea that can only confuse people and must be prevented whenever possible and by whatever means available.  

Now that I think about it, I seem to see this type of thing whenever I encounter conservative ideologues in action... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Friday, December 3, 2010

The Problem of Islam

Welcome friends!
I guess I’ve been on a liberal kick the last few posts and have been neglecting the humanist side, so maybe this time we can talk a little bit about the problem of Islam.  Oh, don’t get me wrong now.  I’m no expert on theology, but as a liberal humanist atheist, I personally doubt there’s anything wrong with Islam that isn’t equally wrong with any of the other religions that have come out of the Middle East.  So I suppose I should really be talking about the problem of Middle Eastern religions in general.  It’s just that Islam seems to have all the typical problems of these religions in spades so I think it’s reasonable to take it up as a sort of special example.  (It may well be that religions from other regions of the world are just as prone to these problems as religions from the Middle East but I’m less familiar with them so I’d like to just set them aside for now.  In the following if I speak about religion in the abstract I mean the major world religions that have originated in the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.) ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!