Random thoughts on God and religion

Whilst walking my Labrador Retriever this morning I found myself ruminating on the arguments for God. I wondered if my dog is cognizant of God. I think not.

As I walked through the forest I considered the old question of whether a tree that falls in the forest when nobody is present makes a sound. The correct answer is no. Sound requires something to propagate waves in the air and something to receive those waves and interpret them. Both things are essential for the existence of a sound.

So, here is the thing.

If no humans existed, ever, would there still be an argument to be made for the existence of God? If yes, then who would make it? Does the existence of God depend entirely on the existence of humans?

The Abrahamic religions tell us that God created humans to worship and obey him.

We know that the Universe is about 10 billion years old. We know the Earth is about 4 billion years old. We know that modern humans first appeared about 100,000 years ago. We believe on the best available evidence that the modern human brain functionally capable of contemplating God first came into being about 50,000 years ago.

So, here is the thing.

What caused God to create a creature capable of knowing of his existence 50,000 year ago? Why not 100,000 years ago? Why not 100 million years ago? Pick any time frame. What was the burning need in God to have a creature capable of contemplating him and worshipping him and why did this need arise only 50,000 years ago?

Questions. Always with the questions.

And here is another one.

We know that Islam discourages the graven images of humans, and that Muslims get very angry at depictions of Mohammed. Yet I have never heard of Muslims creating a ruckus over depictions of Allah, of which there are many in the history of art in Western civilization.

Why is that? How is that Mohammed takes precedence over God? Why does he get to have urban riots in his name because of pictorial representations, but not God? I was in the Sistine Chapel a couple of months ago and noticed a few Muslims gazing up at Michaelangelo’s painting of the Almighty. It did not seem to ruffle them.

And yet another one.

This one I have to attribute to Melanie Phillips in The Spectator.

Why all the fuss over the Jewish settlements in the lands claimed by the Palestinians? Just take the necessary steps to inaugurate the state of Palestine and let the Jews who live there become citizens of the Palestinian state. After all, the Jewish state has a significant number of Arab citizens. If the settlers don’t like that prospect, and I am confident they would not, then they can move to Israel and free up the settlements for Arabs.

In short, it is a self-correcting problem and making into the kind of deal-breaking condition precedent to peace is a red herring.

We "celebrate" 9/11

Tomorrow, at Ryerson University, in the heart of Toronto, a weekend lecture series will kick off under the auspices of the Al-Fauz Institute of Islamic Thought. The AFIIT is a new player in the game of educating young Muslims in Toronto. The series is called, From Caliphs to Kings, the rise and fall of the Muslim ummah.

Its guest lecturer for this series is a British-based, Palestinian-born academic, Dr. Azzam Timimi, who, according to writer Terry Glavin, in The National Post, is an unabashed supporter of suicide bombing, Hamas, the Taliban, etc. Glavin spoke to the folks at AFIIT, who disavowed knowledge of Timimi's political views. You can read Glavin’s columns here and here.

I looked at the AFIIT site and it contained two videos of Dr. Timimi lecturing in Britain in September of last year. He didn’t engage in any of the pro-violence stuff that Glavin writes about, but he still had some disturbing messages – disturbing to this Canadian.

In the first video he gives a very white-washed view of how Islam spread from Arabia. I shouldn’t be too critical of this, since President Obama gave his misdirected Cairo speech and did very much same thing. However, Dr. Timimi is here to guide young Canadian Muslims, so I will critique him.

In reference to Palestine, for example, which he acknowledged was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, he talked about how Islam was welcomed by the people because it brought justice – something he claims they didn’t have.

I don’t know enough about that place and that time under the Byzantine Empire to be able to confirm or deny what Timimi says about the level of justice enjoyed by the non-Arabs, but after the Arabs arrived there are definitely some things they didn’t have. Wives no longer had husbands because they were slaughtered. Husbands who escaped no longer had wives or children because they were carted back to Arabia and sold as slaves. Property that was once owned by Christians and Jews (the majority of the residents) then became the property of the Muslims who supplanted them. Much of the early spread of Islam had to do with Arabs carrying out commerce in the old style – stealing and killing.

He talks about the spread of Islam to India in the most benign language. He left out of the description the fact that Muslim invaders butchered more than one million Hindus and Buddhists and razed thousands of temples.

He starts his lecture by referring to the word minority as being a bad thing. Later he admits that minorities are well protected by laws in liberal democracies.

He pretends that minorities under Islam were protected and treated with respect, and that there were no problems with them continuing worship in the religion of their choice. In fact, they were protected only in so far as they paid a protection tax to the Muslim rulers, and they weren’t permitted to build new houses of worship or openly worship outside of those houses. There were a number of other restrictions that made it clear that in Islamic societies non-Muslims were clearly second-class citizens. And people with no religion, or no religion recognized by Islam, did not have even that status.

I hope some less than bedazzled young Muslim attending these lectures this weekend asks the good doctor why it is that millions of Muslims can live on equal terms and openly practice their religion in predominately Christian-based, secular western societies, but there are very few Christians and even fewer Jews to be found in Muslim countries, and those numbers are rapidly declining?

Timimi made it quite clear in the second video that he does not see Muslims integrating with western secular societies. He claims Muslims are principally disliked because they are part of a global ummah and this transcends geographical and national boundaries. He depicts western society as if it has a Gestapo-complex regarding Muslims – referring to the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

His lecture must have been given before the trial of the airline plotters, because he claimed that everyone of them was innocent. In fact, three of them were convicted, but not for conspiracy to destroy airplanes over the Atlantic.

Finally, the dead giveaway for me was a reference he made to “celebrating” the anniversary of 9/11.

Only a jihad supporter would use a term like that.

The one really honest thing Timimi said was that there was a war going on with Islam. Not that there is a war going on with people who claim to be Islamic but are not really representative of Islam, as the U.S. and British governments try to pretend, but with Islam -- period, full-stop, no qualifications, no obfuscations.

Mohawk Warriors and the terrorists

The latest big flap in the ongoing aboriginal saga in Canada is the Mohawks getting upset that the Canadian Department of National Defense has just put together a new counterinsurgency manual for the army that mentions the Mohawk Warriors as potential terrorists. See here.

Hmmm. Now why would the defense department do a thing like that? Could it be because the Indians marched in the "support Hezbollah" rally last year in Toronto? Might it have something to do with them flying the Palestinian flag at the entrance to the Caledonia land site that they illegally invaded and continue to occupy? See here.

Could it have something to do with this statement by a Six Nations spokesperson?

"The Aims of Hezbollah are akin to the radical warriors. Hezbollah like Hamas does not recognize the state of Israel and would like the Jews to leave.", states Hazel Hill , spokesperson for Six Nations. "Our position has never changed. We the Title Holders as recalled by Wampum 44 of our constitution, the Kaianereh'ko:wa, retain jurisdiction over our land. As set out in the Haldimand Proclamation, the British promised to respect this. Canada's would-be colonizers pretend that land held in trust is "Crown" land. This is an old hoax which is enforced at gunpoint. The British Crown has no legal jurisdiction over our land or over us. We were here first. We never agreed to join Canada. So what are you colonists doing here? Go home. "

If you are going to identify with terrorist organizations, don't be surprised or outraged if the government starts planning counterterrorist measures to deal with you. In fact, they would be delinquent if they did not.