Tom Holland is censored

Channel 4 in the UK made a program called “Islam: The Untold Story”, and got so many complaints and threats that they have cancelled the screening of the show. This is a disgrace: the program is a serious, historical look at Islam, and the protesters are complaining because it takes an objective look at the evidence. We must be able to scrutinize Islam. If they’re going to hide their origins in obscurity, lies, and threats, then their beliefs should be dismissed.

I haven’t seen the program (and at this rate, I never will!), but I can make an informed guess at the content. It’s presented by Tom Holland, author of In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, an excellent and entirely sympathetic review of the history of Islam. He discusses the deep roots of Islam, formed in a culture that was shaped by its proximity to the frontier between the two great empires of the ancient world, Rome and Persia. He traces the origins of the Islamic holy book, and discovers that no, it didn’t simply appear in 7th century Arabia (although he does think there was a singular original text), but that Islamic thought coalesced long after the time of Mohammed…and he points out that there is no contemporary evidence at all of this person Mohammed — which sounds awfully familiar to those of us who are more exposed to the Jesus myth — and that there is a long history of self-deluding Islamic ‘scholarship’ that has a lot of similarity to the self-serving confabulations of Christians.

It doesn’t make negative judgments about Islam at all, unless, of course, you find reality offensive. I thought it was an excellent book to explain the complexities of Islamic history, and it made Islam more human and more interesting. It’s well worth reading.

It would also be worth watching, if Channel 4 would grow a spine. And if Channel 4 can’t manage it, I don’t know how we can ever hope to see it in the US.

Those of you living in the UK can watch it here. They block us Americans, I’m afraid.

Columbus Day is a terrible holiday

So this guy sails over to the New World, kills and enslaves some local populations, brings human beings back to Europe as curiosities, and also unleashes a whole series of nasty plagues that devastate the people of the American continents over the next several centuries…and we celebrate this event?

How about if we don’t?

Here’s a great suggestion: rededicate the day to exploration, and do it in the name of Neil Armstrong, someone who didn’t initiate a wave of genocide and was by all accounts a decent human being. It serves two purposes: it stops enshrining a rather nasty event, and starts celebrating a noble purpose. Easy. It’s such an obvious idea, I don’t know why we haven’t done it already.

Sign the petition.

Oh. It’s got 90 signatures so far. It needs 25,000. That’s why it hasn’t happened yet.

Text of Obama’s DNC speech

It was a real stem-winder. Finally, a liberal democrat uncloaked himself and spoke the truth.

Slamming his fists on the lectern until his hands began to bleed, Obama proceeded to lay out a “three-point plan of sin and lechery” for his second term. If reelected, the president said, he would begin by banning organized religion entirely—starting with Christianity—and burning all churches to the ground, preferably “with their wretched, Jesus-loving congregants still huddled inside like rats.”

As members of the audience violently tugged at their genitals and howled like sex-starved, atheist wolves, Obama stated that his administration would then seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created “federal stem-cell harvesting plants” with raw materials.

Oh. Wait. Sorry. Wrong text. That was the secret speech he gave at the Godless Cabal. Here’s the one he gave at the DNC. It was a bit more conciliatory, but it wasn’t bad.

I knew it!

You can’t have missed all the new Republican ‘science’ about secretions and juices and fluids that women produce when they are legitimately raped.

Unless you’ve been in a soundproof booth for the past three days (lucky you), you’ve probably heard a lot about this mysterious chemical that women can produce on demand to prevent them from becoming pregnant. For centuries, women have, according to anti-choicers, been able to ward off becoming impregnated by their rapists by emitting this substance during their rape. Despite being a miracle of science and biology, we’ve never known its name.

But now we do: it’s called magic vagina death venom, and you ladies can now buy a bottle to collect it.

I’ve long wondered why I often got dizzy and light-headed and confused around women, but now I understand — it’s because you’re all oozing poisons. I think it’s an excellent first step to be collecting these toxins from your bodies to minimize accidental exposure, but I’ve got to wonder…what are you all planning to do with those little bottles of concentrated vaginal evil?