Grombles

In 1954, the USSR requested to join NATO. The US President at the time, Dwight D Eisenhower, rejected their application, believing that their intention was to weaken it from the inside. How different would the world be today if they had been allowed to join? Russia wouldn't have been permitted by the NATO alliance to invade its neighbour for a start... NATO is a treaty. It's an agreement which binds signatories to 14 articles . These are (summarised): Try to settle differences peacefully Be proactive at promoting peace Develop individual and collective defence capabilities Consult with each other over claimed border disputes An attack on one is an attack on all. All members will defend any member under attack Defines where and what is defined as an attack Abide by UN charter Not currently doing anything that conflicts with these articles Form a council to manage membership Be able to unanimously invite other nations to join Process of membership ratification managed by USA Revi...

In a recent interview, loudmouth Trump made headlines again by calling for the USA to "kill their families" in reference to Islamic terrorists. Whilst we're all naturally incensed by senseless horrors on our streets, this is clearly evil thinking. Such vile threats would have been worthy of the likes of Pol Pot and Hitler, not a candidate to become the 'leader of the land of the free'. But it's not just evil, it also demonstrates appallingly bad judgement if he believes that killing jihadist loved ones will stop them committing acts of revenge or prevent more enraged people from joining their ranks. But whether we agree with Trump or not, the dreadful reality is that killing their families is precisely what we are doing by bombing their towns and homes. And the problem is that it makes terror attacks more likely, not less. By destroying whatever stability used to exist in the middle east, we've created dozens of desperate crazed jihadist groups all eager...

I've got the answer to the UK's dilemma of needing to provide sanctuary for a sensible number of refugees without opening the floodgates:- Prioritise atheists who can prove their indifference to deities by drawing cartoons, eating bacon sandwiches or simply stating 'there is no god'. Sod respect for antiquated tribal beliefs. Beliefs in fantasies are what lie at the heart of the tragic mess these poor people find themselves in. Providing refuge from the hells they are trying to leave means not letting them bring with them the potential for turning their new home into the same hell they left behind. Why let them in if they don't renounce the key factor that created divisions in their own societies. And as far as making our borders safer from terrorist infiltration is concerned, can you see a budding jihadist willingly risking the wrath of his deity when confronted with a test of faith? Keeping your fingers crossed when you told a lie used to be a get-out for school...

We all know that Islamic revolutionaries are dangerous people. Clearly there's plenty of evidence to support this. [As an aside, I rather enjoyed "What do you call an Islamic revolution in Texas? A Yihad!"]. But now we're completely confused in the West as to which particular sect of Islam we're meant to fear most. Well we all hate Isis. We can all agree on that. But they're Sunnis. And Sunnis are funded by Saudis, with whom we are chums (but only while they sell us oil and buy our weapons or London property). And we mistrust the Shia who are funded by Iran and who attacked Iraq before we 'rescued it from Saddam' and where we're now relying on the Iraqi army, ironically now unofficially supported by Iran, to prevent Baghdad from falling into the hands of Isis. Meanwhile Syria, governed(ish) by an Alawite president, is fighting both Sunnis and Shias but probably favouring Iran for help rather than the West's chum, Saudi - who are helping Syrian ...

I've been stunned in the past weeks about the ubiquity of misunderstanding in the press and even amongst friends about what is a Jew and what is a Muslim (or a Christian come to that). It's very simple. Jews are a race, Muslims (and Christians) aren't. You can't choose to be a Jew (or not to be one). How many fewer might have been selected to be murdered in the Holocaust if the Nazis had excluded anyone who simply didn't want to be a Jew or were prepared to prove they didn't believe in Judaism. Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all religions which you are at liberty, assuming you haven't been permanently brainwashed by your parents, community and teachers, to follow or not as your conscience or fear of reprisal demands. This is why comparing antisemitism with islamophobia is like comparing apples with pears. Actually it's not even that close since they are patently both fruit. Jews can only be Jews if their mothers were Jews. Curiously Jewish fathers...

There are around 1,500,000,000 muslims, 1,000,000,000 christians, just 14,000,000 jews (it surprises most people how few) plus assorted other faiths on our planet. What they all have in common is an allegiance to outdated thinking and a nervousness about waking up and moving on. A tiny few are so nervous, they believe they are sanctioned by a mystical deity to kill people who suggest their books are out of date and should be considered historical curios rather than offering some sort of enlightenment. All sentient species develop faith. They need constructs to explain the world they experience and to establish safe, reliable strategies to deal with them. A chicken knows not to go into water because it can't swim and will therefore drown. It doesn't know why it can't swim, nor what drowning is. It just has faith that water is bad news. Likewise humans who live in far more complex environments and social groups have developed a vast range of constructs to ensure that they s...

I have been battling with a dilemma. The concept of god is artificial. I am not going to argue the case for atheism here. It's overwhelmingly argued in thousands of books and blogs, and if you were still in any doubt, just listen to a few creationists or watch any religious service for acres of mumbo-jumbo helping to make the case for a 'wake-up' call. My dilemma is about the idea of perpetuating the brainwashing of populations who haven't woken up, or been allowed to, in order to encourage changes of behaviour to improve the world. In other words, if populations are already led by balmy divine instructions, why not harness its control of their minds to do good (whilst also trying to reach the same muddled brains to encourage a rational view of how the world really works). At their hearts, religions are sets of rules which: Justify, protect and propagate their own sources of power (eg 'There is only one god', 'You will not worship any other' etc). ...

and if you ever thought about having a tattoo...brave girl!

Religions create divides - Palestine, Northern Ireland, Syria, Egypt.... Children are collateral damage when religions fight. You can't stop religious hatred by killing religious fighters. The men wielding the AK47s are too far gone. Too indoctrinated. They hate their enemies too much to be persuaded that the brand of omnipotent supercomputer in the sky they're killing and dying for is an outdated idea. We can't rid these countries of deeply entrenched delusions by feeding them atheist arguments, no matter how eloquently presented. The only chance we have to begin to cure their collective delusional anger is to open the minds of their children. Perhaps today, amongst all the upheavals and suffering going on in and around religious war-zones, we uniquely have a chance to do just that. The minds of millions of refugee children who have mercifully escaped the evils of their homelands now have a chance to be opened - out of the reach of their religious leaders at home. But at...

We (the UK and US) are about to start killing Syrians just like we killed Libyans, Iraqis and Afghans in the name of freedom and democracy... Only to end up with a bigger mess of warring tribes than we started with. We need to confront the reason they are killing each other, not perpetuate the hatred. Why do our press and politicians instantly jump to the conclusion that the only people who were likely to have used chemical weapons were the Syrian army? I believe it's because we still harbour the idea that if 'the people' rise up against their leaders, then we're witnessing democracy in action - and democracy equals freedom of choice... which we support. BUT when 'the people' are religious fundamentalists determined to enforce their brand of delusional beliefs and customs on their neighbourhood, should we really be supporting them? What's the difference between uprisings of these people in our own countries (London 7/7, 9/11, Boston Marathon etc), and u...

Who in their right mind could possibly have believed that democracy stood a chance of working in a country whose population elects religious leaders to improve their economic fortunes and protect the interests of minorities? Two years ago, some 52% of Egypt's electorate voted for the Muslim Brotherhood... There's a clue in the name. What in the world possessed the educated world, let alone poor, brainwashed, uneducated Egyptians, to expect that a bunch of beardies muttering incantations while banging their heads on little carpets stood the slightest chance of creating jobs let alone hospitals, education, roads, communication infra-structures, fair justice, and robust transparent finance systems. All these jibbering deluded fools care about are drumming the words written in ancient books into the malleable and frightened minds of children and their parents who have no intellectual weapons to use in defence. Words that teach nothing about IT, food production, medicine, media,...

Religions are businesses: They all have brands and logos. They sell products and use incentives (forgiveness, blessings, afterlife, comfort etc). Most have high street outlets. The Church of England has 16,000 branches in the UK. They employ sales and marketing professionals to sell their brands (we call them priests). They issue product manuals (bible, koran etc). They provide aftersales support (worship, confessionals...). They use recruitment campaigns (christmas, festivals, brainwashing in schools...). Their officials have uniforms. Their founders are worshipped. But there are also a number of differences between religions and businesses: Their license to trade is often protected by laws such as blasphemy. They are permitted to brainwash children (no broadcast watershed for religious messages). They are even allowed to take control of children's entire education through branded faith schools. There is no equivalent to Trade Descriptions or checks on claim...

If someone cut off part of your child's body, without anaesthetic, because they heard voices that told them to do it, there would be an international outcry. It would make front page news in free media throughout the world. If caught, the perpetrators would be strung up from lampposts for extreme child abuse or at the very least locked away for the rest of their sorry lives - and in solitary confinement for fear of fellow inmates finishing the job that the baying lynch mobs would have obliged the public on the outside. Evil, evil people use knives on children. Period. But if the people who commit this horror are the child's own parents, the whole world turns a blind eye because "it's their tradition". We can't interfere with a parent's right to butcher their children if bearded nutters put the instruction in so called sacred books. Collective and total madness in the name of preserving balmy cultural heritage. It is estimated that over 20,000 young gir...

Regular readers will be under no allusions that I don't favour putting blind faith in stories percolating through the minds of ancient bearded-ones. They brainwashed children and terrified poorly educated adults who were never encouraged to ask:- 'is this likely?' If you're reading this, you're probably already an atheist - otherwise why search for writings about it when atheism simply means 'no faith in fairy-tales'. It's a non-subject... unless you happen to be imprisoned in some barking mad regime like Saudi for failing to chant some meaningless bollocks from a holy book with enough conviction to fool the faith police. What sort of god has to  force people into believing 'his word' and then punishes them if they question it? So much for omnipotent and merciful.   And if faith makes so much sense, why issue laws to prevent people from worshipping someone else's nonsense? Surely if your brand of faith is right and it works for you, it is a n...

Have you noticed that the poorer a country, the more likely it is to be fanatical about religion (except the USA of course - but I bet you can correlate religiosity against educational achievement and therefore poverty there too). The government of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries and inevitably therefore a religious stronghold, has arrested 3 atheist bloggers from a list of 84 provided to them by a bunch of islamic 'informers'. Quite apart from the legitimacy of these whistle-blowers to determine who should be arrested and who not, even if you believe in supercomputers in the sky watching and controlling every Higgs Boson (etc) in the universe rather than trusting there is a scientific answer for everything (whether we yet comprehend it or not), you have to agree that freedom of thought beats brainwashing - especially when imposed by the state. If there really is a deity, then assuming it/he/she (!) is simply not a control-freak having Olympian fun at o...

I have a son who went to a well known preparatory school (7-13) in Surrey. He came home one day clutching a leaflet for fun activity holidays that the school promoted every summer. The Titus Trust operate several camps around the UK where they organise fun outdoor activities for youngsters. Something caught my eye in the leaflet hidden in a paragraph in one of the sections describing the holidays. They used the word Christian. It was the only place in the whole leaflet that the word was used. My suspicions raised, I hunted around the leaflet for more clues and found the imprint which said something like 'A Titus Trust Charity' (the name of the camps was on the title of the leaflet). I dug deeper and found some disturbing evidence of who was behind these 'fun' camps. This is what I wrote at the time to the headmaster: Dear Headmaster XXXX came home the other day extremely excited about an outward bound camp next summer that he and his friends had been told about by a r...

Here we go again. Killing Mali tribesmen to prevent them creating safe-havens for Al Qaeda - all dressed up as defending villagers from the imposition of Sharia law - as if we cared. Easy to get involved, difficult to withdraw - and leaving what? Countless fathers and brothers grateful to you for killing their sons and relatives? Genius chum-making tactics. Let's get rid of a hornets' nest by kicking it. They'll be ever-so grateful - especially the bit where we say "Right, we've got rid of all the baddies, so we're off. Now here's a piece of paper for something called voting which means you'll get them back shortly when you can't find a bunch of blokes prepared to abandon their tribal demands and work out how to build a country not driven by corruption, greed and ignorance. Cheerio then, and thanks for the oil." So assuming it is a good idea to stop fanatics becoming jihadists, but that shooting them is not such a good idea, what should we be...

Bad Guy Terrorist Insurgent Fundamentalist Guerrilla Bandit Assassin Saboteur Fanatic Zealot Sectarian  Radical Anarchist Militant or Good Guy ? Rebel Freedom Fighter Resistance Partisan Revolutionary Same chap, different country, different label. Someone's hero is someone else's evil-doer. And how easily we allow our fellow countrymen (media and politicians) tell us which one's we support and which ones we need to kill. But how immensely complicated the truth really is, and how dreadful to think that we are all so easily duped to believe what we're told. Remember WMDs? Are we all too lazy in this day and age of global connectivity to really find out WHY these chaps feel compelled to put their own lives at risk? And is killing them breeding more friends or more foes? Is there a better way of defusing murderous sectarian tension without escalating it and driving it deeper under ground? Can you really kill ideas and hate? ...