Ideas, like stones

Because a rational, free man can not initiate the use of force against anybody, I throw no stones. The only tools I have at my disposal are ideas and the power of persuasion. If I can not persuade the religionist to question his faith, I can not free him from his irrational, voluntary servitude. Fortunately, my happiness does not require his acceptance of my ideas. I require no following.

I do wish these people [particularly the Muslim extremist variety] felt the same way about the use of force, however.

Fundamentalist stone-throwers consider ideas like mine a threat, not only to the existence of their ideas, but as a threat to their existence. They are so thoroughly beaten by their book, they cannot see the possibility that a man who does not believe their stories can be moral. They never actually evaluate their code of ethics, altruism, because it was handed to them by God, and they do not recognize their right to question the ancient God. They pronounce their love for everyone all the time and publicly, even as they deny some members of the community their unalienable rights. They claim to be the lovers of humanity, but they refuse to accept the unleashed mind of a man. They fail to understand that a man who does not own his thinking is not a man, but rather, a slave. There is no free thinking in their world. There is no freedom.

These people [who are forbidden by their God to judge] have been known to judge non-believers to death. Through most of human history the men who dared to question their dogma were stoned, tortured, imprisoned, forced to change their thinking [or at least their public speech]. The magnificent minds of men like Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, and Madison would have been splattered on the unpaved, filthy street of pre-capitalist America by righteous stone-throwers had they been born even a century earlier. Stone-throwers ignore history, failing to see that when Christianity ruled the Western world [from the fall of Rome, AD 500, to the Renaissance, AD 1500,] Europe suffered through a thousand years of stagnation, filth, and brutality. They see no parallel between the pre-Renaissance Christian world and the ambitions of fundamentalist Muslims today.

How many great minds were wasted by Christian stone-throwers, Inquisitors, and witch burners before the Bill of Rights? How many minds are currently being wasted in the Muslim world in the name of Allah?

Fundamentalists of any faith don’t believe in the evolution of man’s body nor his thinking. They are people Ayn Rand characterized as people who “want their cake and eat it too.” They are the people who embrace science when it makes the cell phone, the Internet, and life-saving medicine possible, but deny it when it proves our Earth is over 4 billion years old and that humans are the best product of over three billion years of evolution of life on Earth. How is it that they can be so rational when it comes to planning financial security for their retirement and so irrational when it comes to acknowledging the validity of a theory that has survived over a century and a half of skeptical, scientific scrutiny? Who are these curious humans who wait on line for twelve hours to be the first to own the new i-phone, but drop out of view entirely when the journal Nature reports the findings of the amazing Human Genome Project?

Who are these dropouts who honestly believe that people who lived millennia ago had all the answers, that the Bible [or the Koran] is the only book? Fundamentalists, so beaten by their book they deny human growth through experimentation, trial and error, free inquiry. Who are these 21st Century humans who believe in devils and angels, heavens and hells, like our ancient, illiterate, ancestors who could know no better? They are people who hate the rational if it denies them their wish to live forever; people who worship nothing, since nothing they worship exists; people who hate the mind and human science. They declare their Book of Hearsay and mystic revelation truth: non-believers wrong and immoral. Throw a stone! Kill the infidels!

Fundamentalist dropouts weed this Garden of Eden, Earth, ripping out anything that makes them uncomfortable or asks them to question ancient, sacred doctrine. The fact that so many of them live as free people in the most rational society that ever was, is the oxymoron of the millennium!