Lay off the Muslims you bigots

I am going to cover two related topics in todays post.

1) The "Ground Zero Mosque"
Can they, yes. Should they, there is no reasonable argument against it.
Listen to some people and you will get the impression Osama Bin Laden is planning to personally build a Mosque on ground zero as some sort of monument to extremist stupidity, this is shear bullshit of a purer quality than found on cattle farms.
Firstly it is not at ground zero, it is two blocks away and neither site can be seen from the other.
Second the term Mosque is more than a little over inflammatory, a Muslim prayer facility is included, but so are a variety of secular facilities such as a swimming pool and a childrens play area. However there will be other religious facilities in the community centre, namely prayer areas for Jews and Christians, suddenly the building is a little less confrontational isnt it.
Thirdly America has a couple of points in its constitution about separation of church and state and rights to religious freedoms, so even if it was a Mosque denying it would require denying ALL religious buildings regardless of faith.
If they wanted (and owned the land) Muslims could build a statue of Bin Laden taking a dump on ground zero itself, it would be in very bad taste and create a backlash against all Muslims not just the crackpot extremists but there would be no legal reason to prevent it.


2)Burn the Koran day
Can they, yes. Should they, probably not but their call.
As far as I know this was actually cancelled, but I wrote most of this a couple of days ago so its still getting posted.
Much as religious freedoms in the constitution allow the rather offensive and extreme example I gave above they also protect the right of a 30 strong church in backwater Florida to burn other peoples holy books, so if they want to noone can stop them. That being said burning ANY book is incredibly tasteless, a symbol of destroying that which you disagree with, intolerance and censorship of ideas. All books have some value at least in terms of literature or history. But there is more to it than that, Muslims see the Koran in much the same way Christians see the Bible so everyone understands that all this will achieve is pissing off a bunch of Muslims. The fanatics will become more fanatic and a few borderline moderates may slip into fanaticism. All that the fundies are managing on both sides is spreading the illusion that all Muslims/Westerners are bigoted hate filled oxygen thieves hell bent on eradicating the opposite side. This is far from true and the majority of people on both sides are far more open minded and reasonable than the other side gives them credit for, despite the medias efforts to get a good story by making the other guy look evil.

The latest on these issues.

What's the harm?

A major argument put forward, mostly by politically correct and intellectually lazy people, in favour of superstitious beliefs religious or otherwise is to simply ask "what's the harm?" The harm is that sooner or later any delusional world view will influence a persons decisions and since the decision is made with an incomplete knowledge of reality the change will almost always be detrimental. This is really a very simple concept, the more informed a person is about a situation the better the odds their decision will be reasonable and without and unseen consequences. So in a far from comprehensive list here is a tiny selection of the harm caused by irrational beliefs.

A handful of homoeopathy related deaths, with links to the stories on each case.

Albinos killed (rarely humanely) for potion ingredients across Africa.

Endangered species around the world, sometimes the concoctions are actually harmful.
*apologies I lost a couple of links from this point due to accidentally using some character combinations that are involved in the scripts of this site and were causing problems, and I cant be bothered finding them again.

Several deaths from religious parents refusing medical care for their young children, and permanent disability (from the victims perspective)

The Catholic condom aids thing in Africa a Catholic article. This article shows why condoms are only having a limited effect (hint less than 5 condoms per year is not enough for sexually active people, the rest of the catholic case can be dismissed by pointing out condoms would need to increase peoples sexual partners more than ten times to spread aids as effectively as not using a condom.

A youtube video on all that MMR autism gibberish, also watch part 2 and check out his sources linked below the video.

Then lets not forget assorted terrorist attacks, mostly of a suicidal nature over the years, while not all are religious in nature every single one had a damaged view of reality. At the minute Muslim bombers are in fashion but a decade or so back it was (non suicide) Christians bickering in Ireland blowing stuff up, there was something in a Japanese subway many years ago too.... you get the picture.

Then there is suicide purely to hasten your own death such as the well publicised Heavens Gate incident.

Obviously these are a selection of more extreme examples but more minor issues are possible, if for example a child wants to become a doctor but rejects evolution they are unlikely to succeed because evolution is a vital part of the framework in understanding many illnesses. First if the childs dreams don't change they will be smashed, anything that reduces the number of doctors is bad. Or maybe you just hand over money to some sort of psychic(fraud), spiritualist(fake).

All that was a bit bleak so here's something to cheer everyone up.

The next time someone asks "what's the harm?" in believing a given falsehood, if you can think of any bad consequence answer them, if you can't eventually a believer will provide you with one.