My Two Cents #103 - Islam

• Muslims in the US:  A recent Newsweek poll reveals a lot about attitudes and perceptions of Muslims in the US.  The different responses by age group are interesting.  My favorite question?  Do you think the FBI should or should not wiretap mosques to try to keep an eye out for radical preaching by Muslim clerics? 52% said yes.  And I entirely agree.
• Offending Muslims:  Anti-religionist atheist Christopher Hitchens has a nice post discussing why we should NOT be afraid of offending Muslims.  I agree.  Those who love Sharia can't really be believed as those interested in liberty or human rights.  And once you start creating blasphemy laws (or hate speech laws, which are the same thing), you seriously curtail people's rights. No one is above criticism or even mocking humor.  Nobody.

• Oswald Spengler - How I never saw Spengler before is a mystery, but his intelligent conservative/Christian analyses are fantastic reading.
• Koran not authored by Mohammed? Spengler asks the question, are we sure that Mohammed actually wrote the Koran?  "One reason that the Koran contains so much contradictory material (such that the odious Karen Armstrong can quote it as readily as the estimable Mr Spencer) might well be that it is a later compilation derived from disparate sources. Ibn Warraq, the scholar of Islam who wisely employs a pen name, has assembled the scholarly evidence to this effect in a single convenient volume."