Anisha Thomas:
CLASS OF 1989
Walterboro High SchoolClass of 1989
Walterboro, SC
Anisha's Story
Anisha is from Walterboro, South Carolina. She is single. Her schools include Walterboro High School. She later attended EFMM Universe. She works(ed) at Works at JL for change.
Anisha's interests include WHPK-FM, Beer, Camping, Playing With Isaac, Whatever Brian Likes, Whatever Wade likes. Music she likes includes Straight Shooter sc., Solid Gone, Freehand The Band. Books she likes include The Giving Tree, No Kingdom Come, Goodnight Moon. Movies she likes include Goa Hippy Tribe, Night At The Museum, After Earth. TV shows she likes include Discovery, Speak Atheist, How It's Made.
One of Anisha's favorite quotes is:""Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - attributed to Seneca the Younger
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
"If you judge a fish on it's ability to climb trees,it will live it's whole life thinking it's stupid".....Albert Einstein
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." -- Albert Einstein
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". -Aristotle
"The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition." -Albert Einstein
Excerpts from "God Delusion"
by Richard Dawkins ·
I am not attacking
the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any
other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall
define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman,
supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and
created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book
will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of
sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only
as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.
Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the
universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God,
in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show,
a pernicious delusion.
Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private
revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many
versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from
primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the
Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism
and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our
culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age
text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human
religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally,
patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence
the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those
countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male
delegates.
GORE VIDAL
The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor
of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single
fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual
restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own
superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen
desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine,
Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly
monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which
looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several
centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the
uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its
exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran
or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to
spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword,
wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine
raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the
Crusaders, and later by the conquistadores and other European
invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment. For most
of my purposes, all three Abrahamic religions can be treated as
indistinguishable. For my purposes the differences
matter less than the similarities. And I shall not be concerned
at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism.
Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.
Such unpleasant episodes in Abraham's story are mere
peccadilloes compared with the infamous tale of the sacrificing of
his son Isaac (Muslim scripture tells the same story about
Abraham's other son, Ishmael). God ordered Abraham to make a
burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put
firewood upon it, and trussed Isaac up on top of the wood. His
murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel
dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of
plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing
his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a
child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the
standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example
simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power
relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence:
'I was only obey...Expand for more
ing orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great
foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven
Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or
without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil
people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it
takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something
similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when
they do it from religious conviction.'
On 18 August 2001, Dr Younis Shaikh, a
medical doctor and lecturer, was sentenced to death for blasphemy.
His particular crime was to tell students that the prophet
Muhammad was not a Muslim before he invented the religion at
the age of forty. Eleven of his students reported him to the
authorities for this 'offence'. The blasphemy law in Pakistan is
more usually invoked against Christians, such as Augustine Ashiq
'Kingri' Masih, who was sentenced to death in Faisalabad in 2000.
Masih, as a Christian, was not allowed to marry his sweetheart
because she was a Muslim and - incredibly - Pakistani (and
Islamic) law does not allow a Muslim woman to marry a non-
Muslim man. So he tried to convert to Islam and was then accused
of doing so for base motives. It is not clear from the report I have
read whether this in itself was the capital crime, or whether it was
something he is alleged to have said about the prophet's own
morals. Either way, it certainly was not the kind of offence that
would warrant a death sentence in any country whose laws are free
of religious bigotry.
In 2006 in Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death
for converting to Christianity. Did he kill anyone, hurt anybody,
steal anything, damage anything? No. All he did was change his
mind. Internally and privately, he changed his mind. He entertained
certain thoughts which were not to the liking of the ruling party of
his country. And this, remember, is not the Afghanistan of the
Taliban but the 'liberated' Afghanistan of Hamid Karzai, set up by
the American-led coalition. Mr Rahman finally escaped execution,
but only on a plea of insanity, and only after intense international
pressure. He has now sought asylum in Italy, to avoid being
murdered by zealots eager to do their Islamic duty. It is still an
article of the constitution of 'liberated' Afghanistan that the penalty
for apostasy is death. Apostasy, remember, doesn't mean actual
harm to persons or property. It is pure thoughtcrime, to use George
Orwell's 1984 terminology, and the official punishment for it under
Islamic law is death. On 3 September 1992, to take one example
where it was actually carried out, Sadiq Abdul Karim Malallah was
publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia after being lawfully convicted of
apostasy and blasphemy.
Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned
faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for
what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith,
the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none,
is obliged, by ingrained custom, to 'respect' it without question;
respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like
the destruction of the WorldSookhdeo goes on to explain how Islamic scholars, in order to
cope with the many contradictions that they found in the Qur'an,
developed the principle of abrogation, whereby later texts trump
earlier ones. Unfortunately, the peaceable passages in the Qur'an
are mostly early, dating from Muhammad's time in Mecca. The
more belligerent verses tend to date from later, after his flight to
Medina. The result is that
the mantra 'Islam is peace' is almost 1,400 years out of
date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace
and nothing but peace . . . For today's radical Muslims -
just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical
Islam - it would be truer to say 'Islam is war'. One of the
most radical Islamic groups in Britain, al-Ghurabaa,
stated in the wake of the two London bombings, 'Any
Muslim that denies that terror is a part of Islam is kafir.'
A kafir is an unbeliever (i.e. a non-Muslim), a term of
gross insult.. .
Could it be that the young men who committed suicide
were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain,
nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of
their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of
the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream
interpretation of Islam? Trade Center, or the London or
Madrid bombings. Then there is a great chorus of disownings, as
clerics and 'community leaders' (who elected them, by the way?)
line up to explain that this extremism is a perversion of the 'true'
faith. But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking
objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to
pervert?
Suicide bombers do what they do because they really
believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty
to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his
service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise. And they were
taught that lesson not necessarily by extremist fanatics but by
decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors, who lined them up
in their madrasas, sitting in rows, rhythmically nodding their
innocent little heads up and down while they learned every word
of the holy book like demented parrots. Faith can be very very
dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind
of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. It is to childhood itself,
and the violation of childhood by religion, that we turn in the
next chapter.
"If you judge a fish on it's ability to climb trees,it will live it's whole life thinking it's stupid".....Albert Einstein.".
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