Posts by jamesmahon

30

Britain's Sharia Courts Look Strangely Familiar

by Sea Breeze in

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up to 85 of these sharia law courts operate in britain.

creepy!.

jamesmahon

Loveunihateexams

what ‘worst excesses’ of Islam are western governments not clamping down on exactly? I have no idea what you are on about.

30

Britain's Sharia Courts Look Strangely Familiar

by Sea Breeze in

.

up to 85 of these sharia law courts operate in britain.

creepy!.

So show me one piece of evidence Simon. You say there is plenty. So show me even one piece of sociological, ethnographic or even anthropological research that supports your statement. Of course given this is what always happens there should be a multitude of such research. You mention counties that were Islamic for centuries and in each case it was revolution of corrupt governments that brought zealots to power. I would argue that if a white right wing uprising happened in this country and brought back stoning of homosexuals and removal of ‘the other’ it would gain pretty rapid support from the thug class.

You do spout some pretty horrible bile. I despise Islam as much as I do all religions. I don’t despise the people though. I would never clump every Muslim, catholic or even JW together though as one evil mass.

What would you advocate? Banning Islam? Deporting any Muslim from the UK? Rounding them up and putting them in camps? You seem to have so much anger for something that does not affect you at all.

I guess you get just as furious about the things that do affect you. Like schools having to scrap the arts and languages because they do not have enough money? About spending at least £20 bn on nuclear weapons we will never use? About how if we allow massive inheritance of wealth and power we by default allow inheritance of poverty and powerlessness? How we have moved so far to look to protect the individual rights but failed to educate on collective responsibility? That people let their dogs shit on pavements and playgrounds? That bankers still get to play roulette with the economy where the wheel they play on means if they win they win and if they lose we lose? But you keep having a go at Muslims. I guarantee if there was not a single Muslim on the planet your life would not be in any measurable way better.

30

Britain's Sharia Courts Look Strangely Familiar

by Sea Breeze in

.

up to 85 of these sharia law courts operate in britain.

creepy!.

jamesmahon

Simon

Did you bother reading the article about the Muslim Community Patrols? It is 30 volunteers who have been trained by off-duty policemen who were concerned about violence against muslims in New York. I don't approve of vigilantism but they are not like the religious police in Iran which you are clearly trying to infer.

Your last comment is utter crap as well. 'Starts with an enclave and spreads from there'. Jesus. You want to make fear lingering statements like that show me the evidence. Show me the evidence on how Iran and Saudi Arabia were liberal, prosperous, law abiding (whatever that means? Whose laws?) countries that became islamic nightmare states because of spreading enclaves?

You know I came back here thinking there used to be some nice folk on here (although that all went South six or seven years ago which is why I left then). Maybe there still are. All I can see though is a majority of bitter, angry people who having emptied their spleen (rightly) on the watchtower cannot let that anger go and so vent it elsewhere about other groups of people. If your life is shit or great it has nothing to do with muslims or immigrants or the EU or me.

Go out, make some new friends, be kind to people you don't like and extra kind to those you do. Stop putting people in boxes and start seeing them as individuals. Show no respect to ideas but respect individuals. You will feel better for it. And this board will be a better place for it as well. If you don't want to I am sure there are some Reddit boards that will happily act as an echo chamber for you and you can spout off with other people who feel no better for the spouting.

78

Pacifism is Morally Indefensible

by cofty in

i have been surprised recently to see so much support by ex-jws for the watchtower's refusal to fight and kill.

in my opinion it is a vice masquerading as a virtue.

of course war should always be a last resort but there are occasions that it has to be done.

jamesmahon

What is morally inexcusable is failing to take a stand against what your own conscience tells you is wrong. How you choose to take that stand - be it enlisting to physically fight or with passive resistance - is merely then a question of what will prove to be most effective for you to try to stop what you see as wrong. I have always thought I would have fought in the first and second wars but in no others. On reflection that would probably be the case still, but I am left with a couple of doubts.

What exactly would I be fighting for in either war? It is clear I suppose what I am fighting against. A fascist regime (really in both wars). But the idea that Germany was a direct threat to my family in either war at the start is just revisionist. They had no war aims at the start of the 1st war. If they had got to Paris quickly in 1914 then the outcome would probably have been the same as the Franco Prussian war 50 years before. France pays some money, Germany takes a bit of land. That was there stated aim a few months in and pretty much the peace deal signed with Russia in 1917.

Now the second war. They did not want to fight the UK. Why did we fight? It was not to stop Hitler killing Jews and anyone who pretends that is the case needs to read their books a bit better. Rather it was about empire - as indeed it had been in the first war.

And here in lies the dilemma. The only two wars I can see that a pacifist response may have been morally indefensible is with the benefit of hindsight. At the time and probably for the people fighting them they were about defending the empire - a system that was as morally as reprehensible as the systems in the first and second wars we were fighting against. And who knows - if we had not have fought in the first war and Germany had a quick win over the French and Russians there may have been no Stalin and no Hitler and the world a very different place for the ensuing 100 years. We will never know what it would have looked like but we all want to believe it would have looked worse to justify the brave actions of our ancestors.

So I would say pacifism is always morally defensible if that is the action that an individual believes at the time is their own best response to a wrong that they perceive occurring. That it is sometimes (if not always) only after the event that we can look back and try to understand what the best course of action could or should have been. I would say in almost every war in history joining and fighting with the military on either side of the war was the morally indefensible choice at the time and with hindsight.

43

Freedom of speech?

by The Rebel in

attending my boys parents evening it was mentiond they were to study the " diary of anne frank".

( he is 10 years old) i pointed out to the teacher that having read the book, in my option the book was not written entirely by anne frank, and i would educate my boy on why i believe this to be so.. in my mind this was a totally reasonable responce by me, but it has resulted in the head-master of the school wanting to meet with me.

i think it wrong that an educational system will i suspect meet with me and presumably suggest my options on the " anne frank diary" constitute hate speech, as nothing could be further from the truth.. freedom of speech is never absolute, but at what point do you think it reasonable and justified?

jamesmahon

The Rebel

I don't really understand your point with all this. Your child comes home and says they are studying Anne Frank. This could open up a whole world of conversation with your child about oppression, the danger of nationalism, could it happen again and if so how could you stop it, "what would you do?" etc. etc. etc.

But no. What matters to you is how much Anne's father was involved in editing the story. So strange.

As an aside with a German partner and having been to Berlin recently I do think that the Germans were victims in this like everyone else. That the real issue was Nationalism in all its ugly glory. The belief that somehow you are special and better than other people by virtue of your birth. I fear that the lesson of where this ends up has been learned by the Germans and precious few else on the planet.

Anyway - hope your daughter feels enriched by her conversation with you about correctly attributing authorship to a diary of a child who had been too dead to publish it herself.

150

Evolution: The Deal Breaker

by Hadriel in

first off i do believe there are some evidences of evolution or i should probably say adaptation.

i do believe this exists in various forms.. however the deal breaker for me with evolution is the chick or egg problem.

there are tons of theories that get passed around as proof of evolution however these are usually examples much further down the evolutionary chain.. what i mean is let's start at the beginning!

jamesmahon

When abiogenesis is resolved creationists will only want to talk about cosmic origins.

Some people don't want to let go of the comfort blanket even when it is threadbare and full of mites.

150

Evolution: The Deal Breaker

by Hadriel in

first off i do believe there are some evidences of evolution or i should probably say adaptation.

i do believe this exists in various forms.. however the deal breaker for me with evolution is the chick or egg problem.

there are tons of theories that get passed around as proof of evolution however these are usually examples much further down the evolutionary chain.. what i mean is let's start at the beginning!

jamesmahon

The whole debate is predicated on the assumption that science has to prove how life started otherwise the only answer is god or intelligent life. Wrong. There is not a single reason to assume that our minds should ever be able to grasp how life starts or be able to design an experiment to show this. And sorry to revert to the age old argument, but if you struggle to think that simple life could just arise then why is it somehow easier to think a more complex being could have created it. We are back to who created the creator. The stock answer to this is 'but we were not created to understand how god was created'. Yet somehow this is meant to be more of an explanation than that we may not have a mind that has evolved to be able to understand how simple life emerged.

The reality is it makes jack all difference. We are here. The evidence all points to us evolving to get here. You want to find out how life started? Become a scientist. Can't do that? Read scientific literature. Cannot understand it or it is not giving an answer? Don't worry about it. Most of the life on this planet and probably in the universe does not waste a second thinking how their distant ancestor first formed. They are just experiencing what it is to be alive. I don't think my chihuahuas would give the smallest shit about any of this anymore then they spend the day worrying if the big chihuahua god in Mexico will be waiting for them when they die.

If we ever had an answer to how life started most of life would go "...". Some humans would just go 'oh, that is interesting' and then some would look for the next questions that would surely arise. The creationists amongst us would just try to find a place where god might still be needed in the whole shebang.

32

Recent Update - Service Report

by Da.Furious in

on oct. 22, eight brothers were released from prison in turkmenistan by presidential amnesty.

(see 2014 yearbook, p. 31) the ninth brother is still imprisoned, but it is hoped that he will be released shortly.

some were already in prison for three or more years and had been severely mistreated.

jamesmahon

Sad that 19 million people couldn't find anything better to do then sit in a room with no windows getting excited about cheap wine and dry bread being passed which they cannot even try. Still, keeps them off the streets I suppose.

4

So my children will meet my new partner.....

by jamesmahon in

so i post here every now and again just to keep folks up to date with where i am at.

i have thought about why i do.

i guess it is because i like reading what is happening in other people's lives.

jamesmahon

So I post here every now and again just to keep folks up to date with where I am at. I have thought about why I do. I guess it is because I like reading what is happening in other people's lives. Also because I know where I was and where I am now. I think there may be others in the same situation and it helped me to read about people going through the same and starting to come out the other side. It is also nice to post something that is good news.

On Wednesday my children will meet my new partner. She comes over from Germany. She has made no decision as to whether she will come over permanently as yet but my feelings at the moment are strong enough that she will that I think it is time for my children to meet her (I have known her 7 months)

She will only be introduced as a friend and I will sleep with the children while she stays. I went backwards and forwards as to when would be the right time - was it too early? My ex-wife certainly thought so but I knew I could wait until the children were fully grown and it would be too early for her. Classic case of I don't want you but I dont want you to have anyone else either.

In the end I thought I need to give my children as much time as possible to get used to her should she decide to stay. I also need to assess how my children react to her and her to them in as gentle a way as possible. I don't really have any concerns there. She is a children's social worker and loves children. Indeed when we first met I said my children will always come first and she looked at me like I was stupid to even suggest that they would not.

She has bought them a gift each. I am not sure about this. I know it will only be something small but I am a bit apprehensive how their mother will react. But on the other hand it would be normal if I had a friend staying that they would bring a small something for my children so they would think it nice but not unusual.

Anyway. I am sure it will turn out well. I feel I am starting to feel like myself again. Still a long way to go but getting there.

I had forgotten how much I liked me. Which is easy when you have years of someone telling you why they don't.

Finally - Cofty - yes I did get your message and I live south of the border again now. I will forgive myself for being a ignorant git as I have gone through a bit the past few months but it would be nice to meet up.

6

Just an update

by jamesmahon in

well i have not posted or come here for a while.

it is late but felt drawn here to leave a bit of an update.. i left my wife at the start of december.

i half met someone online but it just made me realise very quickly how much i want to be in a loving relationship not a toxic one and what a mess everything was.

jamesmahon

I am still in the village where I was Cofty. I had not realised how depressed I had gotten and locked myself away from people. I am coming out the other side now though and it would be good to meet up.