Last week was my birthday. I had some people over for a party at my house and the topic of Islamicize Me came up. Of course Islamicize Me is the mockumentary about Islam and the teachings of Muhammad produced by apologist David Wood. I recently wrote a post on this series and my thoughts on it so I won’t go over that again.
I do think that this series will be effective. The reason is, because of humor. It’s not nasty and vicious attacks that some cold blooded leftist or nasty conservative would make. It’s done in a laughable way. The first person to show up at my house gave me a pack of dates for a birthday present and said: “Make sure that you eat seven of them.” If you haven’t seen Day 7 of the series, this will make absolutely no sense.
When more people arrived, my friend told them about the series and they started watching a few episodes on smart phones. The guys seemed to like it and girls didn’t seem interested. One of the girls even said that it was funny but it was “guy humor”. While I’m not going to engage in these kind of tactics myself, I do feel that they’re being effective. It may not be super effective in getting people to leave the faith but it will easily turn off someone looking into Islam. If one hasn’t made a public commitment to Islam, they’ll probably be more open to it. If it was a serious lecture talking about weird things Muhammad did, I don’t think anyone would be convinced.
When I was in University, the New Atheist movement was huge. During that time, an engineering student that I knew started an atheist club on our campus. The books by the four horsemen of atheism were quite popular at that time. The four horsemen of atheism were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins and Dennett are boring and quite intellectually shallow when it comes to religion. Sam Harris is very smart on the subject but is quite dry to listen to.
Christopher Hitchens held the whole thing together. He had intellect and humor and that made him quite attractive to people. In fact, I would say that when his book God is not Great came out, he was the New Atheist movement. He was constantly doing debates and was always charming, witty, and humorous. In 2011 when he died, the New Atheist movement went with him because all that was left were academics who were stale and boring.
I can’t do any of the stuff that David Wood or Christopher Hitchens did. I’m simply not funny enough. I can debate well, expose errors, inconsistencies and double standards, but I simply lack the wit of Wood or Hitchens. Am I jealous of these two? I hate to admit it but yes. Humor has amazing advantages, even and especially outside the world of apologetics. I suppose that one can work on becoming more witty. Wood and Hitchens didn’t become like that overnight. Good for them for succeeding though. Their reach was much larger because of it.
I am not going to watch.
The only masculine things I like is probably baseball, especially pitching. And since I had an affinity for the CCCP, so I had to know basic military history and geopolitics to understand its history. Soviet history is certainly filled with misunderstanding and propaganda. There are so many unsubstantiated claims there.
“Super effective”. Since I am not going to watch it. I am immune to it. Since my ability is Levitate. It will be like an Earthquake (unless you an ability like Mold Breaker).
Did the video deal with chemotherapy? That is essentially poison, but used for therapeutically.
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I really don’t have wit or charisma. I really am jealous of the MSA president from 2016 because she has charisma, but she is genuinely compassionate, not someone who would “exploit” that (some translations of the verb in Phil 2:6). I really admire her. (I don’t know if she has wit.)
Hi Latias,
“Soviet history is certainly filled with misunderstanding and propaganda.”
There are certainly lies about the Soviet Union, but it was still pretty evil. I’m guessing that your ancestors never suffered under that regime? My ancestors lived in the Soviet Union in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. I have relatives alive today who lived through that nightmare and were persecuted only because they were ethnic Germans, even though they grew up speaking Russian. They(ancestors of several generations ago) lived far better lives under the Tsar. I’m not defending the Tsar but they were better than the nightmare that followed.
“Did the video deal with chemotherapy? That is essentially poison, but used for therapeutically.”
No, it dealt with this Hadith.
Narrated by Saud; the Messenger (Sallallaahu Alayhi Wasallam) said, “If Somebody takes seven ‘ajwa dates in the morning, neither magic nor poison will hurt him that day.” [Sahih Bukhari, Book #71, Hadith #664 (also 663, 672)]
David Wood scolded them for not eating seven Ajwa dates then he eats seven Ajwa dates, drinks poison to prove that the ajwa dates are effective as Muhammad said, then goes to the hospital.
Regarding wit and charisma, it can be used for wrong doings. I was actually going to post a video of some witty remarks of Christopher Hitchens instead but unfortunately he uses foul language in a lot of his videos. I know that kind of language is attractive in our culture but its not to me and I don’t want to have foul language on this website.
God Bless,
Allan
I truly appreciate the accomplishments of the Red Army in World War II. Many Russians celebrate Victory Day very fervently, at least more that what Christians celebrate All Saints Day or Easter.
I do know that most Russians regard Stalin was a great leader because he had matured the Soviet economy into a modern industrial power, that was capable producing the materiel to defeat Nazi Germany. I know about human nature: they would not express adulation towards the man if he really did kill tens of millions of his people in acts of deliberate state repression. Few people who had their relatives killed senselessly by the state apparatus would be able to ignore that and avoid holding a grudge against the state. Tens of millions of deaths cannot be concealed by propaganda or ignored in just a few generations. There were polls that asked Russians who was the greatest Russian, and Stalin placed highly. When western media that reports these polls, there comes people from the West who claim that Russians really don’t understand their history. Those people just want to foist Western historiography on them.
[And Stalin brought the CCCP out of barbarism.]
[Why do Westerns say this, and not Russians themselves? I am in such chagrin because of that.]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4639910/Russians-rank-Stalin-outstanding-person.html
Why doesn’t he trust the Russians whose family lived under Stalin and in the USSR to assess their own history? That person is assuming that the strongly anti-Soviet history he has been exposed to is true, while it is more likely the product of propaganda designed to condition his consciousness for political purposes. No, it is more likely that the Russians have a better understanding of their history, than one who has been exposed to a version suited for propaganda purposes.
During the time when I was investigating Islam, I made the decision that I would decamp from this field after I was finished reading Yezhov Vs. Stalin: The Great Terror of 1937-1938 and the Conspiracy in the NKVD by Grover Furr. I felt that I had to know what happened during the Ezhovshchina, when 681,691 Soviet citizens were killed by the security apparatus of the Soviet state. I haven’t arrived at any definite conclusions, but the “terror” did not serve any rational end and actually subverted the state by indiscriminately targeting bureaucrats that had assumed positions of responsibility. I did not have the motivation to investigate further, and read the translations of the primary source materials that Furr had provided (on his website). I do commend Furr for doing original research, and providing that material that one has to address when one is dedicated to finding out what happened during that period.
I do not deny that the Soviet state, with Stalin’s conscious authorization, repressed many ethnic nationalities, especially during the war, where entire nationalities, such as Volga Germans, were deported. I am aware that there is repression, but the popular understanding of its scope has been exaggerated for political purposes. I am grateful that the Russians themselves do not fall for that hyperbole.
This seems to be a good conclusion
https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/the-lie-of-the-20-or-40-or-60-or-80-or-110-million-how-many-people-did-stalin-kill/
Hi Latias,
A lot of what you say about Stalin is true. I’m not saying that there wasn’t a lot of good, I’m just saying don’t ignore the bad. Industrialization and modernization isn’t always good. One could say many good things about Hitler in Germany or even the Meiji Emperor who brought Japan out of the Tokugawa Shogunate and into the modern world. Perhaps you do say good things about them but one cannot help but say that it came at a great cost.
Regarding polls, I don’t trust polls in Eastern Europe. I know some to be fraudulent. I’m very involved in the Eastern European community in my city. At my birthday party of which I speak above there was a girl from Belarus and another one from Ukraine. Of course there was the referendum that said 97% of Crimeans wanted to leave Ukraine for Russian. Every single Crimean I’ve talked to in my city said that they wanted to stay in Ukraine and not go to Russia. I don’t have proof of corruption but lets just say that I’m highly suspicious. Btw, I’ll be in Ukraine this time next month.
I never accused him of killing tens of millions of people. I’m always sceptical when people slap a number on the amount of deaths person X caused, or war X caused, or anything like that. It’s usually a number accepted uncritically soon after the events and never investigated. They used to say that the Auschwitz death toll was 4 million but it was eventually brought down to a million. It wasn’t brought down by investigations of people who ran the camps, but by revisionists who came during the 1980s and did investigations. Their conclusions were eventually accepted, though they were called Neo-Nazis the whole time they were investigating. Similar things happened at Majdanek where the death toll was once 1.5 million and is now less than 100,000. I’m sceptical of numbers.
Btw, the girl that I mentioned from Belarus gave me a good Russian book by Alexander Belyaev which includes a bunch of his stories including this one.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Последний_человек_из_Атлантиды
Also, if you’re into raw veganism, you can go to her website https://liveonalive.com
God Bless,
Allan