REASON IN REVOLT
"The purpose of this website is to examine the world's religions
from a Logical Empiricist perspective."
An Appeal for Donations
This website is NOT a sequel to "How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie."
This website is NOT a sequel to "How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie."
It was not written to please the polite, sedate the offended, flatter the fashionable, or purchase admission into respectable stupidity. It is iconoclastic by design and uncompromising by necessity.
It is written from the standpoint of a Logical Empiricist, or Logical Positivist. I use the two terms interchangeably here. I know the technical differences. They are irrelevant to the task: to separate what can be known from what is merely preached, inherited, threatened, or repeated until repetition is mistaken for proof.
Author's Note
I am no enemy of Jews, Christians, or Muslims. On the contrary, I stand with the overwhelming majority of ordinary believers — people who did not write the doctrines they inherited and cannot verify the promises made in their name. My indictment is reserved for the clerical elite: the leadership and institutions that claim authority through revelation, police the boundaries of membership, promise salvation beyond all verification, and have too often marched ordinary people toward division, sacrifice, and slaughter.
Panini
Author.
PANINI
ISLAM AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
ISLAM and the Counter-Jihad Essays
Brown Before, Brown After
Part One: The Ledger
I. The Claim Under Audit
Every conversion is a transaction, and every transaction implies a claim. The claim made to the Indian convert — whether the salesman wore the robes of the Sufi or the cassock of the missionary — was the same claim in two languages: leave your ancestors and you will become our equal. The ummah knows no race. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Brotherhood, universal and immediate, in exchange for everything you were.
The Dinner at the Palace of the Open Table
Disagreement and Damnation, and the Three Guests Who Walked Into the Sunset Unanswered
A Reason in Revolt Essay — Version Six
The Invitation
I built a palace in imagination because no palace on earth is large enough for the argument I intended to host.
I sent invitations across three thousand years. They went to India and Greece, China and Africa, Alexandria and Athens, Benares and Nalanda, the forests of Europe, the deserts of Arabia, the old temples, the burned libraries, the erased villages, and the graves of those whose only crime was refusing to let another man close the case for them.
The Long Persecution of the Unbeliever
Christianity, Islam, Empire, and the Destruction of Non-Abrahamic Worlds
Here is the claim, and it will not be softened.
Over the last two thousand years, Christian and Islamic empires and elites killed, enslaved, displaced, converted, occupied, and erased more human beings than the Nazis, the Communists, the Maoists, Pol Pot, and Chinggis Khan combined. They did it longer. They did it across more continents. And they did it not only by killing bodies but by destroying whole worlds. They marched into lands that were never Christian and never Islamic, and when the killing was done they called the survivors heathens, pagans, idol-worshippers, infidels, kaffirs, barbarians, Gentiles, goyim, and heretics. This is the long persecution of the unbeliever, and this essay is its indictment. It is not an apology. It is a charge sheet.
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Abrahamic Religions and the Selective Memory of Suffering
Every civilization that has ever burned a library has called it purification. Every army that has ever leveled a temple has called it liberation. Every inquisitor who has ever lit a fire beneath a human being has called it salvation. The Abrahamic religions did not invent cruelty. Cruelty is the common inheritance of our species. What they invented was more dangerous than cruelty. They invented a theology that converts cruelty into cosmic duty. They built an architecture of sacred grief. Judaism remembers Babylon and the Shoah. Christianity remembers the Roman arena. Islam remembers rejection at Mecca. And each has used that architecture to demand permanent moral immunity while conducting, across fifteen centuries and five continents, the most sustained campaign of religious persecution in the history of the species.
The United Front of the Victims of Jihad
There must be a United Front of the Victims of Jihad. Not a front of blood, revenge, race, or tribe, but a front of method. Jew and Gentile, Hindu and Buddhist, Atheist and Agnostic, Norwegian and Nigerian — all belong to this front, because all have stood in the path of the same doctrine. So does the secular Muslim, the ex-Muslim, the writer, the cartoonist, the woman who removes the veil, and the child born into obedience before he has learned how to doubt. They have been divided by nation, language, class, and memory, and that division has been their weakness. What binds them is not hatred of Muslims, because hatred of a population is the first stupidity of politics. What binds them is opposition to jihad as doctrine, blasphemy as weapon, and submission as the declared purpose of the human mind.
Logical Positivism:
The Nuclear Option of the Oppressed
And Why India’s Greatest Minds Were Already Using It
Nothing is sacred because a holy book says so. Nothing is true because a prophet declared it. Nothing is moral because a priest transmitted it across a thousand years of fear. Nothing is profound because it is ancient. Nothing becomes evidence because millions obeyed it. Obedience is not evidence. Reverence is not evidence. Submission is not evidence. Fear is not evidence. Truth is what survives examination after obedience has been refused, after the guru has been stripped of his robes, after the scripture has been stripped of its trembling audience.
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There Are No Minorities in India
Reason in Revolt Format — Version Ten — Official
Reason in Revolt Format — Version Ten — Official
India has been taught to speak a grammar that is not its own. The grammar says that a nation is a collection of communities. It says these communities sort themselves into a majority and its minorities. It says the majority is the norm and the minorities are the exceptions, to be counted, named, and compensated. This grammar was not born here. It was built in America, for America, out of the raw material of race and the machinery of special interest. It fits a country assembled from conquered land and imported peoples who had to be sorted before they could be governed. It does not fit a civilization. Pressed onto India, it does not describe the country. It disfigures it. .
Why Hinduism and India Must Be Defended
Hinduism must be defended because it is the only civilization of consequence that never bolted the door.
Its oldest hymn doubts God.
The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda asks who could possibly know how creation began. It answers that perhaps the one who oversees it from the highest heaven knows. Then it turns, and in the last breath of the hymn it says: or perhaps he does not know.