Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The Second Law of Thermodynamics


The entropy of a closed system never decreases, because closed systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy.
The above statement is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In other words it states that the order of a closed system always decreases.
It is one of the basic principles of physics and indeed no process in nature has ever been observed where this law of nature does not apply. So if anybody comes up with a new theory that does not comply with this Law of Nature, it is considered false.

This law is one of the arguments why it is assumed that the age of the universe cannot be infinite. It must have had a beginning. Otherwise the universe would have reached a thermodynamic equilibrium yet, i.e. the entropy of the universe would have reached its maximum.

However this argument reverses the direction of the scientific method. It is unscientific to say that an observation is wrong, because it does not fit into one of our established laws of nature. If an observation and a law of nature are incompatible, then it is not the observation, which is false, but our law.
We can observe that the universe is not in a thermodynamic equilibrium. Therefore there must be a mechanism that decreases the entropy. Otherwise our universe would never have gotten into its current state. The assumption that the universe was in a state of minimum entropy at its beginning and has since increased its entropy doesn't explain how it got into such an improbable state in the first place. If there was no mechanism to reduce the entropy,the universe would have begun in thermodynamic equilibrium, because this is the most probable state. The probability that it started in such a highly ordered state with a minimum of entropy has an infinitely small probability and can therefore excluded as a possibility.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is definitely false. At least it can only be valid under certain limited circumstances. Otherwise we could not explain the current state of the universe. If our universe and our laws of nature disagree, it is not the universe that is wrong. It is that we have the wrong laws.
Saying that the universe has only a limited age does not solve the problem, because we would have to explain how it got its initial state.
Therefore the Second Law of Thermodynamics is no valid argument for a limited age of the universe. Compliance wit this law is no argument at all, because we know for sure that this law has only limited validity. So we have to look where its limitations are. Which are the mechanisms that allow entropy to decrease? We know that they must exist, even if we don't know what they are. The Second Law of Thermodynamics can therefore not be used as an argument against a steady-state universe.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Decline of the United States of America




America once used to be a beacon of freedom.
The United States of America were the first democracy of modernity. The Bill of Rights was the first instance that human rights were established in a constitution. It was founded as an egalitarian republic by founding fathers that were dedicated to the principles of humanism, tolerance and individual freedom.
In two World wars the United States defended the values of Enlightenment against imperialist and fascist regimes. During the cold war America was the leader of the free world against Communism that threatened to subdue the world under a totalitarian system.

But how much is this America as we used to know it different from today! America has turned into the total opposite of what it once used to be.
  • America is not the land of the free anymore. In no other country of the world such a large part of the population is held in prison.
  • America doesn’t spread the idea of freedom anymore; it systematically destroys secular countries and installs Islamic terror regimes by wars of aggression (Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and soon Syria).
  • The United States is allied with the most oppressive and intolerant regime human history has ever seen, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and supports Islamic hate preachers so they can freely travel all over the world and spread intolerance and religious fanaticism. While immigration of Muslims into Western countries is encouraged, Visa requirements for non-Muslims are getting more and more difficult for non-Muslim travelers from developing countries.
  • America sponsored terrorism in Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Libya and now in Syria.
  • American soldiers and agents of law enforcement and intelligence services circumvent the laws and the constitution and even use torture and extra-judicial killings abroad. And what makes it worse is that it has been authorized by a US president.
  • Unmanned drones are used for surveillance and killings in the name of the United States, domestically and abroad
  • America leads an international hate-monger campaign against prostitution all over the world (code named as human trafficking). And while heterosexuals are increasingly suffering from these oppressive measures, homosexuality is actively promoted by the US government. The hate campaign against innocent sex-workers as well as the promotion of same-sex relationships is supported by cutting and granting foreign aid in developing countries.
  • The war on drugs has been enforced by US authorities worldwide. Millions of innocent people have been imprisoned or killed. The privacy of people is violated by drug controls.
  • Citizens are increasingly restricted in their private lives by bans on smoking, alcohol or special types of food.
  • The US government has taken control over every financial transaction worldwide, reversing the principle of assumption of innocence. Now whoever owns or moves money is forced to prove his innocence or face arrest and confiscation of his property.
  • US intelligence services have established total surveillance of their citizens and even friendly countries.
  • The United States have effectively become a totalitarian police state with extraordinary powers for the police force and 17,985 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
  • The use of biometric documents and the disrespect for privacy have been made compulsory for international travel by pressure from US authorities.
  • Anti-modernism enjoys protection of the US government and unscientific nonsense like creationism is taught in American schools, as if it was a valid theory.

The United States as they are today have corrupted the word “freedom” and turned it into its opposite. In every single conflict today the US government sides with oppressive and intolerant forces. The principles of a civil society, of humanism and Enlightenment are undermined by US authorities inside and outside the borders of the United States.
So it is not surprising that the technological capabilities of America have declined. The NASA is not only unable to return to the Moon, they can’t even get a human into low Earth orbit anymore. The development of the latest fighter jets F-22 and F-35 have been failures and been unable to comply with required specifications. The USAF has been unable to maintain its “Space Fence” satellite surveillance system, which had to be shut down this year.

Maybe the United States have already developed beyond the possibility of reforming. They have become the biggest obstacle for human progress. They are not the leaders of the free world anymore; they have become the worst enemy of freedom. The sooner the final collapse of the United States will come, the better for the progress of humanity.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Politics VII: The Law



Modern law has become an absurdity. 
Laws are supposed to be rules of how people should interact with each other in a state. The first requirement   for obeying a law is to know it. Unfortunately this is impossible in a modern state due to the sheer number of laws. No single human being is capable of knowing every law in a state. A special profession had to be invented for specialists in laws, the so called lawyers. But even these lawyers can't know every law. They have to specialize on a small fraction of laws. But that small fraction is still too much for a single person to know, so usually a lawyer has to look up the exact wording of a law in order to give an advice.
So what is the sense of rules that nobody can know because their number exceeds the storage capacity of a human brain? How can people be expected to obey to rules that they cannot know?

To make things even more difficult, laws arbitrarily vary from country to country. What is legal in one country is illegal in another one. It is therefore not enough to know the totality of all laws, it is necessary to know all laws of every social community you are moving in.

So since it is impossible for a human being to know all laws, how do people manage to obey them?
The answer is quite simple. People don't care what the law says, but every human has more or less an idea what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in a human society. So he assumes that the law in accordance with this concept of "right and wrong". And mostly people get it right. Everybody understands that everything that causes unprovoked harm to others is wrong and that there is probably a law against it, even if he doesn't know which particular law it is, and what the law says exactly.
This means people are totally ignorant about the laws and don't need them, but they manage to obey most of them anyway.

So why do we have laws at all? What do we need them for, if nobody knows them and everybody acts simply according to his general understanding of right and wrong?
The truth is, there is no logical reason for laws, at least not in the form laws exist in a modern state.

One of the first codes of law was the Code of Hammurabi. It was a collection of laws written on a stone stele and made visible in a public place. It was possible for every citizen to read and know all existing laws. So the Code of Hammurabi still made some sense.
Meanwhile the number of laws have been inflated by many magnitudes and we have a permanent legislative power, which invents a flood of new laws every year making the problem even bigger.
If we want to give back any meaning to the institution of the law, we need to reduce the number of laws drastically.Their number must be limited to something every citizen can learn and remember. Therefore all laws of a country should fit on a letter-sized piece of paper. If a new law is added, an existing one must be removed, so that the total number of laws never changes. Only if the citizen of a state can actually know the laws, they will make sense for the state. Laws that are not known by every citizens are a waste of paper and have no effect on the life within the state.

Another irrational aspect of modern laws is that they are permanently changed. How can the citizens make any plans for their life, when the rules that they have to obey to can suddenly be different the next day. This is a similar situation like a football game where the rules are changed during the match. This would undermine the whole idea of the game. In the same way laws that can be changed undermine the whole idea of laws.
A law is no law, if it can be changed. Laws have to be immutable.

The only possibility to change a law should be by unanimous consent of all citizens. When all citizens are asked for their consent, it is made sure, that every citizen knows about the change and that this change will not interfere negatively with his plans that he made based on the former law.

So there are two requirements for laws to make sense:
1. Their number must be limited to something that every citizen can easily remember (one letter-sized page).
2. They must either be immutable or only be changed by a consensus of all citizens.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Overcoming Religious Irrationalism




The continuous progress of human civilization was suddenly interrupted at the end of antiquity with the rise of Christianity to the head of the Roman Empire and its subsequent fall. No other event was so disastrous for the intellectual evolution of mankind. It was followed by an Age of Darkness that lasted more than a thousand years, until humanity began slowly to recover from the catastrophic effect that Christian monotheism had brought over it. It was the Renaissance (= Rebirth) of antiquity and its culture followed by the Age of Enlightenment that put an end to the decline of humanity.
However the cause of the decline is not dead yet and we can again see the deteriorating effects of this dangerous religion on the progress of humanity. Religion is again on the rise during the last decades, and it is accompanied by a visible stagnation of science and technology, a retrocession of humanist values and basic human rights and a resurgence of barbarism and violence all over the world. The disease of Christianity (including the Mohammedan sects) has not been eradicated while there was an opportunity for it. It will now continue to cause problems for mankind and obstruct any further progress.

The mistake was the attempt to jump from a monotheist religion right back to the path of reason and logic. Such an attempt was doomed to fail. Once you have taken a wrong road, you cannot just jump from there back into the right direction, when you realize that you have taken a wrong turn. You have to take all the way back to the point where you have left the right path and from there continue into the right direction.
There is no direct path from monotheism to reason. A Christian atheist still has tacit Christian doctrines implied in his thinking. For example whatever answer he gives to the simple question “Do you believe in God?” - whether “yes” or “no”, he already strays away from the path of reason and surrenders to multiple Christian fallacies. The preposition “in” makes no sense in conjunction with the verb “believe”. Why is the noun “God” capitalized? Where is its article?
Such an irrational question cannot be answered rationally and could only be countered with another question: Believe what about which god? Any answer would imply the concept of an omnipotent creator and the affirmation that such a concept is even thinkable. The whole question of the existence of “God” is meaningless from a rational point of view and commits the fallacy of presupposition (Plurium Interrogationum) since it presupposes statements that have not been agreed upon (that an omnipotent creator is a valid hypothesis, that the world has a beginning, that there can be a logical distinction between natural and supernatural).
Whenever such a Christian atheist makes a statement about ethics, he is also unaware that he implies tacit Christian values. He also uses a language polluted by Christian terminology that makes it difficult to express himself without falling into the mental trap of Christian concepts.

For a monotheist to embrace reason, it is indispensable to return to the pre-Christian concepts of thought first and at least formally learn classical mythology and adopt the customs and language of polytheist antiquity. This is the point in history, after which mankind strayed away from the path of intellectual progress.
Only a classical polytheist is able to overcome religious superstition. From monotheism there is no direct shortcut to rationalism. First all false concepts of Christianity and its spiritual predecessors like Zoroastrism have to be totally erased from the mind, before it is possible to advance on the path of reason.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Politics VI: The Constitution



The administrative mechanisms as well as every law of a country are based on its constitution. It is the constitution that gives authority to the government and to the laws and decrees that regulate the state affairs.
But where does the constitution derive its authority from?
According to the modern understanding of a state, which is based on the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau), the constitution of a state is a social contract that its citizens have agreed to. This means, a constitution is only legitimate, if it is based on the voluntary agreement of the citizens.
In our modern democracies, this agreement is formally done by a majority vote of the citizens who either approve or reject a draft of a constitution. If the constitution gets the majority vote, it is considered to be legitimate and binding for all citizens and all branches of the public administration and the government.

However this is not how a contract works. A contract is only valid, when it is signed by all involved parties, not just by the majority of them. And it is only binding for those who signed it. 
Or would a contract be valid if a group of people signs it in order to justify a hostile action against some other people or to make regulations for people who have not agreed to the contract? Of course this would not be possible, not even if the group who signed the contract is more numerous than the other group that it is applied to against their will. Such a document would not be a contract, rather it would be a conspiracy.
For this reason the constitution of a state cannot be subject to a majority decision. It requires the consent of every single person that it is supposed to be applied to. A constitution cannot have any authority over any human being who has not personally signed it showing his consent. Otherwise it is not a constitution but a conspiracy pact.

It might be objected that it is impractical to try to get the signatures of every citizen under the constitution, but this is how a contract works. If you don't have the signature of all involved parties, the contract is void. If it is not possible to get the signatures of every single citizen of a state, then the terms of the contract, i.e. the constitution, have either to be changed or the reach of its authority needs to be limited into smaller units. If it is not possible to get the signature of several million citizens, then probably the political entity is too big and needs to be divided into smaller units (e.g city states), which are able to agree to an unanimous consensus among them.

A very important principle of a constitution is that it must be limited to the smallest common denominator. Therefore it cannot have too many terms, since it would be impossible to reach a consensus over them. 
Second, a constitution must not include any controversial issues. We know that topics like abortion, family laws or religious references are controversial. So there is no place for them in a constitution.
It needs also to be considered that future generations of citizens must be willing to sign the constitution, so it needs to be free from temporary political trends. 

A constitution is only valid, when every citizen has signed it and it is only applicable on the citizens who have signed it. Therefore it has to consider what to do with people who refuse to sign it. And even if a consensus is reached among all citizens at the moment, it is possible that people reaching adulthood and citizenship in the future might not be willing to sign it.
A person who has not signed the constitution is not subject to its regulations. This will have certain disadvantages, because the person will not have the protection of its laws, but nobody can be forced to give his consent and nobody can be forced to fall under the authority of a law whose legitimacy he has not agreed to.
A state, which is based on such a constitution, has to leave these people in peace. It has no authority over them. It cannot force them to anything, but it also has no obligations towards them. 
However it is in the interest of a state to make the terms of its constitution as agreeable as possible for everyone in order to avoid that too many people refuse to give their approval to its constitution and therefore to its legitimacy.

Since these requirements of a legitimate constitution are not fulfilled by any modern state, no existing country has a legitimate constitution and any legitimate authority.We need a radical change of the political system and the understanding of what constitutes a state. All authority is derived from the citizens. And without their signature and consent to the constitution, the state has no legitimate authority over them. The state has to respect its citizens, not only their majority, but every single one of them.
Every human being is free to agree to the authority of the state or to reject it. No government institution can claim authority over a human being from any other source than this particular human being himself.
The age when state authority was derived from divine mercy or some kind of profane substitute of it (e.g. the "will of the people", the "common good", the "national security", the "proletariat" etc.) needs to be over once and for all.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Proof of Impossibility of Monotheism



While any attempt to prove the non-existence of the gods is frequently eluded by changing the definition of what constitutes a "god", the existence of a single god is easier to disprove.

For empirical reasons the entire concept of a single god is rather counterintuitive. There is no example of anything, of which only exists one. So it is rather odd that anybody could even come up with such a concept that contradicts everything that can be observed in the world.
However there is also an argument from logical deduction that sufficiently proves the theoretical impossibility of the monotheist main doctrine:

If certain preconditions allow the existence of one thing, they would also allow the existence of others of its kind. Since existence of two or more things can be totally independent from each other, the existence of one thing is not necessarily able to affect or prevent the existence of another.
If something (e.g. the existence of a god) is possible once, it is also possible twice. The only alternative would be that it is not possible at all. It is either possible or not. There is no in-between. 
Infinity is incompatible with singularity, and there is no reason thinkable that would limit the possibility of independent existences (i.e. separate worlds). The concept of infinite possibilities necessarily requires that everything, which is possible, exists in an infinite number.
In short: If there is one, there must be more of them.

Therefore depending on the definition of a god (Some define it as nature itself, others deify humans as gods. The existence of neither can be denied.), either polytheism or atheism are valid options. Monotheism is no rational option at all.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Songs and Poetry



When we look at different civilizations, one of the odd peculiarities is the universal human habit of singing and turning text information into rhymes. Although it seems a kind of irrational behavior, it can be observed in all known cultures all over the world and seems to have developed independently.
What is the reason that information is transmitted in such a strange way that defies reason and logic?

In fact the reason behind lyric, songs and poetry can be understood quite easily, if we look at early human history, or better prehistory. Prehistory is defined as the era before writing was invented. Knowledge could only be preserved to the next generation by oral tradition.
The main problem of oral tradition is accuracy of the reproduction. We all know how information can be altered by rumors. Facts are changed, exaggerated or misunderstood, each time they are retold. In order to improve accuracy of oral traditions, early humans used a clever trick. They put the spoken word into a certain rhythm and made the words rhyme. 
So whenever somebody retold a story, he had heard before and changed the text, the rhythm or the rhyme would be broken and the error would become obvious. The storyteller was therefore forced to use the exact same words to retell the story. Whenever he realized that the rhythm of the sentence got lost, he knew that he didn't reproduce it correctly and would check with the originator of the story what the correct wording of the story was. It was some kind of CRC-code (cyclic redundancy check) in the same way as it is used today when transmitting digital data. Some bits are reserved to check the accuracy of the others. If these bits don't correspond with the others, the entire data package is discarded. 
In the same way poets and songs once worked. If they lost their rhyme and rhythm, they were discarded as wrong reproduction of the original.
For this reason we can see that most ancient epics and myths that have been written down on clay tablets, have some sort of repeating internal structure that indicates that they were most likely some kind of songs. We know it for sure from the Edda and the Song of the Nibelungs.
We can also see how little the words have changed in different versions of the Sumerian Atrahasis Epic, although they were written down centuries apart. Of course they could have been copied one from another, but since there are some small changes, it is more likely that they have a common oral source.

By the use of lyric, prehistoric humans were able to preserve information and reports about historic events quite accurately and unchanged for centuries from a time far before the invention of writing. Therefore much of the ancient mythology might be far more authentic than historians assume, since they describe events before they could be recorded in a written form.

Songs and poetry have therefore not been so irrational as we might assume today. This practice was quite rational and efficient to store information in a non-written way. We should not underestimate its importance for early humans and their history records.
However songs and poetry have become obsolete with the invention of writing. We can now record information accurately in many ways, so that it lasts many generations without its content being changed.  In a time of written history there is no need for lyric. It is a relic from prehistorical times and without any use for rational people. Digital CRC-code has replaced rhymes far more efficiently. 
While human intellect develops further, the outdated practice of songs and poetry may one day disappear.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Politics V: Guns and Democracy



Democracy means rule of the people (= from Greek demokratia, demos = people, kratos = rule).
Ruling means to have the power to enforce one's will, if necessary against any resistance. So in a democracy the people is supposed to be able to enforce their will in the state against any resistance from a particular elite or the government.
While power was based on physical strength in a primitive society, today it is based on firepower. Those who have more firepower, have the power. There is no other power, which is not derived from control and ownership of weapons. Nothing else matters when one is faced with superior weapons. The one with the gun is the one with the power. He can decide not to use his gun and voluntarily take orders from an unarmed man, but this is only his decision. And his decision is the only one that counts. Whatever freedom he may have granted his unarmed opponent, he can take it away at any time. 

Now let's have a look at modern so called "democracies". Since they are supposed to be ruled by the people, we should be able to assume that it is the people who hold the superior firepower. In this case the people would have the power to make the ultimate decisions and remove and install governments at any time. 
We all know that this is far from true. There are strict regulations on the possession of firearms and only the government owns all significant modern weapons. Although these weapons are carried by individual soldiers and policemen, they are not their property and only issued to them under very restricted conditions for a limited time.
Therefore it is the government that rules the state, not the people. The word "democracy" is nothing but a lie. 
There is an odd ritual called "elections", in which the people are made to believe that they are asked for their opinions and are free to cast a vote and thereby exercise some kind of power. But the truth is that whatever the people vote, does not matter. The options that can be voted for are strictly limited. In practice this means that all established parties have exactly the same program. And no matter who wins the elections, everything stays the same. A typical example are the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S. There is no real difference between these two parties. Membership in a particular party is independent from the political stance of a politician, and nothing in U.S. policy changes, whether a Democrat or a Republican is U.S. president.
In some rare occasions, when this system of limited options doesn't work just perfect yet, it can happen that the people votes for a candidate that is not in agreement with the ruling class. Such unfortunate cases are either solved by election fraud or the result of the elections is simply ignored. Because it is those who have the guns, not those who have the votes, who have the true power. Those with the guns can either decide to do what the majority voted for, if it is in agreement with their interests, or they simply don't do it. And there is nothing the voters can do against it.

This is not just a theoretical case, there are lots of examples in recent history, that election results are simply ignored, when the people with the guns don't agree with the outcome. The takeover of the Egyptian military was just the last example, although it might be disputed whether it reflects the will of the majority of the people or not. Other examples are Zimbabwe, where President Mugabe simply stayed in office after he lost the elections in 2008. Nobody cares about election results as long as he holds the weapons, because only weapons are power.

Power is based on weapons and only on weapons. In modern so called "democracies" unarmed people might have the impression that they are not oppressed, because the government does not interfere with their affairs. But the only reason for it  is that their interests don't conflict with the government's interests. It is a false freedom, because it is based on the condition that the opinion of the people coincides with the opinion of the government. This granted freedom can be taken away at any moment, if the government wants. The people are slaves to the whims of the government as long as they are outgunned by the government. Their opinion is irrelevant and they are totally powerless.
This situation has neither anything to do with freedom nor with democracy.

In a democracy, the people must have the ultimate power in the state. The citizens must have more and better guns than the police force. They must be able to force the government out of office by their superior firepower, not just by votes. Elections are no expression of power, they are only opinion polls to predict the outcome in case the weapons decide.
To establish a democratic state, the police needs to be disarmed as a first step. Perhaps they can be allowed to carry a revolver with six rounds for their self-defense. But automatic guns must only be owned by private citizens. If these automatic weapons should be carried around all the time is a different question. It is not the job of the police or government employees to threaten the citizens.
In these rare cases that more firepower is needed against a criminal gang, the police can ask the citizens for assistance and establish an armed militia of free citizens for this purpose. There is no need to keep a standing heavily armed police force. A policeman is not the superior of the citizen. His duty is to serve and protect. And nobody wants a servant who is better armed than himself.

A system of government is not defined by elections or other empty rituals or spurious words, it is only defined by the possession of weapons. Who has the weapons, rules the country. In a monarchy the king owns all the guns. In an oligarchy it is the upper class who has control over the weapons. And in a democracy, it must be the people who have the guns.
Using this criterion we can for example see that the United States of America is not a democracy. It is a monarchy. President is just a title of the monarch who controls all the weapons in the country for a period of 4 years and cannot be removed from power by the will of the people (only by the will of the oligarchy under certain circumstances).
If we want a democracy, all weapons must be taken away from the police and returned into the hands of the people.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

What is Islam?



There is a profound misunderstanding about the term Islam. It is often by its members and outsiders likewise considered to be a religion. While there is no doubt that religion is part of it, it is not its primary feature. The current conflict between Islam and other cultures is not based on different beliefs, but on cultural characteristics, which have no religious justification and can neither be found in the holy scripture of Islam, the so called "quran", nor in the biographic anecdotes of its founder Mohammed, the so called "ahadith".
There is no "divine commandment" to grow a beard, to wear Arab-style clothes, to cover women in black coats, to speak Arabic or whatever else distinguishes the typical muslim from other human beings. Why would muslims pray towards Saudi Arabia knowing that their god doesn't actually live there, but is supposed to be omnipresent? All these characteristics of Islam are simply not of a religious nature.

Some quote the rejection of the divinity of Jesus and the concept of trinity as a proof of Islam being distinct from Christianity. But christian beliefs are not homogeneous. Many christians like Jehovah's Witnesses also reject these concepts. Muslims have far more in common with Catholicism than many other christian sects like the Church of the Latter Day Saints have with Catholicism. 
Muslims are christians. They are just one branch of it like Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Jehova's Witnesses, Nestorianism etc. Mohammed did not found a new religion, he brought Arian Christianity to Arabia. He was for Arabia, what was Saint Patrick was for Britain. Since he was illiterate he could not bring the original christian bible with him but had to retell episodes from it as he remembered them, which were later compiled into the "quran". Essentially the quran is a collection of bible comments. The book itself has no chronological structure and remains incomprehensible, if the reader has not read the bible before. Without knowledge of the bible stories, a reader of the quran would have no idea what its statements refer to. There is nothing new revealed in the quran, which could not already be found in the bible with small inaccuracies about details, where Mohammed's memory apparently failed (e.g. confusion of Ismael with Isaac).
However the conflict between Islam and the christian world is not about those religious details, it is about culture. It is about the role of women in society, about behavior code and laws, in short about the so called "shariah", the islamic code of laws. And laws are not a matter of religion, they are a matter of politics. Therefore the conflict between Islam and the rest of the world is a political one, not a religious one.
Many particularities of Islam like the pilgrimage to Mecca or the Arabic name "al-Lah" for their god were the result of a political compromise between Mohammed and Abu Sufyan, the leader of the Quraysh tribe that ruled Mecca in order to negotiate the surrender of the city. The Quraysh did not want to lose their income through pilgrims that visited the pagan shrine kaaba. So the Quraysh gave up all other gods apart from their supreme god al-Lah and forced Mohammed to include the kaaba into his state religion.

If Islam is no religion, so what is it?

Islam is definitely a culture. it is the Arab culture to be precise. The term "Islam" means submission and it refers to the submission under the rule of the Arab conquerors who submitted the entire Middle East in the 7th century. "Muslim" can be translated as "one who submits", and it means he submits to the Arab rule. Neither "Islam", nor "muslim" are religious terms. Arabs call their religion "deen"  Deen is sometimes wrongly translated as meaning any religion in general. But the term deen does not include Buddhism, Hinduism or Paganism. They are called "shirk", not "deen". Deen only refers to the religion of Mohammed. And this includes Christians and Jews, which are together with the muslims called "People of the Book". "Book" hereby refers to the bible, not to the quran. So Mohammed and his contemporaries were quite aware that they were part of the one christian religion. There is even a hadith (anedote from the life of Mohammed), where the pagan temple guard Sulami refers to the advancing muslim army as "christians" [Ishaq, 565]. Islam was only meant to be a political term referring to the subjugated peoples. When Mohammed's contemporaries referred to their religion, they called it "deen", when they referred to the political dominion of the Arab tribes they called it Islam.

Islam is Arab culture imperialism. It is the way how Arabs spread their hegemonic power over the world. The goal is submission to Arab supremacy. Muslims have to speak Arabic, to adopt Arab clothes, Arab customs.and Arab laws. They have to show reference to the homeland of Arabia during daily prayers and pay tribute to the principal shrine of the Arabs during a pilgrimage. It is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of loyalty to Arabia. 
You become a muslim by swearing a loyalty oath to Mohammed, the first leader of the Arabs who united their tribes. This loyalty oath is called "shahadah". It is not sufficient to believe in al-Lah, who is considered to be the same as the christian and Jewish god. This only gives you the inferior "dhimmi" status, which means having to pay tribute to the Arab overlords and not being allowed to bear arms. Being a muslim is only a matter of loyalty. The faith does not count. If you don't swear the loyalty oath to the first Arab leader, you cannot be trusted in the eyes of the Arab imperialists.

Different Concepts of States

The Western world makes a huge mistake when categorizing Islam as a religion. It is something quite different. Its nature is political. It is not a religion, it is a nationality.
To understand the concept of muslim as nationality, we have to look at the history of our modern concept of a state. If we say "state" we mean a nation state. This is a concept that has come up with the "Westphalian System" in the 17th century after the 30-Years-War. A state became a territorial unit that included all human beings within its border. People were subject to the laws of the territory where they were. They became members of the state by birth in its territory (ius solis) or by being the off-spring of somebody born in its territory (ius sanguinis). The nation state is limited by its territory. It is a territorial state. A person travelling into the territory of another state doesn't take his laws with him. He becomes subject to the laws of the state in whose territory he is.
Before this concept of a nation state, there was a different concept of state, the "nation of personal loyalties" (German: Personenverbandsstaat). It is typical for tribal or feudal communities. A person belongs to a tribe or to his feudal lord, no matter in which territory his tribe moves. This kind of state does not include a particular territory, it includes people. As a member of this state, you remain always a subject of its laws, no matter where you go.
This is the concept of state that Islam as a nation is based on. A muslim is subject to islamic shariah law, no matter where he goes and in which nation state's territory he resides. Belonging to Islam as a nation supersedes all modern (Westphalian) concepts of nationality.
It needs to be understood that the nationality of a muslim cannot be French, American, Egyptian, Lebanese or whatever. His nationality is muslim. A muslim cannot have any other nationality, and he will only obey to the laws of his nation, the nation of Islam. The concept of "nations of personal loyalties" was common in the time when Islam as a nation was born. And Islam has not adjusted its understanding according to the Westphalian System. Islam remains a Personenverbandsstaat.
If we understand this, we will understand why muslims behave as they do, why apostasy is considered treason and why it is often incompatible and incomprehensible for outsiders. If we keep thinking of Islam as a religion instead of a nation, we will never understand the nature of the problem with Islam.

Practical Consequences

We have to understand that Islam is a nationality, not a religion. Muslims are christians but belong to the nation of Islam. Islam is not identical with a religion, but it has a state religion, which is a form of Arian Christianity.
Muslims cannot have any other citizenship but Islam. This means nobody can be a French Muslim or a Nigerian Muslim. He is either French, Nigerian or Muslim. 
Muslims are a state on their own and have their own laws, their own language, their own writing, and their own traditions. They will not obey to the laws of other nations. The islamic ummah (community of all muslimsshould organize in a way so they can issue their passports to their citizens. Other citizenships and passports need to be revoked. 
Since muslims take their laws with them and will not submit to national laws, this has to be taken into consideration when interacting with them. Since different sets of laws apply to citizens of nation states and citizens of "nations of personal loyalties", interactions become quite difficult. Rules for such interactions need to be established from case to case and otherwise must be avoided. A disengagement and segregation between citizens of these totally different concepts of states will be necessary. Muslims must be assigned certain zones where they can live according to their laws, but they should not be allowed to leave these zones as long as they don't become citizens of a nation state and formally resign their loyalty towards Islam (i.e. Arabia). Otherwise a conflict between incompatible sets of law cannot be avoided.
Muslims belong to the Arab nation under the definition of a "nation of personal loyalties" and they should be treated as such. Outside of Greater Arabia they are foreigners and should not be allowed to hold another passport.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Politics IV: Property


The justification of the existence of a state is that it is a social contract (→ Rousseau) among its citizens in order to protect their physical integrity and their property from from possible hostilities among them. Therefore the main principle of every state has to be the protection of its citizens against physical harm and to defend their property.

In this post we will have a closer look at the concept of property.
Property means that the proprietor can dispose of his property in any form he wishes and that he is the supreme authority over it.
Unfortunately this concept has been thoroughly undermined by the modern state. The state itself claims supreme authority over any property making it effectively the real proprietor of every property in its territory. This idea is not only held by the last communist states, but also by supposed capitalist states who claim to respect the property of their citizens. The truth is, they don't.
No state has the right to interfere with whatever a citizen does with his property. A citizen neither needs a permission nor a licence for whatever he wants to do with it. Requiring any kind of business licence, construction permission is illegitimate. No law can be established over the property of a citizen, because the proprietor is the ultimate law-giving instance over his property. The sovereignty of the proprietor supersedes the sovereignty of the state in this matter. A state that does not respect this principle is illegitimate.

Another important issue is the concept of "intellectual property", which includes copyright, patents and so on. This concept is in contradiction of the concept of material property. 
There can only be one owner of an item, not a material owner and a intellectual owner. If an item is lawfully acquired, it becomes the sole property of the one who acquired it. There cannot be an intellectual proprietor else telling him what he is allowed to do with his property and what not. With the sale of an item the previous owner has ceased any claims and property rights over it. If he did not wish this to happen, he should not have sold the item in the first place.
Example: If a music CD is purchased, it becomes the sole property of the buyer. He can do whatever he wants with it. He may listen to it, he may make backup copies and he may allow friends to listen to it and give copies to his friends. If he was not allowed to do this, he would not be the proprietor.

The concept of "intellectual property" is not only incompatible with material property and therefore practically inapplicable, it is furthermore a major obstacle for technological progress.
Under current patent law inventors cannot build on existing ideas, if they have been patented. They have somehow to reinvent the wheel in order to improve an item. Patent law suits have slowed down the entire IT sector. "Intellectual property" has become a big business that allows to make money without producing anything. It is such a big business that the state has been bribed to defend the interests of the big intellectual property holders, and they have formed powerful syndicates to abolish the concept of material property. Today there are few crimes, which are as strictly persecuted and with such long jail terms as copyright infringements. For copyright infringement you can be imprisoned for 20 years and more and authorities will hunt you down all over the world. It is much easier to escape punishment as a murderer as for copyright infringement.

A further negative side-effect of  "intellectual property" is that the quality of its products is declining significantly. Every intellectual product that is only produced with the intention to make the maximum possible amount of  money from it, has lost value in itself.
A book should be written because an author has to tell something. With the current copyright business, it is only written, because the author tried to guess what the readers would like to read, so he can sell more copies. The author has no message at all. He cannot even afford to have a message, because this message might offend some of his readers and therefore diminish the market that he can reach with his book.
The same is true for the movie and the music industry.A movie cannot afford to be controversial or surprising. It has to target the whole audience and it has to have all the usual elements in it.that each of these audiences expect including special effects, happy end, family values, things that can later be turned into merchandise etc. The magnitude of these project is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When there is so much money involved in the marketing of intellectual property, nobody can afford any experiments. Everything has to be according to reliable patterns that have formerly proved success. So instead of new movies we get sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots etc.
In the computer industry commercial software has not the main purpose to be useful, but to sell more. They have become marketing tools and are generally inferior to similar software which has been produced without "intellectual property" involved like open source products.

Intellectual property must be abolished. It undermines the concept of real property and it is responsible for stagnation and a decline in quality.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Politics III: State and Religion




One of the major absurdities of modern human societies are the concept of "Freedom of Religion" and "Separation of Church and State".
Religion is a term, which summarizes every kind of irrational human behavior. It is the antonym of education. When this relic of infantile behavior remains in adult human beings, it becomes a mental disorder.
How can a mental disorder claim freedom to be practiced? Freedom of Religion is essentially not different from "freedom of being schizophrenic" or "freedom to remain illiterate". Why should a state protect such aberrations or deficiencies of the human mind?
It is the duty of the state to encourage its citizens to seek education. This can be done by opening institutions of education like schools and universities to the public. Some states even provide free education to their citizens. But a school where religion is taught is not a school. Religion is the negation of everything education stands for. Students are supposed to acquire knowledge in schools and to learn methods of rational thinking. Religion does the opposite. It opposes and denies knowledge and discourages rational thinking. It is diametrically opposed to the efforts of a school.
The state therefore needs to protect children whose judgment can easily be influenced either in a positive or in a negative way from such harmful influences like religion, which could seriously threaten their mental health.
A school that permits the presence of religious teachings in its curriculum or religious symbols in its buildings and facilities is no school. And a state that permits them has failed its citizens and especially its future generation - its children.
Freedom of religion is no human right, because it is no individual right in its current definition. It is a violation of human rights, because it gives privileges to religious organizations so that they can break the laws and disrespect the individual rights of its members.
In the name of freedom of religion children are physically mutilated (circumcision) and coerced into boring and absurd rituals. Neither their human rights nor their dignity are respected. Therefore freedom of religion is not only no human right, but a gross violation of them. If privileges of religious organizations are protected by a constitution, it is a proof that the whole concept of human rights is not respected in this state.
Of course no citizen can be banned from believing whatever he wants and to practice whatever he wants in private. But this is not necessarily the case in public where it might become a nuisance for others (e.g. prayer in public places). When religions demand exceptions from laws, this is incompatible with the rule of law.
There are numerous examples where religious privileges are used to break laws and to undermine the principles of any legitimate state:
  • Physical mutilation of the genitals of children
  • Disrespect of animal protection laws by practicing ritual slaughter
  • Noise pollution by church bells and loudspeakers from mosques
  • Coercion to force certain dress codes on adolescents

Privileges like these violate the principle of equality before the law and are unacceptable. A state that grants privileges to religious organizations is illegitimate.
The separation of church and state is one example of such illegitimate privileges. There can be no separation or non-interference between church and state. This means there can be no separate realm for religious institutions to practice their unlawful traditions. The church, which is named here representatively for all religious institutions, must remain below the state authority and has to obey to the law like any other citizen.
A state has to be committed to rationalism and should therefore not recognize any religious institution.
Religion is a permanent cause of intolerance, violence and social disorder. It does not respect state authority and the rule of law. It should therefore have no place in a modern state.
Therefore the only right that might be granted to adult religious people is not to be reeducated by force. But tolerance towards religion should not go any further.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Politics II: Marriage



Recently the topic of same-sex marriages has become more and more popular. Many countries have changed their family laws in order to allow homosexual couples to be able to marry just like heterosexual couples. For some it is an advancement towards equality and against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For others it undermines the basic principles on which human society is built on.
This controversy is caused by the fact that marriage has a totally different meaning for people depending on their educational and cultural background.

Marriage as Partnership or Slavery?

In the Western society marriage means a kind of partnership between two people. It is historically derived from Hellenic/Roman and Germanic customs that paired one man and one woman together for reproduction purposes. Following the frequent contact among different civilizations, this European understanding of marriage has been paralleled with a completely different phenomenon in Middle Eastern and African societies. 
Such a concept of partnership between a man and a woman did not exist there. But the concept of slavery existed there. And women were considered natural slaves. They were purchased and became part of the household of their owner. Depending on personal wealth a master could have either one or many female slaves.
When Europeans made contact with these cultures, they misunderstood the nature of this relationship and mistranslated it as marriage. What was translated "wife" into English actually meant "female slave". This mistake in translation is first of all visible in the fact that for these cultures it was quite natural that a man could purchase as many women as his wealth allowed, while no female slave could of course have several masters. But even this observation did not make Europeans reconsidering their wrong translation, so up to the present day female slavery is totally legal in Arab and African countries, because it is not translated as such. However women are still exchanged against a certain amount of money or cattle and nobody considers this to be ethically wrong or thinks of human trafficking.

Even in the grammar of Bantu languages, we can still see how this misunderstanding is based on a wrong translation.
In Swaheli the sentence "Ali marries Sheila" means "Ali alimwoa Sheila".
So we should assume that "Sheila marries Ali" would mean "Sheila alimwoa Ali." But this is not the case.
The correct sentence is "Sheila aliolewa na Ali". "Aliolewa" is actually the passive form of "alimwoa" So the literal translation into English is "Sheila was married by Ali". It is grammatically impossible that a woman marries a man, she can only be married by a man.
The reason is that the verb "-oa" doesn'Ät mean "to marry" in the first place. It means "to purchase a slave girl".
Therefore the correct English translation for "Ali alimwoa Sheila" is "Ali purchases Sheila". And "Sheila aliolewa Ali" is "Sheila is purchased by Ali." It is quite logical that you cannot say Sheila purchases Ali, because Sheila is the slave, and a slave girl doesn't buy her master.

This is the actual understanding of "marriage" in many non-Western cultures. It is not a mutual relationship between two equal partners. It is the relationship between a master and a slave, two different roles that are not equal in any way.
This is why same-sex marriage is so radically opposed in those primitive patriarchal societies. It is unthinkable that two persons of the same gender could marry, because who would be the master and who would be the slave? A marriage has to be an unilateral relationship between two complementary social roles.
But even in Western countries there is a strong opposition against same-sex marriage, but mostly by religious conservative persons. The reason for it is obvious: Their understanding of marriage is based on the bible, which is a scripture of Middle Eastern, not European origin. Therefore the bible doesn't have the European concept of marriage as a partnership, but marriage as a master/servant-relationship.

Biological Concept of Marriage

Another argument against same-sex marriage is based on biology. Its main purpose is considered to be reproduction. Therefore it has to be between a man and a woman. The nuclear family is supposed to be the basic reproductive unit of the human society. This nuclear family is believed to consist of two parents (father and mother) and the children. This idea is based on the biological model that the father produces sperm cells and the mother produces egg cells. The fusion of the sperm cell and the egg cell becomes an embryo, which eventually develops into a child made of the two cells from both parents, mother and father.
Unfortunately this model is based on a misunderstanding of the fertilization process. The zygote (embryo cell) is not the result of the fusion of two cells (sperm and ovum). It is only the egg cell that develops into the embryo after the sperm cell injects its genetic data into it. The sperm cell itself dies after this process. The resulting embryo does not contain a single molecule from its father. All of its substance including all cell organelles are product of the mother. What remains from the original paternal chromosomes are only copies of their DNA sequence. The original DNA gets lost during the further development of the embryo, either metabolized or left in the placenta cells. There is no material link between the father and the child. They have only genetic information in common.
In other words the father only has the the copyright of a little less than 50% of the genetic information of the child. He makes no physical contribution to the child.
To fully understand what this means we have to take a closer look at the following situation:
If one of two monozygotic male twins impregnates a woman and she gives birth to a child, then both twins are equally fathers of the child. The one twin who had intercourse with the woman is not "more father" than his twin brother who might not even know the woman. The child has approx. 50% of the genetic information of these twins without any difference between them. There is no way to determine, which of the twins was the one who had sexual intercourse with the woman. There is in fact no biological distinction between these two fathers.
We have to understand that the term "father" is an abstract concept. It does not refer to a physical link between father and child. It only means that the father has provided about 50% of the genetic information of the child. He contributed information, not physical substance.
A child has actually only one parent - the mother.
Therefore in a biological sense the nuclear family only consists of mother and children, no father.
The single mother/child family therefore reflects much more the biological background than the father/mother/child family, which is only a cultural construct. And in many countries the single mother/child family becomes more and more the reality in the society.
This is the true basic unit of the human society.There is no biological justification to include a father in the nuclear family unit. The laws of our society should reflect this biological reality. Children belong to their mother, and their mother only. There is no biological justification to grant any privileges or authority to fathers. And therefore marriage between a father and the mother of a child is totally meaningless.
The relationship between a man and a woman should not be subject to any law. And it should not be allowed that anybody can claim any legal privileges from such an arrangement.

Why Marriage?

We have seen that marriage between a man and a woman has no biological justification. Furthermore we have seen that the concept of marriage has been abused to justify ethically questionable practices like female slavery. Marriage is therefore an immoral concept that is incompatible with human dignity and has been instrumental for the institutionalized oppression of women and children. It is the cause of many ills in our society. It should therefore be abolished.
It is unacceptable that our modern state recognizes this primitive and immoral practice.
Marriage should not be extended to same-sex couples. It should be outlawed even for heterosexual couples.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Politics I : No Victim - No Crime



There are many legal definitions of crimes depending on the different jurisdictions. Since these definitions are different, they are apparently arbitrary and invalid as universal definition or general principle.
In fact every human being knows quite well, what is a crime without the need of arbitrary codes of law that are only locally valid. 

Universal Definition of Crime:
Crime is the initiation of violence or the threat thereof.

Definition of Violence:
Violence is causing physical or material harm to somebody (victim) without his/her consent.

These definitions cannot be disputed even by a criminal. For example a thief would not dispute that theft constitutes a crime and argue that it should not be persecuted, because he trusts that the property that he acquires by his illegal act will later be protected as long as his illegal act is kept secret. If he did not trust that his illegally acquired property was protected, the theft itself would not make any sense, because the acquired property could be taken away from him at any time and he could not claim protection for it. The concept of protected property is a prerequisite of the action of theft. Without this concept, theft would make no sense. Therefore the universality of this definition of crime cannot be disputed even by persons who intend to break this rule, because if they dispute it, it would turn against themselves. This definition of crime is therefore a tautology.

However modern laws go far beyond this definition of crime. They have established so called "victimless crimes". Known examples are laws against drugs, the possession of weapons, prostitution etc.
These laws are a logical problem. They openly violate the definition of a crime as the initiation of violence. By disrespecting the principle of not initiating violence, they take away their own justification. If those who establish these concept of "victimless crimes" dispute the principle of non-initiation of violence, they have to accept that violence can be initiated against them on the same legal grounds. 

Persecution of anything that doesn't fulfill the above definition of crime constitutes a crime by itself.

If persons who possess drugs or weapons and have not harmed anybody are persecuted by the state, then the state itself has initiated violence and becomes a criminal. The victim would have the legitimate right of self-defense and to use violence against the unprovoked aggressor, which is the state in this case.
By disrespecting the principle of "not initiating violence", laws have lost any logical justification, because if the initiation of violence is legal, violence could even be initiated against state representatives without provocation. By disrespecting the universal definition of crime, a state deprives itself of any legitimacy and turned the rule of law into a reductio ad absurdum. A law that punishes victimless crimes is no law, because its premises are contradicting. Such a law is only an arbitrary act of aggression.