Reading Time: 4 minutes Critics of Islam love the Sword Verse. It’s Koran 9:5, or the fifth verse of the ninth Surah, At-Tawbah, “The Repentance”. The bit they like says, “Kill the pagans wherever you find them.” The charge is often applied that Muslims are being instructed by Allah to murder everyone who does not share their religion. At […]
Koran
Posted inDeep Dive
Who owns morality?
Reading Time: 4 minutes At some point during our merry journey through secularism, we all encounter some benighted religious people who incredulously ask: “If you don’t believe in a god, where does your morality come from?” Religious people believe that the source of their morality is their god and that their religious belief is the exercise of that morality. […]
Posted inSexuality
On bikinis and hijab
Reading Time: 5 minutes For Americans, as in most of the West, the meaning of the Arabic word “hijab” is as opaque as the term “bikinis” is clear. But the ancient misogynistic traditions that spawned both are still very much alive in the United States as elsewhere where Christianity still reigns. The recent movement to ban abortion in the […]