Ex-muslim: Personal accounts

→ A collection of short accounts describing the journey to become ex-muslim posted on r/Ex-muslim.

→ Shabbir Akhtar could no longer defend his faith in Islam.

→ Muslim apologist Farhan Qureshi left islam.

→ Palestinian Ex-muslim blogger Walid Husayin shares his story here on his blog. He was tortured and jailed for leaving Islam and criticising it, after release from prison he now recieving death threats from muslims and living in constant fear.

How many muslims leave Islam?

→ According to research carried out by the respected Pakistani-born American Muslim Dr. Ilyas Ba-Yunus (1932 - 2007), 75% of New Muslim Converts in the US leave Islam within a few years. Listen to the clip detailing this research (or watch on Youtube).

→ 70% new muslim become apostates in USA, 30-40% in UK! This is a iERA video in which a british convert Yusuf Chambers (now works with iERA) begging for donations and Zakat while stating this fact. Perhaps he was a bit naive and honest, since most muslims do not acknowledge the existence of ex-muslims. (watch on Vimeo).

→ Iranians are leaving islam in growing numbers.

→ There are certainly no penal sanctions for converting from Christianity to any other religion. In Islamic countries, on the other hand, the issue is far from dead. Ibn Warraq's Leaving Islam - Apostates Speak Out is worth watching.

→ Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves.

→ 2 million ethnic Muslims converted to Christianity in Russia.

Light Bulb Jokes

So I was surfing the fat atheist blog and came across this post. I LOL'd while reading and thought why not modify and add some more into the collection. Enjoy!

How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?

None. They just pray for light.


≈ ≈ ≈


How many muslims does it take to change the light bulb?

None. They sit in the dark and blame it on Jews.


≈ ≈ ≈


How many jews does it take to change the light bulb?

Agnosticism & other positions

Depending on the definitions of "god (G)" preferred by different theists, I could be labeled differently by different individuals. To understand how this may work check out other posts (Part 1, Part 3) in the series.

Consider the proposition: P = G exists.

Theism

If you think P is true, then you have a belief in god. You believe that G exists. If you do not have evidence for this belief then it's a non-contingent belief aka faith. You are a Theist. Degrees of confidence for this belief is based on psychological certainty which may differ for different religious individuals.

Agnosticism

If you do not know whether P is true or false, if you don't claim to have knowledge about the existence of G, then you're an Agnostic. Agnosticism is about knowledge claim. It means "without knowledge". Now you may have a stance regarding this proposition P or not have any stance on either side after all. Which gives us the following types:

• Agnostic Theist: An agnostic who is also a theist. Someone who has a belief in G but does not claim to have knowledge of its existence.

• Agnostic Atheist: Someone who is Agnostic and also an Atheist.

A general discussion on Belief

We need to have ideas of some basic terms before we can discuss atheism. I have given a structural definition with the set analogy. I also proposed a definition of knowledge (100% epistemic certainty) and confidence (< 100% either epistemic or psychological or both) using probability here.

What's belief?

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual accepts a proposition or statement to be either true or false. Any particular mental state of a thinking mind has a belief set i.e. A set of beliefs. Consider the set
B= {a, b, c}
Here the Belief set B has some members where,
a = the truth value of the statement a where A person has the belief that a is true or false. Similarly, b = truth value of the statement b where A person has the belief that b is either true or false and so on.

There are some beliefs which are contingent (depends upon evidence) and some beliefs which are non-contingent type. These beliefs are all subsets of the belief set B.
You could have an empty set B ={ } when you lack belief. You lack belief about statement a and statement b which were given in regard to something or someone.

Cosmological Criticism: Part 2

This post is part of a sequence on Cosmological Argument.

The Universe began to exit is the 2nd premise of KCA. Since the Big Bang theory is NOT a theory of the origin of Universe^[2a], it no longer holds much importance in Cosmological argument. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argues that The Borde, Guth, Vilenkin Theorem^[2b] acts as a empirical scientific evidence to establish the truth of this premise.

Victor J. Stenger in his most recent book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning^[2c] :

The conclusion that Borde and collaborators had proved that the universe had to have a beginning was disputed the same year by University of California-Santa Cruz physicist Anthony Aguirre and Cambridge astronomer Steven Gratton in a paper that Craig ignores. Being good scholars, Borde et al. refer to Aguirre and Gratton in their own paper. I contacted Aguirre and Vilenkin, the latter whom I have known professionally for many years. I greatly admire the work of each, which will be referred to often on these pages. I first asked Vilenkin if Craig's statement is accurate. Vilenkin replied:

"I would say this is basically correct, except the words “absolute beginning” do raise some red flags. The theorem says that if the universe is everywhere expanding (on average), then the histories of most particles cannot be extended to the infinite past. In other words, if we follow the trajectory of some particle to the past, we inevitably come to a point where the assumption of the theorem breaks down—that is, where the universe is no longer expanding.
This is true for all particles, except perhaps a set of measure zero. In other words, there may be some (infinitely rare) particles whose histories are infinitely long."

I then asked Vilenkin, “Does your theorem prove that the universe must have had a beginning?”

He immediately replied,
"No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time."

Vilenkin further explained, "For example, Anthony in his work with Gratton, and Carroll and Chen, proposed that the universe could be contracting before it started expanding. The boundary then corresponds to the moment (that Anthony referred to as t = 0) between the contraction and expansion phases, when the universe was momentarily static. They postulated in addition that the arrow of time in the contracting part of space-time runs in the opposite way, so that entropy grows in both time directions from t=0."

I also checked with Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, whose recent book From Eternity to Here provides an excellent discussion of many of the problems associated with early universe cosmology. Here was his response:

"I think my answer would be fairly concise: no result derived on the basis of classical spacetime can be used to derive anything truly fundamental, since classical general relativity isn't right. You need to quantize gravity. The BGV [Borde, Guth, Vilenkin] singularity theorem is certainly interesting and important, because it helps us understand where classical GR breaks down, but it doesn't help us decide what to do when it breaks down. Surely there's no need to throw up our hands and declare that this puzzle can't be resolved within a materialist framework. Invoking God to fill this particular gap is just as premature and unwarranted as all the other gaps.

William Craig frequently quotes Vilenkin in his arguments although Vilenkin dismissed^[2d] the existence of God as a cause of the begining of the Universe. But most recently in 11 january, 2012 in the New Scientist magazine^[2e], Vilenkin argued for a begining of the Universe.

Alan Guth in his Cosmic Inflation paper^[2f] wrote,

There is, of course, no conclusion that an eternally inflating model must have a unique beginning, and no conclusion that there is an upper bound on the length of all backwards-going geodesics from a given point. There may be models with regions of contraction embedded within the expanding region that could evade our theorem. Aguirre & Gratton (2002, 2003)have proposed a model that evades our theorem, in which the arrow of time reverses at the t = -1 hypersurface, so the universe “expands” in both halves of the full de Sitter space.

See Bibliography.

Fight Islamic Inquisition!

Fight against The Islamic Inquisition just got a lot bolder. Maryam Namazie amounced in her blog, International Day of Action to Defend Blasphemers and Apostates which will be organized on 14 March 2012. As an ex-muslim atheist I couldn't be happier to see this event. The recent disturbing development of increased harassment, torture, jailing and murdering of ex-muslim atheists to the charges of apostasy and blasphemy against islam in muslim countries reminds me of nothing but a death cult which is slowly depriving us of our basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to reject religious doctrines.

Maryam wrote,

Countless individuals face threats, imprisonment, and execution because of their criticism of religion and religious authorities. Blasphemy and Apostasy laws as well as uncodified rules imposed by both state and non-state actors aim primarily to restrict thought and expression and limit the rights of Muslims, ex-Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Such rules exist in a number of countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Yemen,Iraq and elsewhere.

Then she announced the initiative...

On 14 March 2012, we, the undersigned, are calling for simultaneous events and actions in defence of the critics of religion in order to highlight medieval laws and exert pressure to save the lives of the women and men facing execution, imprisonment or threats.

I fully agree. This is what we need. To put pressure on islamic governments not to practice sharia. No more sharia, no more human rights violations.

Whilst there are countless people awaiting punishment under these rules and regulations, we are highlighting ten such cases...

Read rest of the post on her Free Thought blog where she put a list of the victims of islamic blasphemy law. By the way, it seems that one guy is missing from the list which I pointed out also in the comment section. Not to mention, the Palestinian ex-muslim atheist Walid who is constantly living under fear after being tortured by palestinian sharia police. I know there are countless other victims of islamic sharia who could never reach us via news media. But we have to keep on fighting for freedom. Right?