Salman Rushdie: The Belief In Free Speech Is An Absolute Belief or Not at All

‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ pulled by publisher

As a person of faith, I abhor frauds. This book always sounded fishy to me, and now it has been proven so. Sounds like a father was trying to make money out of his vulnerable child.

What I think of when I think of racism

We've had this discussion before on what racism actually is by definition. The discussion has been cordial and for that I have been very appreciative.

Today, I ran across an article which I do define, unequivocally, as racism. If you will notice, the article is from the Russian newspaper Pravda. For people my age, Pravda was the Soviet-era propaganda paper that no one believed, least of all the Russians. However, in the post-Soviet era, Pravda has occasionally had an interesting article or two, which is why I occasionally pop by there.

However, a recent article is, to me, the quintessential definition of racism. The author of this article believes wholeheartedly that black people across the world are not equal to whites or Asians, and that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that "all men are created equal", he was dead wrong. The writer correctly links Jefferson's belief in human equality to his deist leanings and his belief that humans were in fact created by a deity. The writer rejects this religious thinking as superstitious, and relies on evolutionary theory and genetics for his argument that races are not equal. Later, this writer invokes The Bell Curve among other things.

We don't see this kind of writing in American mainstream papers: most of our current complaints are about racist language concern the interpretation of hidden meanings, not shock at the blatantly overt screed.


Black anger and white frustration
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/02-01-2015/129423-black_white_america-0/

The shootings to death of 3 blacks in 3 separate incidents involving white police officers in America in recent months - and the killings of 3 police officers by black attackers in 2 separate incidents (in New York and Florida) afterwards (in apparent retaliation) reveal an uncomfortable truth which is not discussed in the American mainstream media. And this uncomfortable truth is that the American credo of "All men are created equal" is ideologically false, as it is not a "self-evident truth" at all but propounds a form of what I call "heterophobia," that is, the fear of recognizing the biological differences on the basis of race (and, for that matter, of gender, ethnicity, and the like).

As long as America refuses to confront this uncomfortable truth, the racial tension between whites and blacks will continue for decades to come, regardless of what the outcomes of the pending civil and criminal cases about the incidents will turn out to be. In the end, what is at stake here concerns the future of democracy in America and the world at large....

...The first false assumption is that all men are "created," because the Founding Fathers believed in Creation Theory. As I already explained in THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY (2002), the credo of "All men are created equal" as used by Thomas Jefferson fits well in his religious worldview with the Unitarian movement of the time, "in recognizing Jesus as a moral teacher and a religious reformer,...As he himself once said, '[t]here is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.' And so much religious was his life outlook that he spent the pastime in his older days to collect passages from different Christian texts into a collection now published as THE JEFFERSON BIBLE....Mark Noll, an evangelical historian at Wheaton College in Illinois, noted that Jefferson 'studied Scripture every day during the last 50 years of his life.'"

The problem here is that the Creationists accept Creation Theory as a matter of religious faith, but both the atheists and the critics regard Creation Theory as a product of outdated superstition. The debate between Creation Theory and Evolutionary Theory, for example, has continued unto this day...