“…you grew up with freedom so you spit on freedom…”

From the Allahpundit:

Video: Cartoonishly anti-American Canadian interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Jul 13, 2007 6:12 PM by Allahpundit

Not quite parody but dangerously close. How can she be so disgustingly pro-American, he wonders, and yet so stridently anti-Islamic? Doesn’t she see that Islamists and “Christianists” are two sides of the same coin?

Things pick up towards the end but she never retreats. Just one of the many reasons she has my vote for the vice presidency next year. Click the image to watch.

“Is there a school where they teach you these American cliches?”

Atheist Hymn – The Book of Sagan

That’s the testament of Carl Sagan – I’ll come back to him in a moment.

I’ve been competing in a competition run by the CBC (Canadian equiv. of the BBC) on Facebook. The competition is called the Great Canadian Wish List. The top wishes in each category will be featured on a national broadcast on Canada Day. In the last two weeks, my wish has gone from 700th place to 15th place and it is still rising. More supporters are needed.

If I win, I won’t argue for the disestablishment of theism, the removal of God from the Constitution or the removal of the head of the Anglican church as our leader. I will not repeat the legion of crimes that go unpunished and unadmonished because of their origin in religion. Nor will I mention the names of Adrian Yeatts, Lisa Kosack or the many other Canadian children who died because of the vagaries of church-state separation.

What I will do is talk about the glory of a free humanity.

As part of that I will bring up the Golden Record. The Golden Record was created by the famous atheist, Carl Sagan. This record is placed aboard all interstellar probes – of which there are 5 so far – and contains greetings in 55 languages and songs from around the world.

It is right that it contains songs – these seem to be the easiest form of cross-cultural communication and maybe not coincidentally, these are often the first things attacked by the theists. From their moronoic condemnations of “devil music” to the beatings suffered by Afghan musicians under Taliban rule – religion is at war with music.

Here is an atheist’s contribution to that war – Sagan’s Golden Record / A Hymn to the Glory of Humanity:

Greetings from the Secretary General of the UN

‘Hello’ – Greetings from the people of Earth

Bach, ‘The Brandenberg Concerto’

Java, court gamelan, ‘Kinds of Flowers’

Senegal, percussion

Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song

Mexico, “El Cascabel,”

USA, “Johnny B. Goode,”

Japan, shakuhachi, “Cranes in Their Nest,”

Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux”

Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes

India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,”

Top 20! Atheism is on the march. Bite me Pastafarians!

My CBC wish (see the sidebar to the right of this) has made the top 20!  My wish was for an atheist Canada.  I’ve refined my pitch and found that this one below works best:

Tories, Liberals, Dippers – atheism is not a party issue. It’s an issue of conscience and admitting what you know logic is telling you – There is No God.

Issues that are backed primarily by the faithful will win this vote. Get atheism into the top 10 and make sure that when the time comes, and they get their day in the sun, the CBC will be forced to give some airtime to the 30% of non-religious and atheistic Canadians.

Click here to support atheism.

I try to never swear on my blog but …

these anti-anti-abortion people are assholes. Note the emphasis on the ‘these‘. I’m talking about the pro-choicers on the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish group on Facebook. [psst vote for my wish].

On the message board on the front page there’s a posting titled “Suggestions for a catchier name for the “ABOLISH ABORTION” ummm… group…“.

Here are some of the suggestions from that posting:

• Let’s take it back to the good ole coat hanger days
• Population control. Breed more Christians now!
• Want to have more sinners to serve our lord and saviour Jesus Christ? Abolish abortion
• mama why did you kill me ?
• Save the Little Bastards
• dumpster diving

You can read the whole thing here. I’m almost embarassed to share anything with those people. I hope none of them have voted for my wish.

The debate is really ugly – if it can even be called a debate. The pro-lifers have fallen back on religion and* [this part has been crossed out because Suzanne showed it to be false - my bad] the pro-choicers, unfortunately, many like those shown above, have been assholes.

There’s a good response from a woman named Karen Krisfalusi:

I’m not just a Pro-Choice woman, I’m also a Canadian and a citizen and a Parliamentarian and somebody who believes very strongly in trying to create consensus and pull people together. I’m troubled by interest group politics. I’m troubled by divisive social debate. I’m troubled by people who cannot acknowledge the merit in the position of those that they oppose, who cannot accept the ambiguity and complexity of some issues and be willing to support conciliary gestures, even though they don’t cost them anything but perhaps some willingness to acknowledge that the other side of the issue has some merit.

Kim Campbell when she was Minister of Justice

Keeping up the good fight

My wish for ‘an Atheist Canada’ has broken the top 30 on the CBC’s Great Canadian Wish List – we currently sit at 27.

The CBC has taken notice. Now’s the time, push us over the top, get us in the top ten.

From the CBC:

UPDATE: Our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. From the CBC homepage:

Keeping the Faith

Monday, June 4, 2007 | 06:05 PM ET

804 people want, A Spiritual Revival in Canada. I’d say this a pretty broad wish, hard to pin down what it means exactly. But based on the wall, I think what it’s actually calling for is a more “Christian Canada. I’m happy to see that one of the discussion boards on the site is devoted to how that might happen—people writing there seem to think that proving the existence of God might help. The discussion, though, seems to be driving a mass conversion to pastafarianism.

Speaking of Pastafarianism, there’s also a wish that more Canadians joined the faith.
Is it possible that this religious minority is attempting a takeover of the site?

A wish for a more atheistic Canada has also appeared. Proponents of this wish don’t actually want anyone to do anything, but they have begun an interesting discussion on morality. Robert Jago, from Vancouver, writes, “all morality comes from the physical world, either from our ability to reason, or from an intrinsic urge to do what is right and that this is the same across cultures and the same with or without a ‘good’ book.”…

Support Atheism on Facebook

Canada’s version of the BBC – the CBC – has started up a facebook group called ‘the Great Canadian Wish List’, where ordinary Canadians post their wishes for this country. The top ten or twenty wishes will be featured on a TV special on July 1st – Canada Day.

From 500 and something-th place on Friday, we’ve moved to #35 this morning. Vote now and push us over the top!

Please go on to Facebook and vote now.

 

Support Atheism on Facebook

As I posted below this, the CBC has a Facebook group called ‘the Great Canadian Wish List’, where ordinary Canadians post their wishes for this country. The top ten or twenty or so wishes will be featured on a TV special on July 1st – Canada Day. Please go on to Facebook and vote for my wish and get atheism front and centre.

You can also support atheism by visiting technorati and voting for my atheism WTF. Help get that on the Technorati front page, and on the RSS feeds of a million blogs and reach even more godless heathens.

Together we can beat Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, Thor, Zeus, Tyee, Joseph Smith and most of all L. Ron Hubbard.

The Great Canadian Wish List

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Hi! to all the CBC employees emailing this link around on their corporate email accounts: https://gwpilot.cbc.ca. Shouldn’t you be working or something? Somewhere in Nunavut there is a guy who isn’t bored.

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I found this on Ali Eteraz’s blog:

Diversity, the idea, is good. Diversity, the social engineering project, in which each colored, each religionist, each sexual preference, is praised for the simple fact that he or she exists, is a load of crap…

Ali Eteraz direct’s readers to a Facebook Group called “I Wish Canada”…

I Wish Canada is run by the CBC and allows people to post wishes and then allows users to add support to the different wishes. One of the wishes is to get rid of official multiculturalism – officially the wish is called “Celebrate what binds us rather than what divides us”. The wish is summarized below:

I wish Canada would do more to celebrate what brings us all together, rather than institutionalise everything that divides us under the cover of multiculturalism. I recognise our diversity, but I am tired of being forced to celebrate a system that forces us to find our own ghettoes and create 21st century tribes.

On its 140th birthday, I wish the use of religion and ethnicity by Canada’s political parties to garner votes would become a source of embarssment rather than pride.

I added my support to that. In fact you can add your support to any of the 474 wishes listed there. Come Canada Day CBC will be presenting all of the wishes on a TV special:

CBC News will be following the discussions on Facebook, looking for patterns and trends that emerge. We’ll also be reporting about the people behind the wishes on CBC TV, CBC Radio, CBC Newsworld and online at cbc.ca/wish. As Canada Day approaches, we’ll summarize the top ideas from Facebook, and come up with “The Great Canadian Wish List” just in time for July 1st.

Take a look through those 474 Wishes. The leftist ones aren’t doing so well. ‘Canada out of Afghanistan’ has only 77 votes while ‘More Liberty in Canada’ has 133 (including mine). The best one – “Privatise the CBC’ has only 55 (including mine again). Their wish is summarized as:

 

“There is no greater waste of our tax dollars than the CBC.”

I would encourage anyone with the time to go through the list, see if there’s one you can support, maybe if enough people go, we could let the CBC know just how out of touch they are.

UPDATE: I was looking through the groups I don’t like and saw one “Let’s Not Support Israel” . I took a look through the wall posts and saw that the top post was by a CBC Employee (someone part of the CBC network at least):

Zionists selfishness has exacerbated a colonial situation that may otherwise have been integrated without too much bloodshed. But no, they just *had* to have their own religious state. And to assuage our guilt over the Holocaust, the West gave them whatever they wanted regardless of who they displaced. Shame on us for wiping our hands of it like that.

I clicked on some of the supporters of that and found another CBC employee, ‘Alec Forbes’. Google his name + CBC and you find the personell coordinator for ‘CBC Unlocked’.

Anyhow, it’s not exactly a surprise, so getting back to business, here are my wishes (click below)

The CBC Really is Despicable

It offends me so much that I have to pay for the CBC. On the front page of the CBC’s new section, with nary a disclaimer in sight (e.g. ‘the views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of the CBC…’) there’s an article by Heather Mallick.

A lot of it is ahistorical nonsense, but three quotes stand out:

“I have long been puzzled by accusations of being “anti-American,” in other words as though it’s an epithet. I am anti- many things: Robert Mugabe, torture…”

Which is (almost) to say: what’s wrong with being proud of your white skin? She sounds like Zundell. It’s trite, but true, take out the word American and replace it with anything else. Try the word ‘Korean’ for example. Read it with Korean in the place of ‘American’, and try and not get offended.

Next there’s the obligatory ‘Some of my best friends are black’ statement:

[refering to Linda McQuaig] She writes, “I am not anti-American. I like many aspects of American culture; I admire many of its political traditions, its literature, its energy and its creativity. But I am opposed — fiercely opposed, in fact — to American exceptionalism.”

Finally there’s the statement that I’m contacting the CBC Ombudsman about:

I still don’t understand why Prime Minister Stephen Harper would call NDP Leader Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for daring to raise questions about our quagmire in Afghanistan.

The Prime Minister never said that. There’s no record of it, and before this article, there was not even an insinuation of it.

Do you know what the Hadith are? They are the record sayings of Mohammed. KInd of like the Talmud. The Hadith were compiled centuries after Mohammed’s death. They were considered to be true if the speaker could give a chain of reliable witnesses. I.e. Ahmed told my cousin Saddiq, who told Rahem, who told Akbar, who told me – so you, see it’s true.

The internet works like the Hadith. In six months, if left unchecked, the statement from Mallick could be accepted as a fact. I.e. I read in the Star, and they quoted the CBC which itself quoted Canadian Dimensions and so on…

The CBC is a partisan shill. But that Mallick article is ridiculous even for them. If any Canadians of American ancestry read this, it seems like you might have a viable hate crimes case. You can find that part of the criminal code here and the CBC ombudsman here.