Heretics Verboten!

Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro? Another religious tract to study on Sundays.

All of this is kind of like religion, don’t you think? First you’ve got some prophets who come out of the wilderness (the political class preaching the virtues of the euro, come hell or high water), then what they say gets labeled as heresy by the faithful (by the “man on the street” who wants to keep his deutschmark), then the euro faith overcomes this persecution, establishes itself as the true universal teaching and becomes orthodoxy. Then the next voice out of the wilderness comes along and the game starts all over again, etcetera and so forth already.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t beleive that Thilo Sarrazin is a full-fledged prophet or anything (I just think he wants to make a buck, I mean euro). But he’s not a full-fledged heretic, either. And that’s something the euro high priests could never admit to.

The euro, in Sarrazin’s view, is just the old German deutschmark extended to a lot of countries with less robust currencies.

Germany, in other words, is being used as a guarantor of other countries’ debts.

“The German political class bet that the political union would follow shortly thereafter almost as a matter of natural law, because without that the common currency wouldn’t be stable. That bet has failed.”

Germans are hostage to their sense of not wanting to be responsible for Europe’s failure.

Germans are hostage to their sense of historical guilt.

“Pro-euro Germans are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands.”

“Angela Merkel to like the friendly woman on the navigation system in my car.”

Pope Too Religious For Germans

Always talking about spiritual renewal, faith, the heart, love, apostles, saints and stuff like that, many German Catholics were clearly disappointed with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to his homeland over the weekend.

“It’s like an obsession with this guy or something,” one irritated non-churchgoer said. “All he ever talks about is freakin’ religion. He didn’t bring up sexual abuse, abortion, celibacy or letting women become priests once. Boring. I thought he’d never leave.”

The pope drew hundreds of thousands of German faithful to services held on stops during his trip, including a final Mass early Sunday that attracted about 100,000 people to an airfield beside Freiburg’s airport.

Holy Water Frightens German Politicians

Large portions of the German political left have announced that they will not attend Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming speech in the Bundestag.

At least half of the Left Party delegates will boycott the visit as will over one quarter of the SPD politicians. The Greens will be protesting around the corner at the Brandenburg Gate during the speech.

“We have nothing against the Pope’s visit per se,” said one anonymous spokesman in clear and palpable angst hooded in black and lurking in the sinister darkness of one of the parliament building’s more eerie delegate seating areas late the other night, “It’s just that we don’t care for all those crosses and the prayer. And the number 7. And the garlic.”

“Er kommt ja nicht ungebeten, sondern alle Fraktionen haben zugestimmt.”

Islam Had Nothing To Do With This

And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Damn. They haven’t even cleaned up the crime scene yet, I bet, and it’s apology-ahead-of-time time again already.

You’re familiar with the process: Make sure not to offend anybody after you’ve been attacked. Apologize in advance for any crazy connection that crazy people anywhere and everywhere might want to try to make between Islam and Islamic terrorists. There is no such connection. How could there be? Religion has nothing at all to do with attacks like these. And that’s the law (the Islamic one, I think).

And besides, these weren’t Germans who got shot. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading commentaries like these while the gun is still smoking (should Germans ever get attacked here and commentaries like these do immediately appear, please correct me).

“It would obviously be wrong to blame Islam as a religion for this act. Many Muslims around the world distance themselves from violence and terror…”

Es wäre selbstverständlich falsch, diese Tat dem Islam als Religion zur Last zu legen. Weltweit distanzieren sich viele Muslime von Gewalt und Terror. Die friedlichen Revolutionen in Ägypten und Tunesien belegen, dass sich auch die muslimischen Völker nach Freiheit und Demokratie sehnen. Ihre grandiosen Siege waren die schwerste Niederlage für den Terror. Gewaltbereite Islamisten sind nur eine kleine, aber für Deutschland überaus gefährliche Gruppe. Die Behörden müssen alles tun, um diese Gruppe zu überwachen und zu entschärfen.

How can Muslims speak this way about Islam?

And not get listened to, I mean. Forget Sarrazin. More Muslim eggheads like this guy, please.

“In a sense, Islam is like a drug, like alcohol. A small amount can have a healing and inspiring effect, but when the believer reaches for the bottle of dogmatic faith in every situation, it gets dangerous. This high-proof form of Islam is what I’m talking about. It harms the individual and damages society. It inhibits integration, because this Islam divides the world into friends and enemies, into the faithful and the infidels.”

“I don’t like that expression (Islamophobe). A person who has a phobia is someone who harbors fantasies. But the dangers posed by Islamists are real.”

“You accuse your fellow Muslims of continuing to search for scapegoats.” “Yes, instead of seeking faults within themselves. Perhaps the process I experienced is the process Islam needs as a whole, namely that everyone looks at themselves critically and stops constantly blaming others for their own misery and feeling like a victim.”

“There are 1.4 billion Muslims. So what? The important thing is that in almost all countries with a Muslim majority, we see the decline of civilization and a stagnation of all forms of life. Islam has no convincing answers to the challenges of the 21st century. It is in intellectual, moral and cultural decline — a doomed religion, without self-awareness and without any options to act.”

“whenever Muslims seek to introduce Islamic studies into European schools or try to obtain nonprofit status for an Islamic organization, there is always talk of one Islam. The minute someone attacks the faith, they resort to a trick to stifle the criticism and disingenuously ask: Which Islam are you talking about?”

“My dream, in fact, is an enlightened Islam, without Sharia law and without jihad, without gender apartheid, proselytizing and the mentality of entitlement. A religion that is open to criticism and questions.”

“Most so-called reformers of Islam remind me of the band on the Titanic, which kept on playing even as the ship was sinking, so as to give the passengers the illusion of normalcy. The underlying problems are not addressed.”

“You criticize Muslims as a group for taking offence quickly and even savoring it. You have accused European liberal leftists of pursuing a “policy of appeasement” toward Islam. Why do you, as an academic, sometimes enjoy being the provocateur in a similar fashion to Sarrazin?” “You have to state your opinions clearly if you want to be heard. There are plenty of apologists for Islam.”

I like this guy

He’s so… German. You know, so provocative? I mean so Besserwisser-like (know-it-all) provocative? And in this case it’s all the more provocative because he’s provoking other Germans. You may not agree with everything this guy has to say, but it’s hard not to like someone who so clearly bends over backwards to be poltitically incorrect. And this is somebody from the SPD, mind you.

German Central Bank board member and former Berlin finance boss Thilo Sarrazin is now bringing out a book called “Germany is Abolishing Itself” in which, among other things, he warns of foreign infiltration/domination in Deutschland (wow, that’s a new one) – only this time of the Muslim kind. Yikes. The International Jewish Conspiracy is an established fact. But now the freakin’ Muslims are moving in? Like, I had no idea.

Die reine Lust an der Provokation treibe ihn zu „immer fragwürdigeren und menschenverachtenden Aussagen.“

I saw the light(s), and they were flashing

Frau am Steuer (und besoffen dazu), das wird teuer.

“The leader of Germany’s 25 million Protestants was stopped for running a red light while driving under the influence of alcohol, the Hanover state prosecutors office said on Tuesday.”

Wer mit mehr als 1,5 Promille Alkohol im Blut Auto fährt, gefährdet Gesundheit und Leben anderer Menschen.

Nix religion here!

Just like we knew they would, voters in the capital of atheism (and apathy) have pulled through again and voted against allowing secondary school children the choice of taking religion instead of ethics.

  

Ahmen, it's over.

 

And a whopping 29.2 percent of Berlin’s voters actually turned out to vote too, even though the sun was shining yesterday. Well, 29.2 percent is a whopping amount of voters over here. When the sun is shining and the discussion turns to religion, I mean.

 

It’s strange, really. There was a lot of heated debate about this so-called issue beforehand but in the end everybody already knew that nobody really would really care. Germans have trouble voting yes for things like free choice, you see (whether the sun is shining or not), but voting no here is always a no-brainer, regardless of the turnout, which in this case is a no vote, too.

 

“The opposing side scored 48.5 percent but even if it had inched ahead and won, turnout was too low for the referendum to have been valid with only 14.2 percent of Berliner’s 2.4 million voters ticking the “yes” box.”

True religion

It’s another one of these typical German moments, fighting about something that doesn’t really matter or mean much in the end anyway. But maybe that’s why Germans fight about trivial things like this to begin with. If it were ever about a real issue, they would have to take a real stand.

 

And the million dollar question is...

 

Anyway, Berliners are all up-in-arms (yawn) about a referendum on religion and ethics which will be held here this weekend. Being neither particularly religious nor all that ethical, this is the kind of referendum that’s right up their alley.

 

In a nutshell, students here are required to take ethics at school and have religion as an elective course they could choose to take instead. An initiative calling itself Pro Reli wants students to decide between the two courses, thus giving the religion course a bit of a push, I guess.

 

Not only are Berliners apathetic about ethics in general and religion in particular (60 percent are officially non-religious), like I said, they aren’t terribly thrilled about referendums, either (see Tempelhof). And being that participation of at least 25 percent of all eligible voters is required for the referendum to even be binding, the whole shebang will most likely have been for naught. So, well, that will make everybody happy in the end, I guess.

 

„Knapp 50 Prozent der Berliner sind für die Einführung eines Wahlpflichtfachs Religion – doch wollen nur wenige Bürger auch beim Volksentscheid am 26. April für diesen Vorschlag der Initiative Pro Reli stimmen.“