I've been watching the Secular Islam Summit on the CFI YouTube channel. I watch almost only YouTube, I am such a child of the internet I watch the Horror Movie the Lawnmower Man, and when he says, "I am God here!" I felt it in my G-spot. Well enough about the internet.

Back to the CFI Secular Islam Summit.

So I learned a lot of things, and had a lot of challenging things watching these videos. For those of you who are not my Facebook readers, there will be one of the sessions posted underneath.

Some of things I heard that I totally agree with are that the Prophet Muhammad was not holy.

That pre-islamic arab and persian history are plenty to be proud of and should be embraced by arabs and persians as part of their cultural heritage.

It seems there is more to be admired in Xerxes than Mohammed. Indeed.

I love arabs and persians. I have found myself to have a fetish for these people. I feel so at home around arabs and persians, even as loudmouthed and blasphemous as I am. I yearn to see freedom from religion and freedom of religion in these people's lands.

May they shine as brightly as a thousand suns.

I have also agreed with the common thread of all the speakers that it would behoove the west to support secular education in the Middle East.

I heard lovely Q'ranic scholarship, which made me remember fondly my Islamic experiment.

I also heard calls for the Islamic practice of Ijtihad or islamic scholarship. Critical study of the Q'ran and Hadith in academia but with ecclissiastical consequence.

This is something that it may seem strange for me as an atheist activist to endorse.

But my father, Alan Neely, PhD. Director of Neuroscience U. de Valpariaso, has persuaded me that the protestant reform may have ripened the soil for the enlightenment, to see the authority of catholicism defiled, it gave people a taste for uprising.

This taste for uprising causes science.

This is my hypothesis anyways.

An existential yearning for change is what gives us the will for inquiry, inquiry gives rise to science.

So these are the things I liked.

Watch this session: (unless your on facebook, then hit the link)