"Praise Be to Somebody"

By Guest Blogger: Molly Seymour Ghahtani*


I have been taking personal notes on different religions and their meanings lately. Some of them plain piss me off, including certain points of my very own Catholic religion. I find it really, really hard to understand some of the justifications of beliefs of religious laws written by MEN hundreds, even thousands of years ago. But we trudge on, blindly reciting and following and kneeling and praying and hoping that all of this is worth something someday. I believe it is but there are some finer points I beg to differ with.

I cannot imagine that God loves one person on this earth any less than the other. Tall, short, Muslim, thin, fat, disabled, Republican, gay, straight, married, Jewish, divorced, Democrat, Catholic, happy, Baptist, sad, angry, Buddhist, male, female.... you get the picture. God is supposedly all-forgiving, because we are, after all, humans who inherently make mistakes. I make mistakes every single day. But I know my God forgives me.

I take great issue with the fact that religions, such as Islam, believe that their god, Allah, values the worth of a woman to be half that of a man. Pardon me, Allah , and all your worldwide followers but screw that that shit. I am just as worthy of the same rights, love, values, and respect as any man. And as the mother of two daughters, I am extremely offended that anyone should tell my girls women are less important than men. Because I have a vagina and breasts and can bear children, I am the lesser sex? I am not supposed to go pray to my God while I am having my period because I am "unclean"? Really? Because I find that absolutely LUDICROUS.


Why don't you tell my daughters that boys are better than them? Boys are entitled to more in life and they should be able to do it first. Tell them their opinions and thoughts come second to a man's. What god would do this? Not my god. My god values ALL humans equally. But it is a person's right to believe what their faith tells them.

I thank MY god every day for living in a country that allows me to enjoy the freedom to practice and believe exactly whatever the hell I want to believe. If I want to pray to Jesus Christ, Buddha, even an alien, I can do as I choose. America is an amazing place.But there are parts of the world that view America as evil. Even though we give them millions of dollars, purchase an un-Godly (pardon the pun) amount of oil from them, and stand at arm's length in fear of pissing them off. I am also in awe at extremist factions of "religions" who believe their reward in the afterlife will be duly rewarded should they go to any length to destroy, murder, even commit suicide to rid this earth of what an insane "fundamentalist" leader deems as “evil”.

Exactly what is the fundamental base for your beliefs besides your own personal agenda? You are fundamentally jacked in the head, in my humble WOMANLY opinion. This might only count for HALF of what you consider worthy of noting but I am sure I can gather more than enough members of my gender to double your worthless ideals. God, I love America....

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* Note from "The Sage". Molly Seymour Ghahtani is a suburban mom, originally from Michigan, married to her husband Sultan for 13 years. They have two daughters and live in the Chicago area. Molly says, "I teach dance part-time and love to write as sarcastically as possible. I tend to rant about what ails me (parenthood, children, drunk bimbos at the bar, etc.) with excessive profanity that might shock the mommies of some of my 3 year-old ballet students. The thing that makes me tick? Making people laugh!! Someday I'd love to write a screenplay, get a book published, or conquer something with my "funny" to make me end up on a red carpet somewhere. A girl can dream, can't she?" You can read Molly's blog and get a sense of her perspective on life at http://www.ohstewardessispeakjive.blogspot.com/

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Be A "Guest Blogger" at The Sage of Tampa.

After all these months of sharing my thoughts and insights about politics and culture with you I thought it might be fun to let YOU share some thoughts of your own here at "The Sage of Tampa". So, I'm sending out this invitataion to ANYONE of any political persuausion or any cultural bent who would like to be a "Guest Blogger" and has something relevant to say. Yes, whether you're a Conservative with an agenda or a Progressive/Liberal with a message. . .put it in writing and over the next few weeks "The Sage" will publish it. . .word for word. But there are just a couple of rules:

1. No f-bombs

2. No over-the-top name-calling (e.g. "those a**hole Liberals" or "dumb s**t Republicans" etc.)

3. Keep it to 800 words or less.

Otherwise- - -go for it.

For obvious reasons I don't share the site password with anyone so you'll have to send your post to me as an MS Word doc via e-mail to: hal_1945@msn.com. I'll publish it without edits (other than any overlooked typos or the like). Also, if you want to send along a short bio for "intro" purposes that's OK, too. I'm more than happy to pump you up a bit. I usually publish new stuff on Sundays.

First publishing preference will go to those with points of view differing from "The Sage", especially to anyone who can offer an articulate response to either of the following questions:

1. We constantly hear Liberals and others making comments about how Bush/Cheney ran all over the Constitution and took away their "rights". So what I want to know is: "What SPECIFIC Constitutional right did you have under Clinton/Gore that Bush/Cheney took away from you and by what means and- - - when will/did Obama/Biden restore that right to you?"

2. Liberals consistently brand Conservatives as racists and in so doing shift the focus of the Liberal-v-Conservative debate to race and nothing more inspite of the fact that the following CORE VALUES are at the heart of Conservative thinking:

*Self-reliance
*Personal responsibility
*Hard work
*Personal accountability
*Entrepreneurism
*Less government intrusion into our lives
*Neighborliness
*Valuing education
*Private ownership
*The right to reap the rewards of one’s own success
*The right to fail
*The right to pass these values on to our children without public intervention.

Without "playing the race card" can you make a cogent argument against those CORE VALUES? If you can, I promise you will be among the very first guest bloggers to be heard.

So that's it. It's that simple. Write something relevant. Keep it clean. Make it logical. Be reasonably polite. Support your argument with facts where you can not just emotions and rhetoric and your voice will be heard.

"The Sage of Tampa".