Celine Leduc
¨
There are two kinds of scholars: scholastics
and scouts. The first group read what others have written and
regurgitate them back. They are like taperecorders. They faithfully
memorize books, trust what they read and rehash them. The second group think, question and
doubt everything. They are not satisfied with the conventional wisdom but
rather defy it at every turn. They do not believe what they read or are
told. They go deeper than what meets the eye and get to the core of the
matter. They take nothing for granted. They question the claim that God
exists, and then they question the claim that God does NOT exist. They are
thinkers, innovators, discoverers, philosophers and the true prophets.
They do not try to re-invent the wheal but try constantly to make it
better.
We can put a library on a few CDs and with a search
engine access anything we want with a click on a mouse. No matter how much
information you accumulate, you cannot compete with the information
recorded in a two bucks worth CD. That is how much scholastics are worth
today. Gone are those days we respected "walking encyclopedias".
Now any kid can have access to all human knowledge by typing a few
keywords on his electronic notepad.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by scholastic. A few days
ago a reader of this site asked me to debate with a Canadian woman who had
converted to Islam and was hostile to me without having read any of my
articles. Generally I ask people to read first and familiarize themselves
with my thinking before engaging in debate. If they want to refute me they
should at least know what the heck I am saying. Nonetheless, I accepted
the invitation and read her story
of conversion to Islam in MSA site, along with a few more essays that
she had written in preparation. This lady, who goes by the name Celine
Leduc, never addressed me in her correspondence directly. She sent her
emails to our common friend who forwarded them to me. However, she
insulted me from the start to the delight of her heart and as this friend
wrote: “she feels you are not a man of your word, amongst other
things I shall not repeat”. Ms. Leduc at first refused to
debate arguing:
"I have a Master's degree in Religion history and philosophy,...
I expect him to have the same type of academic background or higher.
Next year I am applying for a doctorate program so I do have the right
and privilege to debate people on my own level, otherwise what happens
it becomes an illogical free for all and I do not lower my standards for
anyone...After reading his email he only reinforced my thought that he
is a coward who hides as I do not know his real name nor where he lives,
nor his view on religion in general.
Upon the insistence of this friend Ms. Leduc laid four
"rules"
I stick to my guns, his full name, city he lives in, his credentials
(academics one) not the number of sites he is quoted on, and his stand
on religion. I am not interested in a person who is to cowardly to give
his name and where he lives... Celine
All she had to do was make a Google
search with my name or with
my site, and read any of my articles that are scattered all over the
Net. That is what I did. I searched her name, found no more than three
articles written by her and read them to find out about her.
As for my identity, I have never made any statements
about it being real or a pseudonym. (The less my enemies know, the better)
As for my address, I don't know how it would have helped the
debate. I found those demands irrelevant. Ms. Leduc’s
response was:
“...and all I can say,
is that when in the presence of a fool, I walk away. I have wasted enough
of my time with foolishness to last me a life time.. He does not want to
answer my questions, too bad, my credentials speak for themselves... I do
wish he gets an education in religion then we can debate otherwise it is
like talking to a fool... “
Needless to say that the discussion ended there,
before it even began. Ms. Leduc is not a bad person. She is involved in
feminist causes and she is also against anti Semitism.
How can a person with those views get involved in Islam? Islam is a
misogynist and anti Jewish cult par excellence. Ms. Leduc is a typical
example of a scholastic that I am talking about. She has education but has
no discernment; she has a degree but no sagacity. She loves the Jews and
she is a women’s rights activist, but she converts to Islam and claims
“God guided me back to my spiritual roots.”
... Was it really God?.... If you read her story you'll see that her conversion
was by impulse. She did not investigate the truth about Islam before converting.
Where she stands today is not very clear either. She
seems to be critical of Islam and says "I left the Muslim
world full of paradox and conundrums", and yet she bashes me for
"my ignorance of Allah" and for no disclosed reason she is
extremely rude and hostile to me - a kind of vitriol that only a
Muslim is capable of. Is this hatred a residue of her Islamic
indoctrination, or is it part of her personality?
Her testimony, now featuring in several Islamic
sites, continue doing the damage and misleading people. Not only it
encourages other foolhardy people to convert to Islam, also stupid Muslim women in Islamic countries
read these stories of conversions of western women and the pot of their
zealotry starts boiling, pushing aside the lid of moderation and they
become fanatics and terrorists. This is not an exaggeration. Read
the story of Asiyah Andrabi, a Kashmiri woman
born and raised in a moderate family of medical doctors who read a book
about women in the west converting to Islam and was so inflamed that she
went on to become a terrorist. Most likely the testimony of Ms. Leduc was
one of them.
Ms. Leduc equated me to the terrorists:
"This guy Ali Sina is inaccurate just as much
as the terrorist are, it is the two opposites of a long string pulling
to see who will fall first."
No wonder she converted to Islam. She is
obviously used to make her judgments before having knowledge of the facts.
She further wrote:
"Sina is I think an
atheist and more than likely very much to the left which does not want
religion hence also a threat to Israel as he will try to destroy the
State and its religion.. I do not like extremists on either side of the
debate..."
In Persian we say a donkey can be loaded with books,
but I will not use that parable here. The example that I would use is a CD
loaded with gigabytes of data. Despite all the information on it, it’s
just a piece of plastic, a polycarbonate plastic. It can’t think. It is
not enough to be loaded with information. You must also be able to think
and to discern.
Celine Leduc represents a typical convert to Islam. If
you read her
story, of after she left Islam you'll see she has been a religious butterfly all her life. She
has been in many cults and religions and out and obviously each time she
must have believed “God guided me back to my spiritual
roots.”
How can God err so many times? Or is it she who makes her decisions
lackadaisically, guided by emotions instead of reason?
God has given us
two eyes to look before stepping forward. He has given us a brain to use
before making decisions. Her statements
about me, without having read a single article of mine, tell us a lot
about her commitment to facts and truth. These are people who are too lazy to
think. They are not stupid people, they are not bad people. They are just intellectually
lazy. In fact once you read Ms. Leduc's story, you can't help but feel compassion
for her. She is a hurt woman. But she has only herself to blame. She is
hurt and if her treatment of me is any indication, she probably hurts
those around her too for reasons that are only known to her. Why? It's
because her approach to life is superficial.
She is convinced to know everything.
Ms. Leduc graduated at the age of 57. Good for her.
Better late than never. Now she is part of the clerisy, lodged in
cloud nine where we mortals, a.k.a. "fools" are not worth to touch her sandals.
She is too aware of her "credentials" and not enough of her
ignorance. Little she
knows that the syrupy stuff they fed her in the university as education was the watered down and politically correct apologetic nonsense.
What she has got is a Master's degree in lies. But she is not the kind of
person who would look beyond the surface. Thinking and doubting are not her
forte. She believes everything the establishment tells her. She is a
scholastic but not a scout.
The Persian poet Nezami tells us of the lover
Majnoon searching in the dirt. Someone asked him what is he doing. “I am
searching for my beloved Leili” responded Majnoon. “But Leili is a
pure soul and you look for her in the dirt?” objected that person. “I
seek her everywhere”, said Majnoon. This
is the way of a true seeker. And Ms. Leduc wants to know the city where I
live, what is my real name, my stand on religion, my academic background
and she has already determined that I am a fool even before having read a
word of what I say. How can you add to a cup that is so full?
Today, Ms. Leduc laments: "I had made many
mistakes and that I felt badly about them". Her spiritual mentor
told her that she should not worry because God would forgive her mistakes.
But God never condemns us for our mistakes to begin with. Instead of
seeking God's forgiveness we must learn lessons from our mistakes and try
to avoid them next time. Ms. Leduc does not try to find the causes of her mistakes and
keeps repeating them. "The Muslim world was harsh, full of rules
and I had to cover my spirituality and was left with little room for
freedom of thought", she repines. Why did you not investigate
this first? Would you dive head on before checking whether the pool has
water? "When I asked questions I was told to have faith in God and
to submit to His will. I felt something was wrong," she grumbles.
Why you did not ask these questions before converting? Muslims lie to
convert people. They are not to be blamed. Liars lie. It is up to us
to be careful, don't act on impulse and investigate the facts.
Why some people have to learn everything the hard
way? All she had to do was go beyond the surface, doubt
the conventional belief and investigate the truth like a scout. At any moment in her life,
even when she was committing those mistakes, Ms. Leduc has been convinced to be
right and viewed others as fools. Then as she hit the wall it became clear
to her that SHE was the fool. Despite that she keeps repeating the same
mistakes. After hitting the wall she changes direction, but continues walking blindfold. She acts on impulse, not on
logic or reason. She is a believer, not a doubter or a seeker.
One attribute of the scout is
humility. To know that you don't know is the foundation of all wisdom.
Willing to doubt what you know is the virtue of
the sage. Haughtiness and arrogance are the traits of the fool.
So, you are a doctor, a
nuclear physicist and a university professor to
boot! Congratulations! But how much thinking have you done? you
dismiss my site and say it is worthless. How much of it have you read
and can you prove it wrong too? What is the difference between you and Ms.
Leduc?
The world does not need more scholastics. In fact now
that the Internet is so ubiquitous, we can dispense with them completely.
What we need more are scouts. We need people who can get the information, process them and
come up with their own synthesis. The difference between scholastics and
scouts is not in their intelligence or in the breath of their knowledge,
but in how they process the data. The scholastics choose not to think.
They choose to accept the prevailing belief and are satisfied with the
answers that others have given before them. They do not dare to challenge
the vox populi and swallow the
conventional "wisdom" hook, line and sinker. They are followers.
The scouts on the other hand, choose not to accept the popular
explanations. They are not satisfied with the answers that are given to
them just because they come from “authoritative” sources. They try to
find their own answers and even question the authority of those sources.
They are leaders. They are the ones who shape this world, make the civilization
advance and make human knowledge grow. We owe everything we have, to them.
It is not that Muslims are not intelligent or there
are no scholars among them. It’s that they suffer from intellectual
languor. They perpetuate the lies and the fairytales that they have been told
since childhood lackadaisically. They are too lazy to think.
They are scholastis and not scouts.
Happy holidays and a good year to you
too and also to Ms. Leduc. She hated me with no reason, at least now she has
one. .
Ali Sina See
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