Following are excerpts from an interview with Lebanese journalist Ziad Noujeim, which aired on NBN TV on January 13, 2013.
Click here to view this clip on MEMRI TV.
Ziad Noujeim: "As far as I am concerned, nothing is sacred. Not even God – especially not God – if God exists. As far as I am concerned, if God exists, He is love, and love is not sacred. Something sacred is something unattainable. In my view, if God exists – whether God is male or female… If God created people in His or Her form, they should be free.
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"If He or She created the universe – no need to argue about the gender of God… if God exists, God is asexual, with no gender. I object in principle to the presentation of God as male.
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"As far as I am concerned, if God exists, He is not sacred. I reject that sanctity.
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"I reject the concept of treating God as something to be feared, and if you err, He slaps you on the wrist, crushes you, squashed you, and mops the floor with you. I don’t believe in a God who punishes you, mops the floor with you, makes you bleed, kills you, beheads you, incarcerates you, and oppresses you. I believe in a tolerant God, who harbors nothing but love toward His or Her creatures.
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"People live in fear. People eat fear, digest fear, and excrete fear. They live in fear. They seek something to cling to. People are afraid.
"I too am afraid – but at least I have the courage to say that despite my great fear and my great intellectual anxiety, I do not surrender to axioms.
"I use reason, and this distinguishes me from the beasts – with all due respect to the beasts, which I love very much… I have a cerebral cortex which distinguishes me just a little from the beasts, and which gives me the freedom of skepticism, which is abolished in autocratic societies, most of which are religious societies.
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"Who gave society the right to regulate sexual relations? Engaging in sexual relations is a natural right, just like eating. Why doesn’t the law place you on trial if you eat five meals a day instead of three, but does place you on trial if you have extra-marital sex?"
Interviewer: "What you are saying is very dangerous."
Ziad Noujeim: "I don’t consider it dangerous."
Interviewer: "How will we know who the father and mother are?"
Ziad Noujeim: "There is DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid."
Interviewer: "Fine, but there will be anarchy in society."
Ziad Noujeim: "And right now, society is so organized and so nice and dandy? Right now, we know who is whose father and mother? Who enters whom, and who exits whom? Who mounts whom, who sleeps with whom? You are talking as if we live in a utopian society theorized by Aristotle or Plato. We live in a garbage society.
"Anyone who hears you would think we were living in Iceland, Scandinavia, or Finland – in a country where, if you stood in a city square with 1,000 people, you could hear what the speaker says, because people are civilized.
"You live in a garbage dumpster. It used to be a flower, but they turned it into a thorn, and the people who claim to be removing the thorn from the flower are filthier than the thorn itself."
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