[quote=“Tempo Gain”][quote=“BrentGolf”]
Just throwing this out there and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me some of the ideas in the Quran and the Al Bukari Hadith seem to be a tad negative.
[/quote]
You could say the same thing for the bible, so I’m not sure the answer is that simple.[/quote]
Well first off, that’s the false equivalence I was talking about. We will be treated to a whole week of the liberal media trying to muddy the waters with false comparisons to Christianity as if it has any relevance what so ever to the problem of islam and it’s violence. The whole, yeah but they do it too is pretty weak in my opinion.
Secondly, yes of course the Bible is just as bad, and Christianity has just as dark and savage a history as Islam. You’d really be splitting hairs to try to determine which one is worse, or which of the Bible or the Quran is worse. They are both just about equally savage and idiotic. But there is one very key difference here. Christianity has gone through hundreds of years of being ridiculed and demonized, to the point that now in the 21st century it is so marginalized that very few take it seriously enough to kill on it’s behalf. Some still do yes, but not nearly to the extent as it’s ugly past. The same can certainly not be said about Islam. There is too high a percentage of the Muslim world that believes this garbage.
[quote=“BrentGolf”][quote=“Tempo Gain”][quote=“BrentGolf”]
Just throwing this out there and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me some of the ideas in the Quran and the Al Bukari Hadith seem to be a tad negative.
[/quote]
You could say the same thing for the bible, so I’m not sure the answer is that simple.[/quote]
Well first off, that’s the false equivalence I was talking about. We will be treated to a whole week of the liberal media trying to muddy the waters with false comparisons to Christianity as if it has any relevance what so ever to the problem of islam and it’s violence. The whole, yeah but they do it too is pretty weak in my opinion. [/quote]
It’s not a false equivalence at all. It couldn’t be a truer equivalence. I’ll quote your post in its entirety
Probably, no argument here.
[quote]Now granted I’m not a religious scholar, but I have read a few books that at least for my part seem to point a finger in an uncomfortable direction. Just throwing this out there and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me some of the ideas in the Quran and the Al Bukari Hadith seem to be a tad negative.
Some might argue almost anti-humanist in nature. Now of course no liberal media source would dare utter those words, but perhaps we can call a spade a spade? Nah, let’s wait a few decades, see how this all plays out. [/quote]
You’re drawing a direct connection here between negative ideas in the Quran and terrorist violence. I pointed out that negative ideas in the Bible do not seem to lead to terrorist attacks in the same degree. What’s false about that?
I really don’t desire to argue with you on these points; I basically agree with you. But you’re proving my point here, that there is more to this than simply words in a book. That’s all I’m saying–there’s more to what’s going on here than words in a book, and it does behoove us to try to determine exactly what that is.
Christianity isn’t derived from the Old Testament. That’s why it’s called the Old Testament. It’s derived from the New Testament, primarily the Gospels of Jesus Christ. A lot of Christians aren’t clear on that concept either, despite clear messages in the Gospels attesting otherwise.
And as far as “bad parts” of the Gospels of Jesus Christ go i have to say I haven’t found any yet. Maybe I’ve missed something. So if Christians are busy going biblical by demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth it’s not because they’re being Christians. It’s because they’re not listening.
[quote=“BrentGolf”] I’ve not said anything like that, but thanks for proving my point. You’ve beautifully demonstrated the problem of Western liberals.
Channeling our inner Ben Affleck. Do you mean ALL? Are you saying ALL? Did you say ALL? Oh it’s ALL right? Oh I see, ALL Muslims are bad. Yeah, this guy thinks ALL Muslims are bad. See, see, bigot, disgusting, gross, RACIST ! [/quote]
Thanks for that rant. Feel better?
And what was it you exactly said?
You said that the violence is not limited to ISIS or a few bad apples. So if the violence is not limited to those who are committing the violence, who else are you including?
It’s not hard when you articulate your point clearly. You didn’t in the statement I inquired about. You do in the following statement.
I see where people get the notion that Islam is to blame, but it’s not. The extremists who resort to violence are to blame. Like Islam, Christianity has more than enough vile ideas in its sacred texts. Christianity fought its war against its extremists and won. Now the vile stuff is ignored. Islam is fighting that kind of war now. If the moderates win the war against the extremists, it’s not impossible to imagine the violence will go away. And if that happens I imagine all the other repressive aspects of the religion will slowly fade away, too. Modern New England is a much different, and better, place than when it was ruled by Puritans, and yet the vast majority of New Englanders are still Christian. I’m sure once the extremists are defeated, the Islamic world will also be a better place and the people living there will still be Muslims.
I think one problem we face now is that technology can amplify the actions of Islamic fundamentalists in terms of their lethal effects, along with globalization and migration spreading their reach into our more secular
Regions.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]I think one problem we face now is that technology can amplify the actions of Islamic fundamentalists in terms of their lethal effects, along with globalization and migration spreading their reach into our more secular
Regions.[/quote]
Basically they are medieval bastards with modern weapons.
That’s another thing to control: weapons sells and distribution.
Are you suggesting all or most Muslims are responsible for the violence committed by some Muslims?[/quote]
I’ve not said anything like that, but thanks for proving my point. You’ve beautifully demonstrated the problem of Western liberals.
Channeling our inner Ben Affleck. Do you mean ALL? Are you saying ALL? Did you say ALL? Oh it’s ALL right? Oh I see, ALL Muslims are bad. Yeah, this guy thinks ALL Muslims are bad. See, see, bigot, disgusting, gross, RACIST !
No my friend, I did not say all or most. Surprisingly, I said exactly what I said. I don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand. I have no issue with Muslims as I’m sure the vast majority of Muslims are perfectly peaceful and lovely people. I do however have an issue with religion in general and the core tenants of Islam specifically, and I find it unfortunate that a not so small percentage of the population in the 21st century still take these beliefs rather seriously.[/quote]
Exactly. Everyone knows it’s not all muslims. But to quote Bill Maher “Islam is the mother load of bad ideas”.
Most of the Middle East should be re-named the Middle Ages.
Don’t worry . they are working on bombing the rest of the middle east into the stone age as well. And when it happens ,you can feel even a greater sense of self worth from the accomplishments your team has achieved.
I also don’t wish to argue about such topics, but people are in fact dying all around the world over this crap so it’s worth a mention at least. With all due respect to you sir because I do like you and respect your opinions a lot, based on reading your comments I feel it’s unlikely you’ve actually read any of the books you are speaking about. You may have read the Bible, but it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve read the Quran or Hadith. If you had, I’m positive that an intelligent person such as yourself would be able to immediately distinguish between these sets of ideas.
To be clear, both the Quran / Hadiths and the Bible are about equally the mother-load of bad ideas. ( by the way, that quote was from Sam Harris, not Bill Maher ) As I said, you’d really be splitting hairs to try to declare the winner of the savagery competition. But to somehow try to equate these two religions is in my humble opinion an irrelevant false equivalence. Religions are like “Sports” and they aren’t all the same. There is a difference between bowling, baseball, and UFC mixed martial arts.
Are you telling me that a smart guy like you can’t see the difference between the life example of Jesus, and the life example of Muhammad? Is that what its come to? That we as western liberals are so terrified to risk offending that we refuse to see the stark differences in the lives of Jesus and Muhammad which are the very basis of the religions?
So yes, Christianity is horrible and has done unspeakable things. More in the past, far less today, which is very relevant by the way, but yes Christianity is chalk full of bad ideas. But virtually every Christian alive today will tell you that the heart of Christianity is following the examples of Jesus. Not Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Jesus and his life and teachings.
Care to venture a guess who a large percentage of Muslims say to follow the life example of? And what happens when people believe and actually do follow the life example of the prophet Muhammad? Or what happens when people actually do believe and practice Sharia law? What happens when people actually do believe in martyrdom and Jihad and paradise and the fast track to getting there through killing infidels?
I can’t be any more clear on this. I have absolutely no problem with Muslims or Christians or atheists. People are people, and capable of the full spectrum of behavior. There is nothing inherently violent about a Muslim, and there’s nothing inherently good about a Buddhist or a Jain or an atheist. An overwhelming majority of Muslims are good, great people in my books.
I’m talking about specific ideas that lead to specific consequences in the real world, especially in the 21st century with modern technology. I am attacking ideas, not people. We have to call it what it is on it’s face in order to open up a meaningful dialogue.
What exactly did the Coalition of the Willing expect would happen when it took sides in the thousand year religious war between Zionism and Wahhabism? That religious zealots would play fair and stay on side?
When you’re on a mission from Yahweh/Allah you make the rules and mere human-made rules mean nothing.
[quote]We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.[/quote]
I also don’t wish to argue about such topics, but people are in fact dying all around the world over this crap so it’s worth a mention at least.[/quote]
Absolutely, but the reason I said that is because I mostly agreed with what you said in that last paragraph there, not because it’s not worth discussing, or arguing.
Thank you. I haven’t in the case of the Koran, and am not of a mind to, but I’ve seen some brutal quotes, and some brutal quotes from the bible.
Thank you, that’s basically all I said, all I meant, and I continue to assert it.
I’m not trying to equate the two religions, nor did I say I was. I ask you to go back to what I actually said please, and what I was responding to. I’ll say it again–there’s more to this than just words in a book, and that potentially encompasses every aspect of how these religions are practiced including their writings, beliefs, teachings, other social factors, history, you name it.
[quote=“Winston Smith”]What exactly did the Coalition of the Willing expect would happen when it took sides in the thousand year religious war between Zionism and Wahhabism? That religious zealots would play fair and stay on side?
[/quote]
Wahabbism: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab 1703-1792; pact with ibn Saud to establish salafism (Wahhabism) as official Saudi doctrine, 1744.
Zionism:
Wiki
Between the end of the Third Jewish-Roman War in 136 AD, and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, there haven’t been any Zionist/Jewish wars against anyone, because the Jews didn’t have any land to defend.
As well, they were too busy trying to avoid the oft-murderous attentions of Dar al-Islam and Christendom. Those two indeed were/are engaged in a thousand-year-plus war (on and off); the Jews were basically used as scapegoats by both sides.
And just a note to anyone, it’s “mother-lode” , from gold-mining.
I think if we were having this conversation in person we would have this misunderstanding licked in about 10 minutes, but on a forum things do seem to get lost in the process…
Your quote above there has hit the nail on the head, but it seems it may have been inadvertent. I agree 100% that if the bad ideas in the Bible were “equivalent” to the bad ideas in the Quran, we would expect similar manifestations of those ideas in the real world. The fact that we clearly don’t see anything even remotely resembling equality in number of terrorist attacks and membership to terrorist groups, it seems clear it’s not a “true equivalence” as you put it.
We wouldn’t expect people who follow the life example of Jesus Christ to be killing cartoonists, throwing gays from roof tops, beheading apostates, enslaving woman, or killing 129 people in Paris screaming religious quotes avenging Jesus. If they were doing those things, we would most certainly have grounds to say they have grossly misinterpreted the teachings of Jesus. Just like those so called Buddhists have clearly grossly misinterpreted the teachings of Buddha when killing in his name.
All I’m saying is, take a few months and read the Quran and Hadith, and report whether you think the tens of millions of Islamists around the world have grossly misinterpreted the teachings of Muhammad. I’m not being argumentative, I’m truly interested in hearing your views after reading them. Very hard reads, but worth it. Let me know if you think ISIS is way out to lunch on how they “interpreted” martyrdom, Jihad, and Sharia. And of course it’s not just ISIS. Do you think Boco Haram, Al-nusra, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc have grossly misinterpreted it? Is this some mass delusion, or is there perhaps a grounding in scripture for what they are doing today?
You know I’m an Atheist so clearly I believe neither have a leg to stand on, but I strongly support peoples right to practise any religion they like. Beliefs form actions, and we should have freedom to criticize bad ideas as much as we want.
First of all, unlike those old Gnostic heretics the Marcionites, who believe Jesus came down to earth to defeat that evil demiurge Yahweh, (small ‘o’) orthodox Christians believe that the God of the Old and New Testaments are one and the same.
Therefore Jesus’s Dad is the guy who ordered the slaughter of the Egyptian first-born, the genocide in Canaan- slaughter of all men, women, children, and even animals- including the famous story of the Midianites, where Yahweh gets so upset that the Israelites haven’t slaughtered all the males, including the new-borns, plus all the women who had lain with a man, that He threatened them with plague unless they split the skulls of old ladies, rammed spears into the bellies of pregnant women- not too pro-life, the Lord- and tore baby boys from their mothers’ breasts and “smash the heads of their little ones against the rocks” as that beautiful Psalm 137 goes (somehow no-one, not even Boney M., quotes that last line).
This is the same loving forgiving guy who appears in the New Testament, but Christians don’t get to repudiate the God of the OT on the grounds that He’s mellowed out a lot lately - like those old Nazi death camp guards who get hauled away while the neighbors say “He was such a nice old man- kind to kids and dogs”.
Not that it matters, because as soon as Christians got their hands on a bit of power they began to ignore everything Jesus taught, in this case by introducing the concept of the “just war”, which in practice meant “just 'cause we want to”. For the next 1500 years when it came time for torture, war, massacre, crusades, anti-Jewish pogroms, slavery, and genocide, they somehow managed to ignore/adapt the words of Christ to the purpose of the day.
During the Crusades against the Albigensians, the Cistercian Abbot Arnauld Almaric, appointed commander by the Pope, reported to his boss (to the latter’s great satisfaction) of the Massacre of Beziers
He also produced the famous quote, when asked about the difficulty of distinguishing between Catholics and Cathar heretics “Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His.”
What caused the Christian religion to become house-broken was not the teachings of Christ, but the general revulsion against the Wars of Religion, which caused the death of a larger percentage of the population of Europe than WWII. After that the Enlightenment came along, people stopped taking religion so seriously, and began killing each other over questions of nationality and ideology.
So there’s nothing about the words of Moses, Mohammed , or Jesus, that particularly causes or stops people from killing each other in greater numbers. It’s just that the Muslims, unlike most Christians, still take it all seriously.
Jesus committed an awful lot of microaggressions. They nailed him to the cross because he wouldn’t shut the hell up. Because the whole point of microaggressions is the disproportionate response.
Unlike other prophets there’s nothing in the words of Jesus Christ which encourages people to kill for religion or God, unless I’ve missed something. Christianity is predicated on the belief that what was acceptable under the Old Testament is no longer acceptable under the New Testament so conflating the two isn’t accurate, despite countless examples of self-proclaimed Christians who have – and continue to – do just that in their actions and statements.
[quote]Matthew 19:7
“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
Matthew 19:9
I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery."
Mark 10:5
“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.[/quote]
[/quote]
