That's a long post and I'll read it and respond later. In the meantime, I'll just say I began looking into Islam in an effort to understand why there is so much violence today coming from Muslims - from the Philippines to Nigeria to Europe to the US.
It's clearly not just an Israel thing, not just an American thing, or a western thing. If it was why would there be so many atrocities in Thailand and Sudan and Nigeria and India ..... etc. It's clearly a Muslim thing.
And what I come up with is the sira and hadiths ( which are significant because they record Mohammed's life and words in order to provide a model of how Muslims should behave) present Mohammed and the early Muslims doing, saying and teaching outrageous and violent things. (Okay, there is the koran itself and the jihad concept too. I guess they'd still be there even if we could make the siras and hadiths disappear from earth tomorrow. But I find the siras and hadiths particularly horrific.)
Now I understand you and no doubt most Muslims either ignore these things or explain them away. If every Muslim did that, I'd probably never have looked into this. But there's a significant percentage of Muslims all over the world who take the atrocity stories, without the rationales and context arguments designed to explain the moral problem of the atrocities away, as guides to how Muslims should behave toward others.
That's the root of the problem imo.
You can think I'm just "attacking' Islam out of loyalty to Christianity. But note, I'm not saying anything negative about Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, etc because 1) as far as I know there isn't any negative info out there on them and 2) most important, I don't need to figure out why the followers of those guys are cutting peoples heads off in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Looking into it, I see Mohammed cut LOTS of heads off and that is presented in Muslim religious documents as being justified. Well, gee, thats pretty relevant. Heck, even you a moderate Muslim, I think, has defended Mohammed's beheading of an entire tribe as being justified by the times or context. I guess you have to take that position. And I think thats a problem.
Now you can "retaliate" by listing atrocities that Christians have done over the centuries. However there's a problem there. Let's take a particularly vile Christian - Torquemada. That he tortured people and burned them is indisputable. BUT no Christian today says what he did was right. No Christian teaches their children the Inquisition was a good thing and Torquemada is an example of how Christians ought to behave toward heretics. No Christian says there were extenuating circumstances and a context that justified what Torquemada did.
And the converse isn't true. As you've shown yourself, Muslims, even moderate ones, do feel compelled to defend vile actions by Mohammed and his early followers as being justified by context, the times, or whatever.
I don't know the solution to this problem that the world has. But I do believe its not in sticking our heads in the sand and pretending there's nothing wrong but hate expressed by meanie bigots toward poor innocent Muslims. |
