Hi Addi; Re: "I guess perhaps the best would be to ask you, if you are so hot about Islamic teachings, and have such high regards for the teachings of Koran, would you like to go and live where everyone around you is following those same teachings (lets say Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Nigeria, Iran, etc.)? You will feel much more in peace with yourself knowing that everyone around you follows the same set of beliefs and ideology from treating women, to how to have sex, to how to treat a non-Muslim, to even how to beat someone, or how to kill an animal, etc."
I don't have "high regard" for the teachings of the Koran, in fact I think it's silly. What I have low regard for is those who would attempt to convince the United States that Islam is "satanic".
Re: "The question now is how one would define satanic."
It's not for you to define "satanic", it's in the dictionary:
Satanic:
1. Relating to or suggestive of Satan or evil.
2. Profoundly cruel or evil; fiendish.
Satan: The profoundly evil adversary
of God and humanity, often identified with the
leader of the fallen angels; the Devil."
Fiend: An evil spirit; a demon. The Devil;
Satan. A diabolically evil or wicked person."
dictionary.com
Re: "To me stanic is when a Koran promotes and advocates notions on beating one's wife, and providing a general sense that men are in charge of women ..."
All these things are in various parts of the Old Testament, which includes worse. Go to any atheist site and look it up, what the heck, here's some Numbers 31, King James Version, which I prefer for its beautiful language:
15: And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
16: Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.
17: Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
18: But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
etext.lib.virginia.edu
Re: "... when the notion is provided that it is OK to kill and destroy non-Muslims ..."
As I've shown already (see #reply-16543671 ), the quotes suggesting this were deliberately taken out of context. What the quotes said was that it was okay to kill non-Muslims in battle, but it explicitly stated that you must leave them alone during peace. The Koran was written down at a time when Islam was a minority religion. If it had included instructions calling on believers to be mass murderers the locals would have hunted down the early Moslems and eliminated them. What the Koran says to do is to fight back, and to keep your word.
Re: "... and when it provides a framework filled with harsh inhuman punishments of cutting ones hands, or head for crimes such as stealing, etc. etc. ..."
As I said before, England hung children for stealing bread in the 19th century. The Koran was written 12 centuries before that, what do you expect to find in it, instructions on how to fold peace swans from origami paper? The examples given are not "satanic", they are the normal condition of humans at the time the Koran was written. I giggle at the notion that the Koran was written by God, but to suggest that it is "satanic" is bigoted. Who knows what humans will be like 5000 years from now. Times change, and so do the standards we measure stuff by. I would not be at all surprised to learn that humans from some distant future will consider the concept of raising animals for meat to be a barbarity. Islam is out of date but it is not satanic. Someday the regular, everyday stuff we do will be considered out of date, but it won't be considered satanic.
Re: "If you think these are not satanic, then your standards of good and evil cetainly differs from mine."
Satanic refers to a form of evil that is at an extreme. What Hitler did to the Jews in WW2 was satanic. What's in the Koran is "dated", "obsolete", "ancient", "useless", "backwards", "violent", or "primitive", but it is certainly not "satanic". I'm beginning to suspect that you have difficulty seeing the shades of meaning between black and white. Perhaps to you, everything is either "good" or "evil"? That would be a rough way to look at things.
Re: "You are calling me a bigot, While you mock me for my national origin and not accepting me as an American citizen?"
I accept you as an American citizen. The fact is that we have our share of bigots. Most of the immigrants that come over here are bigoted as hell, but eventually they die and their bigotry dies with them. What do you think my Irish ancestors thought about the English when they came over? And the Norwegians, do you think they had nice things to say about the Swedes? (Don't laugh, Norwegian independence day isn't exactly celebrated in Sweden.) I could go on forever, but the fact is that we are a mongrel nation. This means that the passions and prejudices you brought with you from Iran will not pass on for very many generations. Look carefully at your children. When you talk about the old country and about Islam being satanic do you notice that their eyes tend to roll a bit? If you don't see it, then look more carefully.
By bringing up the subject of where Iran is now, I don't mean to mock your national origin, but merely to point out that your national origin has provided you with a view point that is ineffective. Do you think your viewpoint is so unique that we've never seen it before? Most of the people I've known who grew up in that corner of the world has shared your viewpoint about the neighboring countries and the funny thing is that every one of those countries is poor, backwards and violent. Why is this?
Each of those countries raise their citizens to hate those who are not like them. I guess it gives the citizens something to be proud of, given that it's hard to be proud of a country that is backwards, primitive and violent. My college buddies from Greece talked about how much they hated Turks and what evil, untrustworthy people they are. The Turks blew up the Acropolis, and that was hardly the worst. They repeated propaganda that shocked me. American children would never be taught in the school, by the government(!) that Mexicans or Canadians are untrustworthy and that killing Mexicans or Canadians (in peacetime!) was a patriotic thing to do. Neither is that taught in Mexico or Canada. The result is that our borders with those countries never have small arms and artillery fire exchanged. My observations here are from people who would have gone through the school systems in the 60s, maybe things have changed in Greece and Turkey since then.
My Turkish friend said much same thing about the Greeks. Frankly, I found the Turks to be the less prejudiced, but maybe that's because Greece was for so long controlled by Turkey. My Syrian friend mostly complains about the Israelis, but if you get him onto the subject of Turkey it turns out that they have a border dispute, and of course there is the issue of the excesses of the Ottoman empire. From him I learned that the single party dictatorship that controls Syria is technically the same party that controls Iraq, and that once had identical flags, but they got into some sort of argument. After that, Iraq had to add Koranic script to their flag to distinguish it from Syria's. Now the two countries have rather frosty relations.
Meanwhile, look at the Western Europe and the European Union. They don't speak the same language, have the same religion, or the same political party, but they're united where Syria and Iraq cannot! Do you think that the children of France are taught that Germans are "satanic", and cannot be trusted to honor permanent peace treaties? The history of the past 100 years would suggest exactly that. These countries fought hard (far harder and more effectively than Iran has ever dreamed of fighting) within a fairly recent time period, but their peace and prosperity is complete now. What happened to bring that about? Maybe you should consider the fact that Germany was garrisoned by U.S. troops for many years after WW2 and their children were not allowed to be taught in the Government schools that, for instance, Poles cannot be trusted and were the eternal enemy of Germans because they now occupy (and still do) East Prussia. The arbitrary borders, language, religious and cultural differences are still present in Europe (try to get an abortion in Ireland), but now Europe is peaceful, free and even the parts of it that once were primitive are catching up economically.
In WW2, the United States did not save Europe from the Germans, what we did was save Europe from the Europeans.
This is the power of the tolerance that you call "idealistic". Looks pretty practical to me. The historical record is clear, tolerance kicks bigotry's ass. We are rich (and powerful) partly because of our tolerant nature. Intolerance is what weak (and poor or illiterate) countries do.
What you're trying to do is to demonize the Moslems. There are times when this is a useful, even necessary thing to do, even for the United States. During WW2 the United States demonized the Japanese and the Nazis. But because of the underlying value of tolerance these were only temporary conditions, and as soon as the fighting stopped the demonization ended. The demonization never existed in our leadership, they just played along with for the public's benefit. So, for instance, they negotiated an agreement with Japan that left the emperor in power.
But this war is not comparable to WW2. In WW2 we had to fight two powerful, industrialized advanced nations. Now our power (military, econmic and political) is almost absolute. This is not a time for the propaganda of the weak, this is a time for the idealism of the magnanimous victor.
At this time our cause is being assisted by numerous Islamic nations. If we were to act as if we believed Islam to be "satanic", that assistance would undoubtedly disappear. If we were able to convince them that we truly believed their religion to be satanic, we could end up having to fight them all. We would win this fight, but it would be difficult and we would have to kill hundreds of millions to do it. (This eventuality would undoubtedly please some of the minorities in the Middle East.) In that circumstance, we would have to demonize our enemy, as we have done for every major war before now. But that is not the situation at this time. The enemy is weak, not strong.
-- Carl |
