To: Chris land who wrote (185 ) 11/11/2001 9:14:06 PM From: Zeev Hed Respond to Chris, are you familiar with the talmudic concept of "Din Torah"? But as an aside, my citation was not to paint Judaism as a faith promoting any genocide, far from it. The point was in response to Amein, that a single citation from the holy scriptures of any faith cannot be taken as the correct philosophy of the faith all together. How can one accept the tenet that Islam is the faith of "Peace" when one get to read about a new fatwa from a new mulah or imam proclaiming a new Jihad few times a year. If it was just one mad man like Bin Ladin, fine, but I was not aware of a "mad man gene" running through a large portion of Islam's clergy. I think that part of the problem is one of evolution, at their beginning, the new monotheistic religions, did indeed feel insecure in their long term survival and some chose chose force to "protect" or even expand themselves. Thus, those "Herem" dictates in the early days of Judaism on a number of idolatory tribes that were also trying to clip into the new religion with their idolatory standards and murderous deeds. In the meanwhile, Judaism has grown and learned to live and thrive, not by being frozen on a religious standard 3000 years old, but by adapting for a long time the dictates of the holy books to new ways of life (thus the Mishna and Talmud, and today even more relaxed forms of practicing Judaism). Islam, however, for whatever reason, is still frozen within that paranoia that everyone is after them (like other religions before Isalm), and it may take few more hundred years before it moderates and modernizes itself. After all, Christianity went through similar pains. Christianity profess to offer the "other cheek", but Turquemevada, the Spanish inquisitor certainly did not practice that part of the faith. Even todays, some segments of Christianity would impose a Herem (the English word is actually "excommunication") on other parts or on some of its members, some of the more extreme even find it justifiable to murder physicians practicing abortion.
