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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (585683)	9/15/2010 5:27:31 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576348

"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." You are partially correct. In addition to that those regions, have a history of violent conflict with or with out Islam to blame. Circumstance does matter even though you would prefer to dismiss circumstance and blame Islam juxtaposed with Christanity. I will say this much on that. If the entire would converted to Christianity, then the world, conflict, the nature of human atrocity would not change one iota. I realize there are other conflicts in the world. It's just striking at so many conflicts involving Muslims around the world. 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.) The problem for you, and consequently for everyone you infect, is that literature is 1400 years old and attempting to find a genuine understanding of it by grabbing quotes off a hate blog is first, impossible, and second guaranteed to cause conflict. You find the resources you visit horrific because that is the intended effect of the promoters, not because the literature in any other format would bring that response. The idea of attempting to study the literature to get a better insight on how Muslim radicals justify their actions is recommendable but I'd suggest a more unbiased source. I know it's impossible with the approach you used recently. Is there such a source that you consider unbiased? I accept that you don't take the siras and hadiths as justifying violence (I think anyway) but we both know that some Muslims do. I can simply say I understand that they do and I don't see how it can be avoided since the material exists. "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.' Extremists do what you have done, somehow that doesn't clue you into the problem you are struggling with at all. Of course they do. Thats why I'm posting about this. The difference between me and them is I consider that stuff bad and they accept is as good. But I definitely see that simply reading it as written can lead to extremism. "You can think I'm just "attacking' Islam out of loyalty to Christianity. Absolutely, you have proven it to be true in several ways. The conditions in the world also bolster your confidence that it is the right thing to do. Blacks in Harlam had plenty of information about the conditions in the world to convince them rioting was the right thing to do to. People outside their mindset could see the problem differently. "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. " Irrelevant. Actually it IS relevant to the charge about my motivation. If I were motivated by a desire to attack religions other than Christianity, why pick on only one? "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." I think so too. And I suspect you have gotten just enough information to be dangerous and no more, if history is any guide. I suspect anyone reading the siras simply as written would reach my conclusion. 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. I don't really care and don't really think it is relevant. It seems relevant to me. The fact is, what you are doing right now is every bit of the pattern used to promote inquisition. In addition, you are identifying Christians who have been judged by Christendom to have been criminally extreme. Even though they were the Christian authority of that day. I'm promoting inquisition? I realize reading some of this material is painful .... but I think thats because of the nature of the material. About Torquemada, to continue the example, being a Christian authority at one time. Sure he was. But he's not now. Because when you get right down to it, there's only ONE real Christian authority that really matters and thats Jesus Christ. ------------------------------ We differ in that you are a Muslim and I am not. I'm not under any burden of having any particular opinion about Mohammed. I wonder do you really think any non-Muslim would really think gee, Mohammed was a holy man DESPITE that head chopping, warfare, torture? All that is irrelevant to the issue of holiness. I realize you think there are extenuating circumstances and are angry with me for not recognizing them, but why should you expect non-Muslims to do so at all?