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Post by Ian on Feb 28, 2006 13:58:53 GMT -5
And you know exactly what motivates Dumya ? And all his prayer, born again stuff, etc is all fake? Sorry I can't be that presumptuous - don't agree with you. For many of all faiths it is very real. I can tell what doesn’t motivate Dubya by his actions. By your anti-logic approach you should still be undecided on the issue of whether or not Dumya is a liberal. Bush’s father (who the left like to say Dumya runs to for advice) is not pro-choice. Dumya himself has stated that he isn’t against abortion in the case of rape, incest or the life of the mother; hardly the stance of a hard-line born-again Christian. Using your logic Bill Clinton fits the role of a right-wing born-again Christian. Just remember, talk (especially in Washington) is far different from action. I just told you what I think motivated the jackasses to enter Iraq and you backtrack!!! get with it. All this rationalization of all things anti-American has made your brain tired. This thread was about Islamic terrorism. Lets look back a couple posts: You said: “I admit we have less violence but that is not to say the people are very different. Rest assured we are pretty much like others.”I said: “You're contradicting yourself when you admit that violence is more prevalent with Islamists than with Christians and in the next sentence stating that we are all pretty much alike. Obviously not. In fact our extremists aren't even as violent as Islamists.”You said: “we have as many wackos as any other place but we have lives and supports, structures and prohibitions that make radical actions less likely.”
“But consider a radical thought for a minute, did not our needless invasion of Iraq kill and maim thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis? Get out your justice scale and weigh that one for me.”Either you were using the war in Iraq as an example that Christians are just as destructive as Muslims or that was the most off-topic meaningless statement in the history of debate. You yourself admitted, after I questioned the motives of that statement, that the war in Iraq wasn’t motivated by Christianity at all so I’ll assume is was just the disjointed drivel that we’ve all come to know and hate from you on this board. You still haven’t put forth one iota of evidence to support your claim that Christians are just as violent as Muslims. You, my friend, are the on who needs to “get with it”. |
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Post by midcan5 on Mar 3, 2006 19:58:04 GMT -5
Ian, the Bible is as full of that stuff as the Koran. We are not comparing bads. This is not a you are more bad than I am debate. Do you really think people differ that much? After you have lived a bit and gotten to know more people you may feel differently. I looked up your pictures, see the story comments in the DailyKos piece below. Kinda sad but interesting, a thousand years from now people will look back on our age as we look back at the dark ages. www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/22/102249/246"Foreign and outdated?" (none / 0) "When first reading this story, my first thoughts were how incredibly antiquated and barbaric both the charges and the punishment were. As I thought about it more though I realized in the U.S. it was only two years ago that private consensual sexual conduct was decriminalized, it was only this year that the death penalty for minors was struck down, and only 1996 that the last state-sanction public hanging in the U.S. took place. As a gay American, this story really hits home." Iran Hangs Gay Teens by specialtouch on Sun Jul 31, 2005 at 02:14:04 PM PDT |
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Post by Ian on Mar 4, 2006 16:50:21 GMT -5
Ian, the Bible is as full of that stuff as the Koran. Firstly, that’s not correct. I’m writing this in a hurry so I can’t get into a very long debate on that subject, perhaps we should open another thread. Secondly, even if I were to take your statement as fact, you would be referencing the Old Testament. The one aspect that differentiates both texts is the placement of the violent verses in their respective chronologies. “Fire & Brimstone” verses in the Bible are found in the opening section. In the New Testament, I think we can both agree, the verses become more “peaceful”. In fact that peacefulness has become the crux of the argument, however ignorantly, on the side of practicing homosexuals wanting acceptance in the church. This is not the case with the Qur’an. The Qur’an becomes progressively more violent. I don’t remember, please correct me if I’m wrong, Jesus ever stating that God will “cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” I don’t remember any talk of Jesus preaching that “The punishment of those who wage war against [God] and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned” The Qur’an is filled with 164 verses of this nature all focused on the principle of jihad. I don’t remember the Bible ever introducing the Christian equivalent of a jizya (an overbearing tax levied on non-Muslims should they not convert to Islam and not fight against the Muslims). These are not obscure verses in the Qur’an, these are basic principles that all devote Muslims must adhere to. Just some of these glaring intolerances, intolerances endorsed even by Muslim “charity” organizations wittingly or not, were highlighted by me in “Patriot’s Rant Thread”. You know, the post you conveniently overlooked.  Do you really think people differ that much? After you have lived a bit and gotten to know more people you may feel differently. So what you’re basically saying is there is no difference between the worldview of a Jew and a Muslim. There are no differences between races. Believers and non believers are basically the same. You’ve just hamstringed yourself with your own reasoning. This takes any stock the atheistic system has built up and flushes it down the toilet. If all people are basically the same, then Christians ought to fight tooth and nail to keep atheists from gaining control of anything, because considering we’re all alike, atheists will engage in the very subjugation of populations that they have been accusing Christians of engaging in. The idea that all people are the same negates the concept of forced diversity pushed by so many on the left side of the world. I thought liberals wholeheartedly endorsed that idea that “our differences are what make us stronger.” To bad they never bothered to tell anyone that those differences don’t even exist… When first reading this story, my first thoughts were how incredibly antiquated and barbaric both the charges and the punishment were. As I thought about it more though I realized in the U.S. it was only two years ago that private consensual sexual conduct was decriminalized, it was only this year that the death penalty for minors was struck down, and only 1996 that the last state-sanction public hanging in the U.S. took place. As a gay American, this story really hits home. This is a ridiculous statement. Even when sodomy was a criminal act it wasn’t a capital offense as it is today in Iran. This rather simple actuality is illustrated (even to the most inept of intellectuals) in the fact that no homosexual was ever executed in the United States for engaging in homosexual acts. The statement that you endorse, as you would say, lacks logic. |
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Post by midcan5 on Mar 6, 2006 20:27:34 GMT -5
Ian,
My idea that we are all the same is not as specific as your examples. We love, hate, fear, suffer pride or experience courage, we all hope and dream and work and like and hate and believe and not believe. We all do these things in various degrees and dependent on our maturity, our experiences, our childhood, our abilities we all do similar things. If we didn't life would make no sense, we would hardly know what came next. Do you not think all people are similar? Your religion teaches that. You must be as a little child open to life is one of its requests. Pick any person and soon you will meet someone like them. Are we exact replicas, no, of course not, but there are only so many things capable under the sun.
"I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member." Groucho Marx
"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them." Virginia Woolf
There is a quote I cannot find but I will paraphrase it, "rest assured, you can be certain of one thing you are very much like others."
The author is not saying they are the same, he is only comparing the nature of each.
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Post by Ian on Mar 7, 2006 11:48:29 GMT -5
Your assertion that we are all innately the same leaves only the Islamic faith as the answer to the exponentially greater frequency of Muslim violence than so-called "Christian violence", which is the point I've been making all along...
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Post by TNRighty on Mar 7, 2006 18:54:56 GMT -5
Medican,
I would agree with you that we are alike in as much as we all love, hate, fear, believe, etc. That's called being a human being.
Those emotions; love, hate, fear, anger, sadness, belief, etc., are common to all people regardless of race, religion, or culture. What makes us different is what we love, what we hate, what angers us, what we fear, what we believe. That's what makes you a unique individual, and its the actions that manifest from those emotions that make us different.
Some people love freedom and hate tyranny, and for others its vice versa. Its not the emotions that are different, its where they are directed that makes the difference.
America is the first country in the history of the world that was not founded to serve a religious doctrine. Our founders, who were majority Christian, put religious freedom above religious theocracy. I challenge you to find the word "Christian" anywhere in the Constitution. That establishment of personal and religious freedom allows Christians and Muslims alike more freedom in the USA than they have anywhere else in the world.
In America we don't have Baptist Christians killing Methodist Christians or Sunni Muslims killing Khurdish Muslims. That's because we are ruled by law not a religious theocracy. Your freedoms are independent from your religious affiliation. There are as many different sects of Christian religion as there are in Islam. Yet in Islamic countries ruled by a sect of its religion you end up with war and conflict between the different denominations. Saddam Hussein, a Muslim, has killed more Muslims than anyone alive today.
I believe freedom is the one and only common religion. America is the most religiously diverse country in the world. Sure, we have our own problems, but we're not killing each other in the name of religion. And the occasional Eric Rudolf or Timothy McVeigh are locked up or put to death when their religious beliefs run afoul of the law, even if they do it in the name of the Bible. Perhaps in a country ruled by a Christian theocracy, they would only be seen as doing God's will. But in America we don't play God. We protect freedom.
WE ARE DIFFERENT, AND WE ARE BETTER!
The radical Muslim movement seeks to establish Islamic rule.
My idea that we are all the same is not as specific as your examples. We love, hate, fear, suffer pride or experience courage, we all hope and dream and work and like and hate and believe and not believe. We all do these things in various degrees and dependent on our maturity, our experiences, our childhood, our abilities we all do similar things. If we didn't life would make no sense, we would hardly know what came next. Do you not think all people are similar? Your religion teaches that. You must be as a little child open to life is one of its requests. Pick any person and soon you will meet someone like them. Are we exact replicas, no, of course not, but there are only so many things capable under the sun.
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Post by TNRighty on Mar 7, 2006 18:59:30 GMT -5
Whoops...that last paragraph was a quote from Medican. I'm sorry to have that oversight disgrace my post.
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Post by Ian on Mar 8, 2006 23:14:48 GMT -5
TNRighty,
I take exception to one point of your post:
“Perhaps in a country ruled by a Christian theocracy, they would only be seen as doing God's will.”
Perhaps some would perceive their actions as God’s will; however, those perceptions would be without any Christian textual basis. Muslims are called time and time again in the Qur’an to “slay or be slain” for Allah. 164 times the diligent reader of the Qur’an is confronted with Allah’s endorsement of jihad. The
Muslims who kill today are not “seen” as doing God’s will, they are doing God’s will as it is spelled out time and time again in Islamic texts.
I should reiterate my religious position so that I avoid any claims of my allegiance to any particular group. I am, by all accounts, agnostic. I don’t hold that anyone can conclusively state that god exists, and in the aim of fairness I don’t hold that anyone can conclusively state that He doesn’t. Many argue that you can’t prove a negative, but until man has offered undoubted evidence to the non-god creation of matter I’m not willing to purport that that matter was indeed created without the presence of a higher power. However, where I have little use for religion, I have absolutely no use for organized religion. The Catholic Church has been a prime example, I believe, of the influence of human kind’s corruption.
That being said, I cannot believe any clear headed person could take an objective look at the facts provided of the great religions and the respective religions’ texts and the state of the world today and come to any other conclusion than that Islam is the most vile, violent, intolerant, sexist and yes, explicit trash on the face of the Earth. Islam must be commended, I suppose, in that it has in its texts left very little room for cogent debate. The tactics used by the so-called “radicals” are spelled out very plainly in Islamic writing. It is a case of either incomparable ignorance or absolute fraud for people like the current president to assert that Islam is in any way a “noble” or “peaceful” religion or one that “respects others” when even the most superficial reading of the Qur’an very easily reveals otherwise.
So I believe that attempts to dull the utter savagery found in the world under Islamic rule today, good natured or not, by claiming that that savagery is simply an exposition of the adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is both devoid the knowledge of the unmitigated brutality that is endorsed by true Islam and damaging to the supposed "goal" of Bush and the like, which they have stated is to rid the world of radicalism
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Post by midcan5 on Mar 9, 2006 16:12:42 GMT -5
Ian, then you can blame Islam if you can find a correlation between it and violence. In order for Words in a book to have meaning they need to become actions. If there were a correlation you should see it everywhere. Right? There is no more violence in Muslim neighborhoods in Indonesia or even in the US than any other place. Consider northern Ireland as area in which violence has been rampant, is that then due to Christianity? Or using your example of the power of a book due to the Bible? Hmmm... So maybe there is no correlation?
Tnr,
I suggest you check out "The Godless Constitution" if you want a clear picture of how we came to separate church from state - and how difficult that separation was. You also have to remember our founders recognized the consequences of the religious wars in Europe and acted in a way to prevent a repeat of the barbarism.
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Post by Ian on Mar 9, 2006 18:19:15 GMT -5
Ian, then you can blame Islam if you can find a correlation between it and violence. In order for Words in a book to have meaning they need to become actions. If there were a correlation you should see it everywhere. Right? There is no more violence in Muslim neighborhoods in Indonesia or even in the US than any other place. Perhaps the obvious fact that Muslims don’t launch jihad on other Muslims explains why there isn’t Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Muslim neighborhoods... Consider northern Ireland as area in which violence has been rampant, is that then due to Christianity? Or using your example of the power of a book due to the Bible? Before I begin my rant, I should say your cite of the Northern Ireland conflict is poorly placed time-wise considering the IRA in July of last year unequivocally renounced violence and ordered all its members to “dump arms”. However, the true face of the Northern Ireland conflict materialized after the British victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 which was the turning point of the Williamite war. To summarize, the Williamite war was chiefly an attempt by the deposed James II to regain the throne from his successor William. It was not a religious conflict as many have assumed, in fact the Dutch, who were Catholic, fought on William’s side. On the other hand the Jacobites included, in addition to Irish Catholics, English and Scottish Protestants who were loyal to the monarchy and believed James to have been illegally deposed. So we can tell that in a European context, the context in which it was initiated, the war was completely secular. Yet even in the Irish context the war was fought for Irish sovereignty and land ownership, ownership that had been significantly reduced after the Cromwellian conquest. The entire conflict stems from British imperialism, not religious fanaticism. While the conflict became easily recognizable when divided by Irish Catholics and Northern Irish Protestants, those involved very rarely classified themselves as such. Their official classifications were Unionists and Nationalists which directly correlated to the state of the British occupation, not their religious ideologies. That being said, even if the conflict was wholly a war between factions of Christianity, there would, I’ll say again, be no basis in the Bible for such violent solutions. There is no denying the violence present within the Qur’an nor the power of the Qur’an in the Islamic faith. You need look no further than the riots that claimed 15 peoples lives sparked by the mere allegation of Qur’anic desecration to discover just how much more power that “book” holds over its believers than the power of other religious texts. If you would like, in my continuing attempt to educate you on the Qur’an’s non-misinterpreted influence on Muslim violence, I can replace my long-winded posts with lists of violent Qur’an verses and ahadith. In no other religion can you find anything even remotely close to the principle of an offensive jihad or the phenomenon of a caliphate able to commission such jihads. The true interpretation and not perversion of the Qur’an is the rationale for Muslim aggression in the world today, there is no other explanation. Your attempt to juxtapose a regionally isolated border conflict with a worldwide conquest is obviously lacking historical awareness and I shant tolerate it. *I’m 100% Irish, thus my apparently “unhealthy” fascination with the Northern Ireland conflict.
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Post by Patriot on Mar 9, 2006 20:52:00 GMT -5
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Post by midcan5 on Mar 10, 2006 13:08:06 GMT -5
Patriot, LOL - that was funny.
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