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Topic Review (Newest First)
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| Aug 31st, 2006 03:54 AM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
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| Aug 30th, 2006 08:39 PM | ||
| DuFresne |
That's true! I've seen 'em headbang to it! 
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| Aug 30th, 2006 08:33 PM | ||
| Courage the Cowardly Dog |
fundamentalists of any religion are gonna be a little odd to the average person. Fundamental Muslims (to say Wahabi Islam) by the Koran must be prejudiced against jews whom some were turned into rats and pigs, and believe tha Muslims will one day conquer the world. Also if you don't decapitate or crucify a christian or jew they will come back from the dead and hunt you down. (that's why Sudan still has crucifictions) Fundamental Mormons must practice polygamy and follow a modern prophet as if his word were from the mouth of God, can't drink coffee, and believe God is from the planet Kolob, that black people are the reincanation of fallen angels and will turn white if converted, and actually think Christian rock counts as "rock". |
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| Aug 30th, 2006 08:33 PM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
So what's happened since 2002 to make this article irrelevant? Articles like this are a dime a dozen now, but it made a pretty bold statement when it was published. For the record, there's nothing wrong with the Koran (as long as you stick to the even pages, and replace all mention of pigs and infidels with flowers and fruits) |
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| Aug 30th, 2006 07:05 PM | ||
| Dr. Boogie | So, is this a thread about how that show Mr. Ed was a metaphor for Islam? | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 03:35 PM | ||
| Sethomas | Conus, you'd be wise to stick with ctrl+p&v, just preferably elsewhere. | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 03:18 PM | ||
| DuFresne | In fact, he was probably just being an asshole... | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 03:17 PM | ||
| DuFresne |
 uhhh... I don't think he was actually relating the Koran's age to its holiness there, friend...
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| Aug 30th, 2006 03:02 PM | ||
| conus |
Quote:
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| Aug 30th, 2006 02:30 PM | ||
| Dr. Boogie |
Quote:
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| Aug 30th, 2006 11:37 AM | ||
| CaptainBubba | Racist | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 10:51 AM | ||
| conus |
Well, the article was written in 2002, but I guess it really wouldn't matter when it was written. It's timeless, as is the Koran, which I guess was the point. I guess what frightens me is that when I listen to these moderate westernized voices of Islamic reason you so often see on television, I know that they're not really Muslims. Or, rather, their beliefs are not reflective of what is so often preached and believed throughout the world. To get an idea of how dangerous as a group they really are, go into a small town in the rural south, find a member of a Pentecostal church and try to convince him that Noah did not, in fact, load a mated pair of every living species of animal on earth into his ark. Suggest to him that Jonah did not live for forty days in the belly of a great fish. As moronic as fundamentalist Christians can be, they're generally more flexible and open to new information than their Islamic counterparts. At least the majority of them wouldn't prevent children from being vaccinated against disease, for example, and most of them haven't yet killed over their beliefs. The Koran teaches that we infidels are to be allowed only conversion, slavery or death. It teaches this to people, some of whom are deeply offended by the photographic image of a pig. [/i] |
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| Aug 30th, 2006 10:28 AM | ||
| DuFresne | Is this what "The Satanic Verses" was about? I regret to say I'm kind of ignorant to the whole thing. :/ | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 09:45 AM | ||
| Sethomas | I don't see why Mohammed would quote a 21st-Century Bishop of Rome, so... | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 08:51 AM | ||
| conus | The Koran or the article? | |
| Aug 30th, 2006 08:26 AM | ||
| Sethomas |
"...says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger" When the fuck was this written? I think that old Joe has had a minor change of name and office since April 2005. |
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| Aug 30th, 2006 08:03 AM | ||
| conus |
Use of Nuclear Weapons Inevitable? Having once been forced to read the Koran in a Western Religion class I've been a little uneasy about this for a while. Found this in the National Review. September 23, 2002 9:00 a.m. Not Peace-Loving, After All: Is Islam itself a threat? Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer Most Americans have a benignly positive attitude toward religion, one that holds faith to be a good thing for the commonweal, regardless of sectarian particulars. Norman Rockwell's famous "Freedom of Worship" painting captures this nicely, while Eisenhower's remark — "I believe every American should have a religious faith, and I don't care what it is" — does so a little more clumsily. That tolerant, pro-religion view has served America well over time, but one cannot help wondering if our civic piety, allied with political correctness, is blinding us to some hard questions about Islam — questions upon which the survival of our civilization depends. I don't know many non-Muslims who believe President Bush's politically necessary but theologically nonsensical proclamation that, "Islam means peace." But there are many more who take comfort in the belief that the threat to America comes not from Islam itself, but from an extremist form of the religion espoused by terrorists and their small but vocal band of supporters. That's certainly the line taken by the mainstream media, who seem so afraid of sparking American bigotry against Muslim citizens that they have largely resisted critical analysis of Islamic writings, practice, and history. What if they are wrong? What if the threat is not extremist Islam, but Islam itself? That's the view set out by author Robert Spencer in his new book, Islam Unveiled, a relatively short, plainspoken analysis of the Islamic faith and the challenge it poses to pluralist democracy. Warns Spencer, "The culture of tolerance threatens to render the West incapable of drawing reasonable distinctions. The general reluctance to criticize any non-Christian religion and the almost universal public ignorance about Islam make for a lethal mix." This is a deeply unsettling little volume, because it offers scant hope that the West can live at peace with Islam unless the religion changes radically, and even less hope that that is possible. Still, the questions Islam Unveiled poses and the answers it provides are hard to dismiss, and given the urgency of the times, necessary to ask. As Spencer writes, "This is not in order to incite thugs to attack Muslims on the street, but to look squarely at what the West is up against." If Spencer is right, the West faces a primitive, violent, and fiercely chauvinistic religion whose followers, to the extent that they are pious adherents to its teachings, cannot be reasoned with, only resisted. Islam is at its core inimical to democracy and human rights as we in the West understand them. To expect Muslims to drop their belligerence toward the West, which has existed since Islam's founding in the 7th century, is to expect them to jettison core values of their faith — something for which there is no precedent in Islamic history. The Koran, writes Spencer, is more central to the Islamic faith than the Bible is to Christianity. Muslims believe it was revealed directly from God to the Prophet Muhammad. A pious Muslim may consult an imam or spiritual leader for guidance, but he will also read the Koran himself. He will find there many divine instructions to make constant war on the infidel, who is only to be given the choice of conversion, slave-like subjugation (in historian Bat Yeor's word, dhimmitude) — or death. And throughout Islamic history, that's exactly how Muslim societies have behaved toward non-Muslims, who are by the very fact of their unbelief not considered innocents in the eternal, divinely mandated conflict. Undeniably, Christians have in the past committed many despicable acts in the name of God, but they did so in violation of scriptural teaching, not in fulfillment of it, as in Islam. Though the Bible testifies to violence committed at the command of God, and they the few if any Christians or Jews today believe that this is how God expects man to live today. "Islam, by contrast, generally rejects the idea of a historical progression in revelation, and allows little latitude for allegorical interpretation of the martial verses in the Qu'ran," Spencer writes. "A book [that claims] literal perfection tends to resist any interpretation that diminishes the literal truthfulness of any of its statements." This literalism has profound consequences for the way Muslims live. Unlike in Christianity, there is no scriptural mandate for separation of church and state in Islam, making secular democracy an alien and hostile concept. Women have few rights over and against their husbands, who may legally beat them, and men in general. (Spencer, quoting from Islamic sources, demonstrates that Muhammad, considered the ideal man for all time, treated women cruelly by contemporary Western standards.) Enslaving infidels and raping infidel women are justified under Koranic law (and still occur in some Muslim lands). Grotesque punishments for crimes — beheadings and the like — are not medieval holdovers, writes Spencer; "On the contrary, they will forever be part of authentic Islam as long as the Qur'an is revered as the perfect Word of Allah." Spencer does not believe that Islam can be tamed. While Muslims in the West live in peace, prosperity and religious liberty, Christians and other non-Muslims are persecuted, sometimes unto death, throughout the Muslim world today. Turkey is the only Muslim country that could be called democratic, and that's a stretch; its example shows that secularist values can only be imposed on Islamic societies by force, and will therefore remain tenuous. Because Islam demands death for heretics, moderate Muslims will always risk their lives by offering more liberal interpretations of their faith. And most crucially, in his view, Islam cannot be other than a religion of violence. "Of course, most Muslims will never be terrorists. The problem is that for all its schisms, sects, and multiplicity of voices, Islam's violent elements are rooted in its central texts," Spencer writes. His final verdict on Islam is sobering, particularly when one considers the rapidly increasing Islamic presence in Europe, the cradle of Western civilization: "It would be too pessimistic to say that there are no peaceful strains of Islam, but it would be imprudent to ignore the fact that deeply imbedded in the central documents of the religion is an all-encompassing vision of a theocratic state that is fundamentally different from and opposed to the post-Enlightenment Christian values of the West." To be sure, Spencer's despairing view is not shared by many scholars, even one as reliably critical of radical Islam as Daniel Pipes. In his recent Militant Islam Reaches America, Pipes emphatically denies that radical Islam is the same thing as traditional Islam. He insists that drawing the distinction and encouraging moderates within Islamic societies is an imperative for the West, though he offers scant evidence for this conclusion. And he admits that Muslim moderates are "weak, divided, intimidated and generally ineffectual. Indeed, the prospects for Muslim revitalization have rarely looked dimmer than at this moment... ." One gets the feeling that Pipes would rather light a candle for the unlikely hope of a peaceful revolution within Islam, not because the alternative — one-sixth of humanity, many of whom are already living among us, as implacable enemy of the West — is unrealistic, but because it is unthinkable. "Nowadays, nothing seems less tolerated than what people call pessimism — and which is often in fact just realism," says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Is Islam Unveiled pessimism, or realism? We can only know for sure if we have a serious public discussion of the issues Spencer raises in this important (but unsatisfyingly brief) book — issues that stand to be ignored by the media, for fear of trading in anti-Muslim bigotry. If Islam Unveiled, which is published by Encounter Books, Peter Collier's imprint, becomes the bestseller it deserves to be, it will be through talk radio and word of mouth by Americans who believe that post-9/11, America cannot afford the moral disarmament of indulging in multicultural platitudes. Spencer may be wrong — I doubt it, but I'd like to hear a convincing refutation of his arguments — but he is asking questions that few others have the courage to. And until we hear from this supposed vast silent majority of peace-loving Muslims, the answers Spencer gives go a long way to explain the hatred, violence, backwardness, and fanaticism endemic to the Islamic world. http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher092302.asp |
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