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Post by zameel on Nov 11, 2009 15:07:23 GMT
Speaking of bias and the media, this summary of a recent talk by Noam Chomsky is useful: www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=35407Consider: I'm sure everybody's heard of Somali pirates, but whose heard of European and Chinese pirates dumping toxic waste in Somali waters and stealing their fish which is the reason why these fishermen must resort to piracy (see www.newislamicdirections.com/nid/articles/somali_pirates_more_of_the_same_or_a_new_way_ahead/ )? I'm sure many have heard of the atrocities committed by the Arab janjaweed raping and killing the people of Darfur (although the Khartoum government dissociates itself from the janjaweed) leading to death of about two hundred thousand, but how many have heard of the Congo conflict (involving Christians) in which many were raped and murdered and millions perished (20 times that of Darfur, mostly due to disease and famine)? The reason one is emphasised and not the other is because America is friendly with the Congo government and Europe but it is not friendly with Arabs and Muslims the lands and peoples and resources of which it systematically destroys and exploits. Another important difference Chomsky states: (Muslim) Turkey did not send troops to Iraq as it listened to its people, whereas America, Britain and Spain the supposed democratic nations opposed the view of the majority of its people and went to war. As he shows in his writing and in his speeches for most Westerners it is incomprehensible to use the same standards used for themselves as they use for people in the Muslim world or the "east" - that is hypocrisy, and must be remidied. |
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Post by codewordconduit on Nov 11, 2009 17:09:06 GMT
My quote above makes no mention of honour killings. It mentions fatwas - such as the one placed on Salman Rushdie because he had the termerity to write a book with some "blasphemy" in it.
There you go, a clear example of religious rulers - in Iran, which you used earlier as a good example of a Muslim country - appealing to holy writ and sanctioning a killing.
Oh honey, I learned long ago never to play quoting games with theists. Holy books can be interpreted however you like to prove a point. And again, you cannot deny that Muslim theocracies use texts they hold sacred to justify killing fornicators and adulterers, which is the point I was making here.
Stop misconstruing, Zameel. My original quote was:
Stop arguing against stuff I never said. It makes you look shifty.
And as per my quote above, this is "unusual" for modern day Christianity.
The decision to invade Iraq was not the decision of the Church, and the reasons given, although false, were not religious reasons. The mindless blatherings of a load of rapture-tards, after the decision was made using falsified "secular" evidence, are neither here nor there.
Yes but the Rabbis aren't Israel's leaders. Israel does not make government decisions and laws based on Judaism. Again, rabble rousing Rabbis aren't the people making laws.
In Sharia theocracies, the laws are based on holy writ and they are totally transparent about it.
Oh my goodness, all this proves is that secularism is kinder to homosexuals than any form of ruling based off religious writ. And anyway, I asked you whether you disagreed with the punishments that these clerics came up with based off the Koran, and you didn't respond.
Well it's good that people are beginning to speak against some of the horrible things that are being done in the name of their faith. Unfortunately, "no comment" often reads as tacit approval; and I know this isn't fair but it's just how it looks from the outside.
Don't think that I underestimate the Christian Dominionist threat. I was raised by one, and grew up seeing fundamentalism from the inside but with a heavily sceptical eye. Nobody outside the house or my dad's circle of religious fundamentalist friends even knew what he was; he was so good at repackaging his beliefs to others.
This is base and disingenuous and you know it. You are asking me to dig up a database for the reported rapes on children in Saudi Arabia where children can be legally married and there is no provision in law for rape by husband within marriage.
Zameel, what does Sharia law offer women that secular law does not allow them?
What does Sharia law offer men that secular law does not allow them?
Unless you can give a clear example of how a woman would financially benefit under Sharia, when the same provision could not easily be made under secular law, then this law subjugates women. (Because a man can leave his wife penniless under some Sharia ruling, if she entered the marriage with nothing.... so it clearly can benefit men financially.)
If a woman in Britain could not appeal a Sharia ruling that involved her and a male family member in secular court then this law would subjugate women.
It's as simple as that. Also, dragging Christians and Jews through the mud matters not one jot on many of these points, I'm an atheist - so get it right and drag Stalin, Mao and Pol-pot in for your next little theatre of strawmen.
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Post by zameel on Nov 11, 2009 19:56:48 GMT
My quote above makes no mention of honour killings. It mentions fatwas - such as the one placed on Salman Rushdie because he had the termerity to write a book with some "blasphemy" in it. There you go, a clear example of religious rulers - in Iran, which you used earlier as a good example of a Muslim country I did not use it as a good example of a Muslim country, in fact I said there are no good examples of Muslim countries today. Have you ever asked yourself why Ayatolla Khameini issued the death fatwa a year after the book was written when his Islamic revolution was dwindling? Al-Azhar University, the highest sunni authority in the world, issued a statement repudiating Khameini's fatwa, but the papers did not see fit to print it back then. A senior British Muslim scholar, Zaki Badawi, offered his own home to Salman Rushdie. The fatwa was obviously politically motivated. In any case, I don't see any difference between Khameni's religious verdict and that of the Rabbis I mentioned - the only difference being Khameni targetted a single grown man while the Rabbis justified indiscriminately murdering children (which makes sense based on Deuteronomy and Jushua). Yes, it wasn't the Rabbis that followed the rulings they gave, but it wasn't Khameni that followed the ruling either. IDF Rabbis and Jewish seminaries play a strong role in the military and in decision-making. The decision to invade Iraq was not the decision of the Church, and the reasons given, although false, were not religious reasons The lies and false propaganda and the strong minority public support require explanation (clearly what Bush knew to be lies didn't influence his decision - it was a mixture of an aggressive foreign policy and religious ideology). There is evidence Bush was influenced by apocolyptic readings before the war as were a large minority in America. |
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Post by himself on Nov 11, 2009 22:59:57 GMT
The careful reader will notice himself contradicts himself in his essentialisation of Islam in the above post. At the start of the post he begins by lamenting the situation that there is no normativity in Islam (in other words, there is too much individual opinion), and he ends by claiming there is no room in Islamic teachings to think outside of the normal interpretations of the Qur'an and ijma' (consensus). a) I don't know what you mean by "essentialisation." Is it a 'power' word? b) There is no contradiction. If the consensus is that i) the Book has all the answers and ii) there is no normative body; then iii) as soon as large numbers of people learn to read, they will start reading the Book for themselves, latching onto verses that tell them what they already want to hear, and no one can tell them that it's wrong. Something similar happened after the collapse of Christendom, when fundamentalists began ignoring the Magisterium and read the Bible for themselves. Inevitably, they applied a naive-literal interpretation and - as usual - found exactly what they wanted to find. The irony that both Luther and Calvin looked to the Book for answers and wound up calling each other fools and liars was overlooked at the time. himself's typical Orientialist regurgitation of the homogeneity of Islam I don't know what this means, either; but it has the 'look and feel' of academic bull-cant. Be sure to use the Currently Approved Terminology so as to diminish any contrary voices. I think religion plays a part, in some cases a larger part and others a lessaer part, but the double standards present in much of Western discourse in the media and elsewhere means the opposite of your comment appears to be the truth and appears to be what people accept to be the truth. Hence Sarah attempts to explain away the bias in the media of calling crimes committed by Muslims by the qualifier 'Muslim' but not doing so (except rarely) for others, by assuming this difference first exists before providing an explanation; it is this assumption, that Islam is essentially more evil, more violent than what the West has produced 'Discourse' is another of those Approved Terms, no? For action X to be attributed to motive A, it is important not that the actor be devoted to A, but that he draws X from A and justifies it based on A. Thus, a devout muslim may rob a bank; but unless he robbed the bank in order to finance jihad, it was not a "muslim" bank robbery. Greed or a desire for thrills are not specifically muslim. Honor killings are associated with muslims simply because most others have stopped. [They were condemned by Aquinas way back when.] They can still be found in the Arab world, and to a lesser extent in India. But as a muslim woman has told me, it is only muslims who try to defend the practice, as muslims. For example, the horrific public murder in Kurdistan of Buaa Khalil Aswad by her own extended family: they were all Yazidis, and since autopsy showed she was still a virgin, was likely motivated by her alleged intention to convert to Islam. [Two months earlier a muslim girl eloped with a Yazidi man: She was later found beheaded and several Yazidi houses and religious sites were set afire.] Tahsin Saeed Ali, the supreme religious leader of the Yazidi condemned the killing. But every time Jordan considers canceling or restricting Art. 340 or Art. 98, the Islamic Action Front [Muslim Brotherhood] speaks up and calls it 'Western imperialism' trying to suppress 'muslim values.' In 1998, Jordanian religious leaders like the late Sheikh al-Tamimi, spoke in support of the revisions and against honor killings; but more recently the mufti and others maintain a discreet silence. Trials on honor killings usually wind up rolling through the 'uncontrollable rage' loophole. It is rarely reported, seldom prosecuted, rarely convicted by judges and police sympathetic to the perps. There was a guy in Salt who killed all four of his sisters and nothing was done about him. But correlation is not causation. Estimates are that half of all honor killings in Jordan are "land killings." A devout muslim friend of mine relates how when his mother's father died, his uncles came to his mother and her sisters with guns, telling them to sign their father's lands to them or be killed. Not wishing to be killed, they complied. But the uncles had no joy in it, and all of them wound up destitute. The question here, as you rightly point out further down, is: who gave al-Awlaki the right to interpret and read the Qur'an? You'll find that most of the so-called Muslim terrorists and extermists are not traditionally trained ulama. In fact they are usually engineers or doctors. .... Even those who sporned the radical political movements, Qutb and Mawdudi, were literary critics and journalists, not traditionally trained ulama. Quite so. Most people do not realize that what is happening today is as much a civil war within Islam as it is a renewed "low intensity" jihad against the unbelievers. Again, it is the I-can-read-it-for-myself newly literate peoples who ignore the teaching traditions. The woman I mentioned earlier followed the Hanafi school; her husband was salafi - in the sense of "cafeteria Islam." That is, he did not follow any one school, but picked and chose among them. There are other salafis who, like fundamentalists, fall for a self-proclaimed imam and pick and choose without regard to the schools. There are those like Hamzi Yusuf and Faisal Abdurauf who have a more modernist approach - but these are little known in the core. It is precisely this collapse of tradition and the magisterium of the schools that has led to the current crisis in Islam. No one is complaining about classical Islam, but about what is happening today. Now you are making the mistake you accuse others of making. Just because someone is A and does X you cannot say that A is the cause of X. You would have to point to something in Catholic doctrine that enjoins this. Yet the only things one can find in Catholic doctrine forbids such actions. I detect a bit a academic cant in this as well. The warrior Tutsis clans invaded the region in the first half of the 18th century and set themselves up as a ruling caste over the local Bantus. The area was nominally under German rule in 1890, but the Germans never really had much interest in Africa. After WW1 the areas was given to the Belgians, who did not "invade", and who dealt with the native rulers already in place. They dumped the place in 1962, making a grand total of 44 years of Belgian "rule." + + + Who says adultery is not wrong? Both are sins against charity. Murder is the greater wrong because it is permanent. Remember, a "sin" is not a transgression of a commandment; it is a defect [or lacking] in a good. Life is a good in that, in the common course of nature, all living things seek it. That makes killing a lacking in this good. Fidelity and trust are also goods, so that breaking the marriage vow is a serious wrong. There are three basic requirements: i) the matter itself must be seriously wrong ii) the person must know it is seriously wrong (you cannot sin by accident) iii) and the person must intend the serious wrong. Item iii) is similar to niyya. Item ii) is where synderesis/damir comes in (or where things must be spelled out in some Book.) + + + Only if you insist that scriptures are a set of rules to be followed or exemplars to be imitated. Remember, the Christians did not find their religion in their Book. They found their Book in their religion. That is, there were Christians before there was a Bible. (Yes, even the OT. They decided what they would include and how they would read it, which in many ways is very different from the Jewish reading. Basically, the use the OT for "prefigures" of the Christ.) |
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Post by zameel on Nov 13, 2009 20:58:58 GMT
Who says adultery is not wrong? Both are sins against charity. Murder is the greater wrong because it is permanent. Remember, a "sin" is not a transgression of a commandment; it is a defect [or lacking] in a good. Life is a good in that, in the common course of nature, all living things seek it Who decides what is right and what is wrong? Is it the individual's own consciousness as you seem to imply? Or God? Or the Church? What if they conflict? So, for instance, the command to stone an adulterer comes straight out of God's law in the Bible which Jesus says must be followed to its every last detail (Mt 5:19-20), but your consciousness tells you not to do it. But what if someone else's consciousness told them to commit adultery because they felt it was the right thing to do? In other words, who's to say another person's consciousness will follow the reasoning you use to declare adultery a sin (many in the secular world, e.g. swingers, believe it to be a normal part of their lives and something that doesn't affect trust or fidelity - how will you convince them otherwise)? If you leave it *absolutely* to an individual's consciousness to determine what is sin and what is not anybody can justify anything to themselves, that is precisely what moral relativism is, and what can result in chaos and nihilism. As I explained in my previous post, but which you chose to ignore as you did many of the points I made, the Qur'an does not deny the fact people have been imbued with a moral consciousness (e.g. see 91:7-8). Unfortunately human beings have a propensity to what the Qur'an terms as "ghafla" (heedlessness) - escapism (e.g. through intoxication, gambling, promiscuity etc.) and forgetting our humanity - and the Qur'anic teachings attempt to revive our humanity through God-consciousness (taqwa): "if you have taqwa of God He will grant you a criterion (to judge between right and wrong)" (8:29); "Those who have taqwa (conscious awareness of God), when a thought of evil from Satan assaults them, they remember [dhikr], when lo! they see (aright)" (7:201). But there must be a higher law, or there will be chaos, as Paul recognised in some parts of his writings as did the Church. The following hadith is recorded by Imam al-Nawawi in his Forty Hadiths on which the religion revolves (for the remainder, see: fortyhadith.iiu.edu.my/hadiths.htm ) According to Wabisah bin Ma'bad (God be pleased with him) who said: I came to the Messenger of God (God bless him and grant him peace) and he said: "You have come to ask about righteousness?" "Yes," I answered. He said: "Consult your heart. Righteousness is that about which the soul feels tranquil and the heart feels tranquil, and sin is what creates restlessness in the soul and moves to and fro in the breast, even though people give you their opinion (in your favour) and continue to do so."
The Prophet in this report was speaking to someone with a high degree of taqwa. In Islam there are a number of sources of morality: "the preacher within the self" (wa'iz al-nafs) as the Prophet called it; the "higher objectives" (maqasid) of the shari'ah, which are "the protection of religion, life, property, intellect and lineage" or the spirit of the shariah; the positive law and tradition (fiqh) or the letter of the shariah. In other words, Islam recognises the fact that total reliance on an individual's own consciousness can be chaotic and harmful; some form of "law" must exist. |
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Post by sandwiches on Nov 14, 2009 17:18:52 GMT
"So, for instance, the command to stone an adulterer comes straight out of God's law in the Bible which Jesus says must be followed to its every last detail (Mt 5:19-20), but your consciousness tells you not to do it."
No, Jesus tells us not to do it:
John 7:53-8:11
53Then each of them went home, 81while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. 3The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ 6They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ 8And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.* 9When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ 11She said, ‘No one, sir.’* And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’
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Post by knowingthomas on Nov 14, 2009 23:52:40 GMT
Isn't that one of the few passages in the Gospels that is questionable? Wasn't it added in centuries later?
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Post by bjorn on Nov 15, 2009 0:26:49 GMT
It was added in the second century, still it wouldn't have been if early Christians had remembered Jesus as insisting on stoning for adultery. Alleged sayings by Jesus might however be genuine, even if added a generation or two after the rest of John was written, even if we perhaps never really will know.
Still, I think it captures perfectly the Jesus we meet in the gospels.
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Post by zameel on Nov 15, 2009 12:08:26 GMT
Isn't that one of the few passages in the Gospels that is questionable? Wasn't it added in centuries later? My point was not about Jesus' opinion on stoning, but a question of methodology. If we were to go by what himself wrote, what Jesus said or did doesn't matter. What matters is our own consciousness. If we were to actually follow Jesus, that would mean Christians should separate themselves completely from their non-believing family, should not divorce at all, if they lustfully see a woman they should gouge their eyes out. These are merely the things he said; in following his example, Christians should strongly oppose interest (Jesus' violent attack on the moneychangers), should observe circumcision, the sabbath laws etc. In fact Jesus confirmed all the laws of the Torah (Matthew 5:19-20). But we don't see most Christians doing that. If it were the Church, then the Rwandans would have had to follow the churches' instructions when they asked them to murder. Or the Africans should not wear condoms. But most Christians appear to repudiate these. Do Christians have a consistent methodology for knowing what is right and what is wrong? Jesus did not mention homosexuality, so does that mean it's ok? If not, how much do you rely on the Old Testament? Or do neither of these really matter? |
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Post by bjorn on Nov 15, 2009 14:55:15 GMT
I think what Christians may conlude will vary, based on theological traditions.
However, at least one should attempt to have a wiser approach than taking hyperbole literally. A lot of interpretative confusion stems from a lack of understanding of Semitic rhetorics.
The Old Testament laws is not binding to Christians, except from general principles like The Ten Commandments. The ritual and political laws of ancient Israel are not to be followed, we are neither Israelites nor under the old covenant.
In short, Christianity is a religion without any religious laws.
To put it simple, however, Jesus's life and sayings, and e.g. Paul's letters provide guidelines for Christian living and may also be considered when thinking about general laws in a society, even if not laws by themselves.
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Post by acornuser on Nov 16, 2009 2:13:13 GMT
Martin Lloyd-Jones once said that if he had preached and what he said could not be misunderstood as anti-nomianism (lawlessness), then had not successfully preached the gospel. zameel - I've heard about the toxic dumping story. It's an absolute disgrace, as is the mass pillage of Somalia's waters by foreign fishing fleets. |
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Post by zameel on Nov 17, 2009 22:19:28 GMT
Yes but the Rabbis aren't Israel's leaders. Israel does not make government decisions and laws based on Judaism. The Israeli government: haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1128767.htmlIDF Rabbinate during the Gaza massacre: show no mercy to civilians: haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058758.html ("a call to challenge international law when it comes to dealing with enemy civilians") - notice the clear Biblical reference The following questions are posed in one publication: "Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David?" Rabbi Aviner is again quoted as saying: "A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land ... They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country ... Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence." |
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Post by krkey1 on Dec 2, 2009 2:06:41 GMT
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Post by himself on Dec 6, 2009 2:12:08 GMT
Here's a take by a muslim woman. www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/2812/She told me recently that the difference between Islam in Europe and Islam in America is that American muslims tend to be professionals - doctors and engineers - while Europe has a large number of underclass muslims originally as guest-workers, some of them even illiterate. The local masjid here in a small Pennsylvania city is almost entirely "Desi" professionals. (There is another, larger one a bit farther up the valley.) In France, by contrast, there are many Algerians who came from rural districts; in Germany, Turkish peasants, and so on. Australia, she said, has mostly refugee immigrants, often entire villages en masse, and in the case of the Lebanese in Canberra, criminal gangs. They were criminals in the Lebanon and are criminals in Australia. However, she said, the only European country with a muslim "problem" is England, where there are genuinely radical "imams" actively working for jihad. The Turks in Germany for the most part want to be Germans; the Algerians in France want to be French. (The Europeans haven't figured out how to do this yet.) The British, who actually have the most experience in forging a nation (out of Britons, Gaels, Welsh, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norsemen, Normans, French Huguenots, etc.) have paradoxically the worst problem. There are many muslims there who do not want to become British and who want to subvert and overthrow the West. The problem is not Islam, per se. In fact, she knows of one imam in the Washington DC area who when he is at home lives as a secular American, using an American name, going to American parties, and so on. He is, as it were, only working as a muslim. It's his day job. But he is frequently called upon to "explain things," usually to spin the latest arrests as persecutions. Privately, he is anti-jihad and disparages them; publicly, he makes excuses. Which reminds me of something her husband, a Jordanian, said: that after the Iron Curtain fell, the Communist Party members in Jordan and Syria went out an joined Islamist groups. Not that the US is problem-free. I am told that among muslims, the City of Brotherly Love is known as Killadelphia, because the muslims there are organized as criminal gangs, many of them prison converts to Islam (called "prislam"). And in Boston, the MAS, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been infiltrating and taking over other muslim institutions. |
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Post by eckadimmock on Dec 6, 2009 2:37:42 GMT
Interesting, and a valid take. Much of the crime among immigrant groups is a law enforcement problem rather than a religious one. One problem appears to be that governments are unwilling to pursue offenders for fear of being called intolerant or racist, which encourages crime and irks the majority. Then there's the problem of screening immigrants from places which do not keep careful records or are actively hostile. IIRC, the US had a similar problem with cubans in the 1970s when Castro emptied his jails and allowed the inmates to flee to the US.
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