Evil Muslim conspiracy...

"Name the Muslim Nation that invaded a Christian Nation?"You got me there. If only you had said, "Name the Muslims who carried out violent attacks against people of other nations," it would have been dreadfully easy. I think it is a fortunate thing that Muslim nations tend to be too poor to carry out conquests against non-Muslim nations.Edited by ApostateAbe, : plural

There is a thread here that might interest you: I think it does much to explain the current political and social tensions between the Middle Easter Islamic world and the Western kinda Christian world.You can find it here.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

You might as well argue that cars contribute to drunk-driving deaths. Cars produce far more deaths than if they were replaced by a more peaceful mode of transportation, such as bicycles. Cars are a direct causal link to drunk-driving deaths.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

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You might as well argue that cars contribute to drunk-driving deaths. Cars produce far more deaths than if they were replaced by a more peaceful mode of transportation, such as bicycles. Cars are a direct causal link to drunk-driving deaths.

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Not at all invalid statement, but analogies need to have their corresponding elements on the table so the argument is clear. You can't just puke an analogy poorly connected to the discussion and hope the rest of us will get it. For example, which part of that analogy corresponds to the passages in the Koran encouraging violence against non-Muslims?I can use the analogy in my favor, too, but I will put all of the corresponding elements on the table. The violent passages in the Koran correspond to alcohol, which is not a risk as long as Muslims do not have the access to the means to kill people, which corresponds to cars. However, as long as the religion of Islam (alcohol), the propensity to violence among jaded groups of people (young ignorant party-goers), and the means for violence (cars) are coincident, then Islam is an added risk to violence (drunk driving).

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There is a thread here that might interest you: I think it does much to explain the current political and social tensions between the Middle Easter Islamic world and the Western kinda Christian world.

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You can find it here.

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Thanks, dude, I think that will help me gain an understanding of your perspective.

I beg to differ. That's my standard MO. The violent passages in the Qur'an correspond to the car's bumper, which is not a risk as long as it isn't used irresponsibly. In drunk driving as in drunk reading, the problem is the drunkenness and the subsequent misuse of the car or book. The car or book is not to blame.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

Christianity has a remarkably poor track record in that respect.Buddhism, perhaps. I seem to recall that there was one Chinese emperor who persecuted non-Buddhists, but perhaps he hadn't got the hang of it. It seems clear enough from the whole text (Sura 9).No-one supposes that Christians or Jews want to kill everyone just because the OT says: "Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass". Then I would say that "the masses" are not, by and large, blowing people up.

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It seems clear enough from the whole text (Sura 9).

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No-one supposes that Christians or Jews want to kill everyone just because the OT says: "Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass".

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The passage that commands Muslims to fight against non-Muslims until they cease and convert is found in Sura 8. Sura 9 is one Sura ahead. The start of Sura 9 is addressed "to those with whom you had made a treaty among the polytheists."I have used the phrase, "open-ended," to describe the passage in Sura 8. It means it is seemingly not addressed to any specific group of people. It is seemingly not confined to any particular circumstance. I use the word, "seemingly," because you may very well have a different interpretation, but it isn't the obvious one, and the obvious interpretation is the one that matters most. There would be no good reason to skip ahead and borrow the addressee from a different Sura and apply it to one where it doesn't apparently belong.Open-ended. That is in contrast to the Old Testament passage you cited. It is a quote from God, commanding a specific group of people at a specific time and place. It is not open-ended. God is at one end, and Samuel is the other end. In order to get the obvious intention, you don't have to go to the next chapter. That would be nonsense. Instead. You go to the beginning of the quote."Samuel said to Saul, 'I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel...Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"That is how a normal Christian makes sense of the passage.There are some passages in the Bible that are truly open-ended. They are commands addressed directly to the reader. And some of those passages really do give Christians trouble, and they have caused horrible violence in centuries past.Exodus 22:18
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."This single passage, in the same context as the ten commandments, had a direct causal link to many accused "witches" in Christian Europe and the colonies to be put to death.Still, Christians have put up a defense. Sometimes they say that there were not actually a lot of victims of witch hunts. But, usually, they say that the passage do not apply to modernity, in the time after Jesus.That is the way a religion should be.Witch hunts are still reportedly going on in rural Christian parts of Africa. The same damned excuses could be made."It is not about religion. It is about greed and revenge. Christianity is only an excuse."

And in many cases that was exactly what it was about. The Crusades for example were a great example, Christianity used as an excuse to grab power and wealth and redirect violence into someone else back yard.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Does religion ever cause anything bad?

Sure, sometimes. It is a convenient tool though and a powerful one for controlling the ignorant proles. Religion itself is pretty much harmless, it is how it is used that is an issue.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Of course. Religion perpetuates and encourages irrationality. It causes people to believe without any reason to believe, and to actually value self-delusion.Many faiths promote a system of ethics based not on thinking about the social consequences of actions, but rather based on authority and obedience, a system that can work well but is also extremely vulnerable to corruption...especially considering that human beings will perform astounding evils when allowed to do so by authority (see the Milgrim Experiment, or the Stanford Prison Experiment).It can magnify pre-existing hatred and intolerance. A person already predisposed to dislike people who are different from himself can very easily latch on to xenophobic aspects present in many faiths.But at the end of the day, the Koran and the Torah and the Bible and all of the other holy books are just words on paper. The sermons of preachers from Martin Luther King Jr to Martin Luther are just words.Books can't hate. Speeches can't explode. People hate and murder and torture and rape and burn and destroy.The evils of religion are a recursive symptom of the disease. A Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, can all commit murder just as easily as anyone else - they just have a specific, easy-to-point-to authority that can be interpreted as justifying their evil actions. Some people commit murder directly because of their religions. Muslim suicide bombers, Christian abortion clinic bombers, and so on. But even in those cases religion is not the root cause. Remove religion, and people will still fight wars and kill each other. Any difference is enough to make people fight, any difference at all. Give us all the same skin and we'd fight over eye color. Homogenize that and we'd start fighting over hair color. National origin. City of birth. Gender. Orientation. Favorite football team.The point of this thread is that Islam and Muslims are not inherently evil. They aren't even predisposed to evil, any more than anyone else. They are people, just like you and just like me, and every time you start to go off on how they are wicked, they are murderers, they aren't loud enough at denouncing evil, their beliefs are bad, you feed into the same tribalistic division that perpetuates virtually all of the major conflicts in the world.Specific interpretations of the Koran are irrelevant. They don't matter, not at all. What matters is that Muslims, regardless of what you say about their beliefs, stood up and did something good and true and right by embracing people different from themselves, a persecuted minority in their country, and said "we are all the same, and we're not going to let you be attacked for your beliefs tonight."

Hi Coyote.How many pictures get taken of Muslims not holding up hateful signs? How many news reports get made of all the Muslims sitting on their couches at home not blowing things up?You're usually one of the first and strongest Islamophobes to post here, so I suppose you could say that much of my original post is directed squarely at you, though not exclusively so.The plain and simple fact is, if all Muslims were terrorists, the rest of us would already be blown up. You consistently take tiny representative sample (and yes coyote, no matter how many photos of angry hateful Muslims you can find, its still a tiny insignificant representation of all Muslims, because there are over a fucking billion of them on the planet), and apply that tiny sample as representative of the whole.It is, quite literally, no different from looking at pictures of Fred Phelps and Family, and deciding that they represent all of Christianity. Or all Americans. Or all white people. Or all Arkansans.They don't. Never have.You always seem so sure of yourself when you claim that I/we ignore all of the "evidence" of Muslim evil, coyote. But you utterly fail to recognize that you're simply falling for confirmation bias, believing what you see most often without even thinking for one moment with credulity that what you see is only a tiny subset of reality.What do you believe, and why do you believe it?If you believe that all Muslims, or even most, are evil murderers in waiting, why do you hold that belief?How would the world look if some Muslims were hateful murderers in waiting, as opposed to most or all?If most Muslims were ordinary people no different from the myriad Christians and Jews and others you encounter every day, would you expect to see something different on the news?Would you expect weekly news reports showing some Muslim family at the dinner table, or perhaps a bunch of Muslims praying at a Mosque, showing how peaceful Islam is?I don;t expect to see many stories of Muslim peace, because peace most often looks a lot like doing nothing, which isn't interesting and doesn't show up on the news.I think that, with over a billion Muslims in the world, if they were all violent and hateful, those pictures you love so much would have much fucking larger crowds. And rather than hearing of small-scale terrorist attacks on occasion globally, we'd be attacked daily or hourly worldwide by a billion-strong army of jihadis.I don't have to ignore your pictures, coyote. All I have to do is look at the forest, rather than a few trees. Your rotten trees are a noticeable but awfully small part of that forest...and you are the one ignoring every single speck of evidence that doesn't agree with your predetermined hypothesis.

jar, Rahvin thinks that "Some people commit murder directly because of their religions. Muslim suicide bombers, Christian abortion clinic bombers, and so on." What bad things do you think religion causes? Do you think that suicide bombers do it for their religion? If not, what would be the cause?

The cause is almost always ignorance.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!