Evil Muslim conspiracy...

It would be and has been a fallacy to equate the actions of a religion with the actions of religious adherents. It would not be a fallacy if all of the actions of religious adherents are best explained as following from religion--that is, if every Muslim was a "perfect Muslim," then all of their sins could be pinned on the religion itself.Of course we all realize that the actions of religious adherents do NOT always follow from the religion. All people's actions follow from a mixture of causes, ranging from religion, political ideology, selfish nature, tribal nature, family influences, friend influences, organizations, and personal thoughts.If the anti-Muslim bigot believes that the evil things that Muslims do follow from the religion of Islam, and the good things that Muslims do follow from something else, then the pro-Muslim advocate may believe that the good things that Muslims do follow from the religion of Islam, and the evil things that Muslims do follow from something else.The ideal way to resolve the disagreement, then, is to find the best explanations for the respective actions of Muslims.I am a smarmy anti-Muslim bigot. I believe that very many of the evil things that Muslims do follow only from the religion of Islam. I can explain the bombing of the Coptic Christian church with quotes from the primary guiding text of Islamic thought, the Koran, which you have no doubt already seen. For example, this passage is from the Koran chapter 8 verses 38-39 (translation of Sahih International):"Say to those who have disbelieved [that] if they cease, what has previously occurred will be forgiven for them. But if they return [to hostility] - then the precedent of the former [rebellious] peoples has already taken place. And fight them until there is no fitnah and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah . And if they cease - then indeed, Allah is Seeing of what they do."So, your challenge as a pro-Muslim advocate is to find motivational forces within the religion of Islam--in the scriptures, in the preachings of the prominent imams, in the moral beliefs that have lasted generations--that would motivate Muslims to be "human shields" for the Coptic Christians of Egypt. If you think that Islam is merely an "excuse" for the violence among Muslims, then that is what you must show. Show that Islam truly is a religion of peace. Show that the actions in sacrificial protection of members of other religions follow from Islam. Show that such actions probably do not follow from sociological forces outside of Islam.I take this news to be a sign of hope. I am not completely pessimistic about Islam. Five hundred years ago, Christianity was more bloodthirsty against heretics, blasphemers and apostates than Islam is today. But, Christianity changed for the better. They took the primitive commands to violence and encouragement of hatred in their holy scriptures as outdated and irrelevant. Maybe Muslims will do likewise.Edited by ApostateAbe, : left out a few words

OK, jar, my interpretation--and I'll take the somewhat liberal interpretation of Sahih International (that places extra words in square brackets)--is that it is a command to wage war against those who disbelieve Islam and who are hostile against Islam. The battle must continue until they convert to adherence to Allah. It has relevance in Egypt, because all it takes is a myth of Christian violence against Muslims (or even an actual small event) for the Koran to seem to command Muslims to "fight them until there is no fitnah and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah."How do you interpret the passage?

OK, jar, so your interpretation is, "...if they cease making war, then stop." That is one condition for stopping the fighting. In the Koran, regardless of translation, there are two conditions for stopping.1) "there is no more tumult or oppression"
2) "there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere"You missed the second condition. That is the YUSUFALI translation. The PICKTHAL translation is phrased less tolerably.1) "persecution is no more"
2) "religion is all for Allah"The SHAKIR translation is phrased least tolerably.1) "there is no more persecution"
2) "religion should be only for Allah"So, stop fighting if they cease making war and they convert to Islam.If there is a "true" meaning that is somehow different from this, then I think it is easy to see how that meaning would be lost on so many Muslims who are only trying to follow the scriptures as they were written. The Washington Post wrote about the clashes between Coptics and Muslims in 2008:

quote:

---

"Is it a land dispute when they kidnap monks and torture them?" Brother Michael, 34, asked from a hospital bed in Cairo, where he cradled an arm hit by shrapnel in the attack.

​

"Is it a land dispute when they tell you to spit on the cross, when they try to make you say the words to convert to Islam?" asked Brother Viner, 30, sitting on Brother Michael's bed. He wore a neck brace because of the beating he received in the attack.

---

That seems to be a good point. The Egyptian government blamed the violence on a land dispute. When there is a land dispute where I am from, they hire land surveyors and fight it out rhetorically in court. More importantly, such Muslims behaved how they would be expected to behave if they seriously believed the apparent meaning of verse 8:39.If you have a different interpretation, the challenge is to show that such an interpretation is not just possible but obvious. It should be the best interpretation for any lay reader of the Koran.Most relevantly, find the passages that would encourage the self-sacrificing actions of the Muslims who were human shields for the Christians on the Coptic Christmas Eve.Make your case. For example, maybe there is a passage in the Koran where the "people of the book" are well respected and must be respected. I can find condemnation and prediction of damnation for Jews and Christians in the Koran. Show me those other verses on the other side of the coin.

Dr Adequate, the passage is an open-ended command to return violence and continue violence until there is no more of it and they convert to Islam. The history of it does not matter, because Muslims are obliged to obey the Koran, and they see the passage as a command to all Muslims, not just to the Muslims who lived at the time of the writing. That is the pattern throughout the Koran. It is not like many of the commands to violence in the Christian Old Testament, where they are merely accounts of God commanding war, which don't have much relevance to a reader.What this passage means is that a Muslim merely has to perceive a threat from the Christians. It can be a myth that churches are stockpiling weapons for a war against Muslims. Such accusations have been made. There was another allegation that a Coptic priests wife wanted to convert to Islam and she was kidnapped for it. Guardian.co.uk. If such allegations are true, then every Muslim who follows the Koran must fight against Christians until they surrender and convert to Islam. If such allegations are false, then it hardly makes a difference to those who believe them. Either way, it is a command to overreact in violence.So, when you say it has nothing to do with the Copts, that doesn't matter. What matters is that it has everything to do with the people who assault and kill the Copts.Edited by ApostateAbe, : Islam, not ChristianityEdited by ApostateAbe, : left out a word

jar, what matters most is what is going through the heads of people who believe the Koran. The whole of it was written at an entirely different time and circumstance. Does that make the whole of it irrelevant? I would hope so, but... when the Koran makes commands to violence directly to the reader, then there are going to be problems for anyone obliged by their religion to believe it. I love it that you discriminate which parts of the Koran you should follow, regardless of your reasons, ad hoc or not. I think all Muslims should do that. The unfortunate thing is not all Muslims do that. And, the tragedy is that it is not all about power, land and wealth. The religion of Islam feeds very strongly into it. When you pour gasoline on a campfire, then the conflagration isn't all about the firewood.Would you seriously believe that Sura 8 verse 39 does not help to feed into the violence of Muslims against Christians? I ask because that is my explanation for why a Coptic Christian wearing a neck brace was asked to spit on a cross and convert to Islam. I would like to know your explanation for what motivates such actions.

Dr Adequate, when most of us hear of possible threats to our lives from people of a different religion, there are a number of things we can do.1) Call the police and have them investigate.
2) Stay in hiding.
3) Carry a gun.
4) Hire security guards.
5) Get protection from a gang of neighbors.
6) Flee the area.
7) Fight them until they are no longer a violent threat and they convert to your religion.According to Sura 8 verse 39, there is only one thing you must do. It is only one of those seven options. Do you see how that may be a problem? Even if you can draw an analogy to Bush?Edited by ApostateAbe, : misspelling

Dr Adequate, it is great that you can read between the lines and you have knowledge of historical context that puts it into the correct context. It is great that you can exclude the commands to excess that may seem to exist within the Koran. That is wonderful. But, the issue is whether or not such passages in the Koran help to explain the violence. I don't want to convince you of what the Koran actually says or intends to say. I am making my case for why Islam is not, in practice, a religion of peace.

Dr Adequate, yeah, all kinds of things go on in practice. The issue on the table is not whether or not there are some Muslims who are violent and some who are not. On that point, we all agree. The issue is whether the religion of Islam contributes to violent tendencies among Muslims. My conclusion is that the religion of Islam causes significantly more violence than if it were replaced by a more peaceful religion (such as Christianity or Buddhism). My argument is that the commands to violence in the Koran, like Sura 9:39, are a direct causal link to the violence of Muslims against Christians. If you have a different interpretation, then it hardly matters, unless you can show your interpretation is obvious enough to almost all Muslim readers that the passage does not contribute to violence. It won't be easy, I figure, because the interpretation gained from the plainest reading of the text (favorable to jaded Islamists) very much seems to command violence of the Muslim reader with a few conditions, and your interpretation requires historical knowledge that is not plainly on the face of the text. If the issue were about the best interpretation from a scholarly point of view, then you may have the upper hand. But, the issue is about what Islam causes among the masses.

"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

quote:

---

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.

---

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).

quote:

---

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.

---

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

quote:

---

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".

---

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."

Does religion ever cause anything bad?

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?

quote:

---

The cause is almost always ignorance.

---

Well, no doubt about that. Remember, I asked, "Does religion ever cause anything bad?" And you said, "Sure, sometimes." So, I would like to know specifically what those times are. Maybe religion only contributes to something bad, in addition to ignorance, nationalism, inequality, or whatever else, and I am curious about specifically anything about religion that you may think either causes or contributes to something bad. Yes, I am trying to trap you in a corner.Edited by ApostateAbe, : clarifying rephrase