Pentagon Breaks the Islam Taboo...

[GtoRA2]

Some of you religion hating atheists are funny.


You have your own religion, called atheism, and you are just as intolerant as or more so then what you appear to despise so much.





People will find reasons to kill each other,  its a human problem. There is no way to know if a world without religion would be any safer.


I personaly think it would be far worse. Most people of faith, (all religions) are good people.

A bad person is a bad person, it does not mater if he calls himself a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist.

I am not religious by the way. I was even a religion hating atheist at one time too. (When I was 14)

[Octavius]

Who?  gimme some names.

[StSanta]

Calling atheism a religion is like saying bald is a hair colour.

The only thing atheists need to have in common is either lack of belief in a deity or all deities (weak atheism) or a belief that a deity or deities do not exist (strong atheism). A poll on alt.atheism newsgroup indicated a division of about 80% weak to 20% strong atheists in that particular subgroup of the population.

Atheists may be religious. Certain strains of Buddhism for instance do not have god or gods, lacking a belief in such entities. But, this philosophical stance is separate from the atheism - atheism is simply a descriptive word used to say "No god(s) for this dude".

Nothing more should be inferred or deducted from it because they one would be on shaky grounds considering the great diversity amongst atheist (from Buddhists, to Stalinists, fascists, democrats, republicans, swimmers, skydivers, poets etc etc).

If some dude walks up to you and says "Hi. I am an atheist." you can conclude two things:

a) he either disbelieves in gods, lack belief in them or believes they do not exist.
b) he's a total weirdo you should stay away from. An atheist saying "I am an atheist" is equivalent to a Catholic saying "I've eaten". Big deal. It's a non issue.


Making the inference:
atheist->communists were atheists->communism is a religion, sort of->this mans religion is communism->therefore, he is a communist is stretching things. I'm sure the guy will wonder what he had done in past lives to warrant such Karma, as he performs ritual Buddhistic meditation.

Wordnet says:

  religion
       n 1: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that
            control human destiny; "he lost his faith but not his
            morality" [syn: faith, religious belief]
       2: institution to express belief in a divine power; "he was
          raised in the Baptist religion"; "a member of his own
          faith contradicted him" [syn: faith]

There are other definitions out there, but in common they have:
  Rituals or rites to be observed
  A dogma
  A recognition of the divine
  More often than not, a god or gods

With atheism fundamentally not having any of these, it is hard to classify it as a religion.

Now, if you take some behaviour of some atheists, they do attack certain issues with a religious fervor. I am still waiting for the time a Save_The_Whaleist will be knocking on my door, asking if they can tell a little about the Great Blue One though. The issues are separate from the descriptive term.

[GtoRA2]

I meant it more about the fanatical need to spread it, to convince people or tell people they are stupid for believing, and hating all religion.


Sure most Atheists are normal good people as well.

But some can be just the like the nutty religious guys who take it to far.


You want names? Just read this thread, all the ones bagging on Christianity being evil, or all religions being bad for mankind.

[Octavius]

When religious dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.  

Read my first post in this thread.  Any dogmatic belief is extremely ignorant.  The refusal to question and look for answers is beyond foolish.  Atheism also qualifies.  Arthur C. Clark said religion, atheism included, is a disease of infancy.  In 3001, the final oddyssey, religion has become taboo, a product of man's early ignorance which resulted in hatred and mass bloodshed.  Absolutes suck. My objection to religion is that it prevents the search for a god, if it exists.  

To label me an athiest is ignorant.  There's a lot of grey out there, nothing is black and white.  Start dealing with things in terms of possibility and probability.

[GtoRA2]

Originally posted by Octavius
When religious dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.  

Read my first post in this thread.  Any dogmatic belief is extremely ignorant.  The refusal to question and look for answers is beyond foolish.  Atheism also qualifies.  Arthur C. Clark said religion, atheism included, is a disease of infancy.  In 3001, the final oddyssey, religion has become taboo, a product of man's early ignorance which resulted in hatred and mass bloodshed.  Absolutes suck. My objection to religion is that it prevents the search for a god, if it exists.  

To label me an athiest is ignorant.  There's a lot of grey out there, nothing is black and white.  Start dealing with things in terms of possibility and probability.

I was not talking about you Oct.

I agree with your posts in this thread as a mater of fact.

This last one very much so.

[Ack-Ack]

Originally posted by GtoRA2
Some of you religion hating atheists are funny.


You have your own religion, called atheism, and you are just as intolerant as or more so then what you appear to despise so much.


 

LMAO!  Damn, give me a minute to clean up my monitor.  Your comment made me kind of laugh a little too hard.

Yes, I am an atheist but unlike my "religious" brethren, I do have tolerance for other faiths.  I honestly don't give a crap what someone believes, as it's their personal choice.  But when they start to spew fundamentalist rhetoric that effects me, I'm gonna stand up and fight back.


ack-ack

[GtoRA2]

Originally posted by Ack-Ack
LMAO!  Damn, give me a minute to clean up my monitor.  Your comment made me kind of laugh a little too hard.

Yes, I am an atheist but unlike my "religious" brethren, I do have tolerance for other faiths.  I honestly don't give a crap what someone believes, as it's their personal choice.  But when they start to spew fundamentalist rhetoric that effects me, I'm gonna stand up and fight back.


ack-ack

LOL now you made me laugh.

You have sure shown a remarkable amount of tolerance up here.

[Seagoon]

Hello Momus,

Originally posted by Momus--
Seagoon, once again you misrepresent for your own ends the concept of jihad as it is understood by the vast majority of muslims on the planet.

So you studied comparative religion and history at university? So what? Reproducing the junk you come up with would get you a swift U grade at any decent establishment.

So, to the nitty gritty:

Statement in response to the 9/11 attacks by Mustafa Mashhur

Well first off, not that it matters, but I didn't study comparative religion and history at University, I studied Arabic History which is taught by the Middle Eastern Studies department at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland. One of the guys I roomed with went on to become the Arabic studies prof at another Scottish University, so I've had the opportunity to discuss Jihad and Sharia Law, for several years now. I realize that no amount of reading or discussion will help if the person in question is fundamentally an idiot, which I apparently am. But I hope you will indulge the idiot's eye view for a little while longer.

In any event, quoting supposed repudiations of the 9/11 attack from groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, indicates that you are either being disingenuous or excessively credulous. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was the source of much of the modern Jihadi philosophy, first via its founder Hassan Al-Banna and then via the highly influential Sayyid Qutb. It's "peaceful anti-terrorist" members include Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Muslim Cleric who organized the 1993 bombing of the WTC. For the Muslim Brotherhood to repudiate acts of terrorism would be like me repudiating acts of Christian evangelism.

As Ahmad Al Rabbi put it an article responding to a similar Muslim Brotherhood repudiation as blatantly deceptive:

"If we were to go according to the logic of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement then we shouldn't condemn the Sharm Al-Sheikh crime, nor other terrorist crimes!

"The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has its own justifications for violence. In a statement by the movement, in which it 'condemned' the Sharm Al-Sheikh crime, it laid out its justification for the crime. The statement said: 'the colonialist policies that the world's strong countries pursue, as well as the aggression against the peoples – they are what engender the culture of violence.'

"The Muslim Brotherhood's problem is that it has no shame. The beginnings of all of the religious terrorism that we are witnessing today were in the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology of takfir [apostasy]. Sayyid Qutb's book Milestones was the inspiration and the guide for all of the takfir movements that came afterwards.

"The founders of the violent groups were raised on the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who worked with Bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood.  ...

The Muslim Brotherhood's statement is an example of total shamelessness. It is a continuation of the Brotherhood's self-contradictory and deceitful language which it has long been employing in the name of Islam."

So for groups which are themselves dedicated to the principles of Jihad and the imposition of Sharia law to "repudiate" the second successfull attack on the WTC reminds me of a counseling session I had a little while ago. In it a woman who had been put in the hospital twice by an abusive boyfriend, plaintively said "But he loves me, he always tells me he loves me, and he usually apologies after he hits me." To which I asked her, which do you believe? What he says to you, or what he does to you? In the end, like so many others she chose goes to go with the comforting but empty words, and she'll end up in the hospital again, or worse. Unfortunately, many Westerners are willing to make the same decision in regard to Islam. We'll take the words, even against the evidence of our own black eyes and busted lips.

As for "the violence" being minor and the extremists being almost non-existant, tell that to some of my friends in Sudan who have worked with villages that have almost been wiped out by the Janjaweed, or Pastors in Pakistan whose congregants have had daughters kidnapped and married off to Muslims against their wishes in accordance with Sharia law (the same thing happens to Hindu girls BTW). I have spoken with men and women who have to live in societies where the female members of their family had to wear the Hijab even though they weren't Muslims and couldn't go out without a male relative escorting them, where if they admitted they had converted to Christianity and were baptized, their own relatives would kill them. Would you call that "moderate?"

Finally Momus, lets just get down to the root shall we? Did Mohammed practice the "liberal inner struggle" or did he practice the violent subjugation of unbelievers? Would you call the history of Islam during the Medina period of the Prophet's life "peaceful?"

- SEAGOON

[storch]

Originally posted by Momus--
Source for this claim? The sumerian moon god was called Nanna by the way.

 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/554692/posts
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/moongod.htm  nananananaaaaaaaaaaa well ok also nana but primarily aliyah.

[straffo]

Originally posted by Octavius
When religious dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.  

I thought only TV had this effect but I've too agree with you it's "l'opium du peuple"

[Seagoon]

Hi Guys,

No matter how I cut it, I'm running out of time, so please forgive me if I answer points raised in several posts at once. I'm answering in reverse chronological order...

Originally posted by Octavius
When religious dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

I see. So Augustine, Calvin, Johannes Kepler, Luther, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Isaac Newton, John Witherspoon, John Jay, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster, Gregor Mendel, Roger Bacon, Lord Kelvin, G.K. Chesterton etc. etc. etc. where all utterly devoid of intellectual activity because they were also devout, even dogmatic, Christians?

Originally posted by MomusAFAIK christians and jews native to the middle-east have all at one time or another used the term Allah to refer to the judeo-christian god. Etymologically speaking, it literally just means "the God", i.e. the one god, a specifically montheistic construct.

Merely using the name "god" does not necessarily mean one is referring to the same being. For instance, are you the same being as all the other beings with the same name? When it comes to God, when Christians refer to Him, they are referring to the Triune God of both testaments of the Bible, when the Muslims refer to Allah they are referring to a being who is neither Triune and who is essentially different from the God of the bible in many of his qualities. He commands different things of his worshippers, calls different things from the God of the Bible "good" and "evil," and offers salvation through a system that contradicts the message of the gospel. These are clearly not the same being.  

One would immediately see the difference if one were comparing Yahweh with Vishnu, but because Islam has only one God in its pantheon we assert that all monotheists must be worshiping the same god and that therefore the god of Muhammad and the God of Jesus are the same even though they are as different as it is possible to be.

The falacy of this "all monotheists worship the same god" position can be seen more sharply when one considers that Zoroastrians and Sikhs are also monotheists. As far as the "God of Abraham" is concerned, while Mohammed did attempt to imply that Allah was the God of Abraham, he essentially redefined who Abraham was as well, asserting that the Jews had altered the story of Abraham, he then set about revising the story himself and introducing the idea that the true son of the promises was Ismael and not Isaac. So yes, Muhammad started by pairing the Arabian pantheon down to one (and cleansing the Kaaba of the others) god named Allah and then redefining this god incorporating bits and pieces of the Bible, but finishing with a wildly different "god" from the one of the Old and New Testaments. For ease of translation, many Arabic bibles do use the word Allah for God, but many missionaries to the Islamic world are increasingly using Raab (Arabic for LORD) in place of "Allah" in order to distinguish them.

More later....

[Octavius]

Originally posted by Seagoon
I see. So Augustine, Calvin, Johannes Kepler, Luther, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Isaac Newton, John Witherspoon, John Jay, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster, Gregor Mendel, Roger Bacon, Lord Kelvin, G.K. Chesterton etc. etc. etc. where all utterly devoid of intellectual activity because they were also devout, even dogmatic, Christians?

Rather loaded question.  Fanatics and literal fundamentalists fit the category, those on your list do not.  I don't believe any on that list went on a jihad or inquisition.  Fighting over that one true god is gonna kill all of us.


Luther - Reformation based on justification by faith alone.  Too bad the catholic church no longer controls dogmatic authority.  

Aquinas - Perfect!  Thomism, yay.  Catholicism, yay.

Calvin - predestination?  lol.  

Bacon dabbled in the occult and alchemy.

Newton, Kelvin, Kepler - no explanation needed.

Hamilton was a gifted rake.  Played lip service to religion for political means where appropriate, and ignored it when convenient.  Sounds like a guide for modern christians today.

All of these men have made great contributions and throwing them into my category does not negate their work.   Do we celebrate the man or the idea?

[-tronski-]

Originally posted by Seagoon
Merely using the name "god" does not necessarily mean one is referring to the same being. For instance, are you the same being as all the other beings with the same name? When it comes to God, when Christians refer to Him, they are referring to the Triune God of both testaments of the Bible, when the Muslims refer to Allah they are referring to a being who is neither Triune and who is essentially different from the God of the bible in many of his qualities. He commands different things of his worshippers, calls different things from the God of the Bible "good" and "evil," and offers salvation through a system that contradicts the message of the gospel. These are clearly not the same being.  

One would immediately see the difference if one were comparing Yahweh with Vishnu, but because Islam has only one God in its pantheon we assert that all monotheists must be worshiping the same god and that therefore the god of Muhammad and the God of Jesus are the same even though they are as different as it is possible to be.

The falacy of this "all monotheists worship the same god" position can be seen more sharply when one considers that Zoroastrians and Sikhs are also monotheists. As far as the "God of Abraham" is concerned, while Mohammed did attempt to imply that Allah was the God of Abraham, he essentially redefined who Abraham was as well, asserting that the Jews had altered the story of Abraham, he then set about revising the story himself and introducing the idea that the true son of the promises was Ismael and not Isaac. So yes, Muhammad started by pairing the Arabian pantheon down to one (and cleansing the Kaaba of the others) god named Allah and then redefining this god incorporating bits and pieces of the Bible, but finishing with a wildly different "god" from the one of the Old and New Testaments. For ease of translation, many Arabic bibles do use the word Allah for God, but many missionaries to the Islamic world are increasingly using Raab (Arabic for LORD) in place of "Allah" in order to distinguish them.

More later....

As educational a play on words that was, what this is really is an example on semantics.
Mind you most differing christian faiths can hardly agree at times and they supposedly worship the same god too, I doubt anyone would accept Muslims could worship their god too...

 Tronsky

[Momus--]

Seagoon,

In any event, quoting supposed repudiations of the 9/11 attack from groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, indicates that you are either being disingenuous or excessively credulous. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was the source of much of the modern Jihadi philosophy, first via its founder Hassan Al-Banna and then via the highly influential Sayyid Qutb. It's "peaceful anti-terrorist" members include Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Muslim Cleric who organized the 1993 bombing of the WTC. For the Muslim Brotherhood to repudiate acts of terrorism would be like me repudiating acts of Christian evangelism.

Qutb died 40 years ago, Hassan Al-Banna 55 years ago. You can't label me as disingenous while at the same time basing your case on arguments made half a century ago can you? Yes Qutb was a MB figure. Yes, his philosophy inspired later generations of extremists. Not all the MB bought into that philosophy. Today, within the muslim community some of the most visible supporters of increased secularisation are figures associated with the Brotherhood, for example Gamal al-Banna (Hassan Al-Banna's brother) and Tariq Ramadan (Hassan Al Banna's grandson).

 

As Ahmad Al Rabbi put it an article responding to a similar Muslim Brotherhood repudiation as blatantly deceptive...

I've read a number of articles by Dr. Al-Rab'i including the one you partially quote here. His argument is that since past MB figures like Qutb inspired certain extremist movements, then is it hypocritical for today's MB to criticise acts of violence. That's a pretty weak case.  One could argue that by the same token it is hypocritical for the USA to condemn human rights abuses in certain countries having tacitly supported the same behaviour in other spots in the past. Is this really a road we want to go down?

So for groups which are themselves dedicated to the principles of Jihad and the imposition of Sharia law to "repudiate" the second successfull attack on the WTC reminds me of a counseling session I had a little while ago. In it a woman who had been put in the hospital twice by an abusive boyfriend, plaintively said "But he loves me, he always tells me he loves me, and he usually apologies after he hits me." To which I asked her, which do you believe? What he says to you, or what he does to you? In the end, like so many others she chose goes to go with the comforting but empty words, and she'll end up in the hospital again, or worse. Unfortunately, many Westerners are willing to make the same decision in regard to Islam. We'll take the words, even against the evidence of our own black eyes and busted lips.

You're setting up a straw man here. Few if any of the authorities that I quoted are dedicated to the principal of jihad as you would portray it. You're welcome to try and demonstrate that though.

As for "the violence" being minor and the extremists being almost non-existant, tell that to some of my friends in Sudan who have worked with villages that have almost been wiped out by the Janjaweed, or Pastors in Pakistan whose congregants have had daughters kidnapped and married off to Muslims against their wishes in accordance with Sharia law (the same thing happens to Hindu girls BTW). I have spoken with men and women who have to live in societies where the female members of their family had to wear the Hijab even though they weren't Muslims and couldn't go out without a male relative escorting them, where if they admitted they had converted to Christianity and were baptized, their own relatives would kill them. Would you call that "moderate?"

In backwards places like Sudan or the tribal areas of Pakistan, people use religion as the excuse to do bad things. One could look at christians killing muslims in Lebannon as an equal case in point, or Christian violence against muslims in Nigeria. The problem is as I see it that you want to tar them all with the same brush.

Finally Momus, lets just get down to the root shall we? Did Mohammed practice the "liberal inner struggle" or did he practice the violent subjugation of unbelievers? Would you call the history of Islam during the Medina period of the Prophet's life "peaceful?"

The Koran as I understand it is ambivalent on this issue but much the same could be said of the Bible. You might as well point at the violent subjugation of the Canaanites by the Israelites and say that the modern occupation of Palestine by Israel has roots in the words and actions of Joshua. Of course it is a stupid argument because it takes no account of historical context.

Apart from arguing the toss about the Muslim Brotherhood and "what would Muhammed have done?", what other evidence have you got to support your position that violent jihad is not the philosophy of an extremist minority but of the mainstream majority of muslims across the globe?