11-30-2007, 01:26 PM | #741 |
Elf Lord
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What Lief wrote is true, but I'm sure he will be the first to add that we shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush.
Or maybe the second |
11-30-2007, 01:29 PM | #742 |
Elf Lord
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Here's another true statement:
"Throughout the Middle East, Muslims are enduring horrible persecution at Christian hands." It works with Jewish as well. |
11-30-2007, 01:33 PM | #743 |
Elf Lady
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Hmm, okay, see your point. But I was more talking about the Netherlands which is a mixed country, with Christians, Muslims, Buddhists whatever, and the only religion getting ridiculed or is considered bad is the Islam. Doesn't that feel kinda wrong?
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11-30-2007, 01:35 PM | #744 | |
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Love always, deeply and true ★ Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer. ★ Friendship is sharing openly, laughing often, trusting always, caring deeply.
...The Earth laughs in flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"... |
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11-30-2007, 01:41 PM | #745 |
Elf Lord
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I see a difference between political violence and religious violence. Sometimes, anyway. But Israel and the United States are not "persecuting" Muslims in the Middle East because they are Muslim, but rather for military and strategical reasons. We aren't going to bomb mosques because Muslims use them to worship, but extremists are destroying churches because Christians use them to worship.
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11-30-2007, 01:46 PM | #746 | |
Elf Lady
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Love always, deeply and true ★ Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer. ★ Friendship is sharing openly, laughing often, trusting always, caring deeply.
...The Earth laughs in flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"... |
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11-30-2007, 01:54 PM | #747 |
Elf Lord
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Lief, you're right.
Or are you? Do you really think the Iraq war would have been politically acceptable if it had been a Christian country? If 0.5-1m white folks had died as a result? 4m Anglo-Saxon refugees? I doubt it. What if Iran invaded, say, Norway, citing spurious justifications whilst clearly intending to secure access to North Sea oil? We need to look behind these sorts of stories and understand how people are attempting to manipulate us. We are now at the stage that there are people on this thread who not only think that Islam is a disease, but think it's OK to say so in a public forum. It's rank hypocrisy. |
11-30-2007, 01:54 PM | #748 |
Elf Lord
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Mari, the only times I can think of when that was done was hundreds of years ago, during times when we were defending ourselves from Muslim invaders. The Reconquista, for instance, or the Crusades (which started with Muslims invading Byzantine lands, and the Byzantines calling for help from the West).
Maybe others here have a better knowledge of the history, though.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
11-30-2007, 02:01 PM | #749 |
Elf Lady
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Actually Byzantine was from the Turks since almost 2 or 3 hunderd years after the fall of Rome. When around 1100 the first Crusade was organized it was to liberate Jerusalem which was important to the Christians. It also relieved the political stress back home because the nobles causing that stress had all left on a Crusade (how convenient). Upon arriving they found that one of their allies had allready secured the town and kicked the Turks out, but since they were allready there, the good Christian Crusaders decided to attack anyway resulting in a rather bloody end. And then they went again and again.
I don't know too much about the Reconquisita (perhaps of I look up the Dutch name) so I can't talk about that yet.
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Love always, deeply and true ★ Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer. ★ Friendship is sharing openly, laughing often, trusting always, caring deeply.
...The Earth laughs in flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"... Last edited by Mari : 11-30-2007 at 02:02 PM. |
11-30-2007, 02:06 PM | #750 |
The Black Númenórean
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*peers into a thread entitled 'Muslims' and finds not a one. Only heated theological ideas* Hmm, something seems out of place here.
Not that I am a Muslim myself though, I dare say I know a bit more about them then a great majority of you combined. Before I make a plunge into this... Odiferous stew, I'll wait a while for a few more pages.
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11-30-2007, 02:21 PM | #751 |
Elf Lord
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Gaffer . . . When we get into the realm of suppositions, such as "what if Iraq was a Christian country," or "what if Iraq was a white country," we lose a lot of our factual grounding and it becomes much harder to converse. Though I know that, obviously, supposition is always going to be present at some level.
My personal opinion is that the primary reasons for going into Iraq were strategical. Undercurrents of religious or racist fear probably existed in the minds of some, but I believe that to have been a minority. And Christian countries have attacked one another for strategical reasons before too, plenty of times.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 11-30-2007 at 02:23 PM. |
11-30-2007, 02:48 PM | #752 | |
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"People's political beliefs don't stem from the factual information they've acquired. Far more the facts people choose to believe are the product of their political beliefs." "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." |
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11-30-2007, 04:50 PM | #753 |
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Insidious, my friend Heidi Saad, a Coptic Christian from Egypt who moved to the United States, checks the news on the Coptic Church every day, and she feels that in her experience, "something happens almost every week." I'll give you a short report from copts.com to support her statement and hopefully give some idea for the frequency of persecution in Egypt.
On November 22, 2007, police officers arrested a convert to Christianity named Siham al-Sharqawi on her wedding anniversary, calling her a "whore" and threatening to beat her. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not they actually did beat her while arresting her. There haven't yet been any charges made against her, and her location is unknown. Al-Sharqawi was abused by her family when she tried to convert to Christianity in the first place. They pinned her to a chair and beat her. On November 21, 2007, a Christian woman named Shadia Elsisi was sentenced to three years imprisonment for failing to follow her father into Islam. On November 15, 2007, copts.com reports that in the previous week, Mohammed Hegazy had risked his life to venture from his secret apartment in Cairo to get groceries. He was forced into hiding the previous August because of death threats for converting from Islam to Christianity. One's religion is written on one's identity card, in Egypt, and it's next to impossible for Christians to get their identity cards changed to say they're Christian. They often resort to forging identity cards that say they're Christian, because if they worship as Christians while having identity cards saying they're Muslim, they're vulnerable to criminal charges. On November 11, 2007, Shadia Ibrahim was sentenced to three years imprisonment. She's been imprisoned because her father converted to Christianity when she was three years old, and he made himself and his daughter forged identity cards saying they're Christian. On November 10, 2007, three Christian activists from a human rights group were imprisoned on charge of defaming Islam and destroying the reputation of Egypt. I'm just giving you a short account of reported cases of abuse of Christians in Egypt for this month, to impress upon you how common this is. This, of course, doesn't take into account unreported and unpublicized occurrences of persecution this month. Those are likely more common than publicized events.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 11-30-2007 at 04:52 PM. |
11-30-2007, 06:06 PM | #754 | |
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See, one of the challenges of pluralism is that people are free to hate their neighbors and say so. Of course, the US is a big place, and really, kind of uninterested in the rest of the world, so a tendancy to say so wasn't an international issue, until relatively recently. Isolationism enabled all that smug stuff to percolate along. We managed to just set odd folks locally on fire and drive them West. Making the world a smaller place lets the people like that in Sudan or Egypt and the people like that in the US or England, or wherever get to meet each other. Bound to be friction.
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11-30-2007, 06:21 PM | #755 | ||
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I find it somehow ironic that the muslims have among themselves so many different religious currents and cultures that most of the time they can't even agree with people of our own religion. That much at least we have in common.
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11-30-2007, 06:38 PM | #756 | |||
Elf Lord
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Quote:
Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 11-30-2007 at 06:40 PM. |
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11-30-2007, 07:47 PM | #757 | |
Elf Lord
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The "Islam is a disease" thesis is indeed hateful, and also malevolent. It may well be sincere, however. |
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11-30-2007, 10:11 PM | #758 |
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The hypocrisy is that we treat those we know well as individuals and those we don't as a group, but that's not exclusive to christians.
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12-02-2007, 10:05 PM | #759 |
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Gaffer, where did anyone say Islam is a disease? I've reread the posts since I put up the Teddy Bear story (sorry for inciting sympathy for some poor female Brit caught up teaching in another country, wot). I haven't seen anyone other than you make that allegation and you did put it in quotes as though it were quoting someone.
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Inked "Aslan is not a tame lion." CSL/LWW "The new school [acts] as if it required...courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism." GK Chesterton "And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man's nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances." Dorothy L. Sayers, 1 Sept. 1941 |
12-06-2007, 09:50 PM | #760 |
Elf Lord
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IRONY ... http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=1621
WARNING! THE ABOVE SITE REFERENCE IS POLITICALLY INCORRECT and a little hysterical in all senses of that word.
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Inked "Aslan is not a tame lion." CSL/LWW "The new school [acts] as if it required...courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism." GK Chesterton "And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man's nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances." Dorothy L. Sayers, 1 Sept. 1941 |
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