muslims PART 2

[The Gaffer]

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

[The Gaffer]

Here's another true statement:

"Throughout the Middle East, Muslims are enduring horrible persecution at Christian hands."

It works with Jewish as well.

[Mari]

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?

[Mari]

Originally Posted by The Gaffer

Here's another true statement:

"Throughout the Middle East, Muslims are enduring horrible persecution at Christian hands."

It works with Jewish as well.

Nice comeback.

[Lief Erikson]

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.

[Mari]

Originally Posted by Lief Erikson

We aren't going to bomb mosques because Muslims use them to worship, but extremists are destroying churches because Christians use them to worship.

We used to... perhaps they are now trying to make up for what we did to them first Just kiddin'

[The Gaffer]

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.

[Lief Erikson]

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.

[Mari]

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.

[The last sane person]

*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.

[Lief Erikson]

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.

[Insidious Rex]

Originally Posted by Lief Erikson

We aren't going to bomb mosques because Muslims use them to worship, but extremists are destroying churches because Christians use them to worship.

How many churches are actually blown up by islamic extremists in any given year lief? You make it sound like this is a daily occurance. I would dare say islamic extremists destroy more Islamic buidlings than christian ones.

[Lief Erikson]

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.

[sisterandcousinandaunt]

Originally Posted by The Gaffer

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.

I don't think so. It may be hateful, but it's not hypocritical. That's covered by free speech and the establishment clause.

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.

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by The last sane person

*peers into a thread entitled 'Muslims' and finds not a one. Only heated theological ideas* Hmm, something seems out of place here.

Muslims are quite underrepresented here. Serenoli is the only one I know of and as far as I know she has tired of this sort of debate.

Originally Posted by Lief Erikson

Forget ridiculing . . . Converts from Islam to Christianity are getting tortured and killed for their religious beliefs.

That's because you can convert to the islam all you want but technically converting from Islam is considered a capital crime, the other religions just didn't seem to have thought about plugging that loophole.

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.

[Lief Erikson]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

Muslims are quite underrepresented here.

Yes, it's unfortunate.

Originally Posted by Eärniel

That's because you can convert to the islam all you want but technically converting from Islam is considered a capital crime,

Yes. Christians that aren't converts from Islam also get persecuted, but converts certainly are getting it the hardest.

Originally Posted by Eärniel

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.

In Islam, I find that a good thing. Muhammad was one of these extremists, and his original supporters also were. The currently Muslim lands were taken by unprovoked, religion-inspired conquest. So the break-up of Islam into groups with varying ideologies is a blessing, from my perspective.

[The Gaffer]

Originally Posted by sisterandcousinandaunt

I don't think so. It may be hateful, but it's not hypocritical.

Sorry, error of the sequence of words on my part. The hypocrisy is in going "ooh aren't these muslims so much worse than Christians?" whilst bombing the crap out of them.

The "Islam is a disease" thesis is indeed hateful, and also malevolent. It may well be sincere, however.

[brownjenkins]

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.

[inked]

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.

[inked]

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.