Blind fanatics give religion a bad rep...

I was impressed with the method imputed to Olaf Tryggvason, in which a funnel would be put in the mouth of the obdurate pagan, then a snake put into the funnel, after which the outer edge of the funnel would be heated. You can't fault the boy for a lack of imagination.

By the way, your video doesn't work. It's always a good idea to hit "preview" first when posting a video, to know if it will embed properly.

I didn't know about the snakes, though I do not doubt that he did it. Around here he is known as Olav the Holy.

Thanks for the heads up. I did hit preview, but I didn't try to watch the video through it.

I thought you'd appreciate a reference to Tryggvason. Olav the Holy? Those boys are too squeamish about who they set up as holy men, are they. Did they make him a saint?

Erm, my mistake. Olav Tryggvason was not Olav the Holy. That was Olav Haraldsson, who came after. But both killed those who refused to accept the new faith, and Olav the Holy was indeed made a saint. Today we have the Order of St Olav, which is kind of the equivalent to English knighthood.

They do.

We can't view the video to hear what this fellow actually said, but might you, in referencing violent Christianity, be comparing the Islam of today with the Christianity of centuries past?

I appreciate that it is possible to cite examples of current day Christian violence, but but to my thinking there is a significant gap between the scope of violence employed by today's Christian zealots and their Islamic colleagues.

Unfortunately, Islam (at least in the region of its origins) seems to have taken a huge step backwards rather than reform through modernity.

You should be able to get to the video by following the link below it.

I was comparing Christianity of centuries past with Islam of centuries past. The bloody introduction of Christianity in Norway happened around 200 years after what Mr Voris mentions in his video. I'm just seeing a hypocritical double standard in this guy. To his mind, the bible was delivered by God, and the Quran was clearly fabricated. He falls into my category of ignorant fool.



I am not sure about that. Might be, but I just don't have enough information to make the judgement.



I think the biggest differences between the religions are the cultures they grow in. In Christian culture, Islam appears horrible. I think it's the same the other way around. There are things to be said for our modern ways, but to say that they are better than the old ones in every way is taking it too far.

When the Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians) murdered more than 8000 allegedly Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, was the scope not large enough to impress you?

(I've written allegedly Muslim because the accounts of all knowledgeable observers that i've read about Bosnia-Herzegovina describe the Bosnian Muslims as not being very fanatically muslim.)

"Blind fanatics give religion a bad rep... "

Na... religion gives religion a bad rep.

I find it entertaining when one religious group attacks another because it is only one dogma accusing another dogma that their dogma is wrong. Like two obese kids pointing at each other calling each other fat asses. Or one lunatic calling another lunatic, crazy.

In a way, there are two kinds of people. There are those who assert their reality based on intellectual fact, and there are those who assert their reality based on emotional relationship. It is a matter of how we identify with the world.
What gives you the sense of awe in a sunrise? Is it the emotional experience of it, or is it the sheer mind blowing scope of the universe and thinking about the forces at work?

The way I see it, normal, rational people experience reality through a combination of intellectual understanding and emotional relation. For a fanatic, it's either or.
A religious fanatic, as most of us know, does not give a damn about facts. He believes what he wants to because he feels it is real.
To a "science fanatic", a person who defines reality as strictly mechanical processes, how he feels about it is irrelevant. He believes what he wants to because he knows it's real.
I believe that only the most unbalanced people are this one sided. Intellect without emotional evaluation is just as dangerous as emotion without intellectual restraint. Religion is an expression of the human need to be emotionally connected, so I will not agree with you that "religion gives religion a bad rep".

Somehow this doesn't seem very surprising.

Yes, we are jamming on an old song.

Kind of strange how you claim there are two kinds when later you state a third kind as being the most reasonable. Why not state the third type then? There are perhaps even a forth type. The third type is one who utilizes both intellect and emotion for their assessment of reality. The forth type utilizes both but in irrational ways, such as ignoring one in favor of the other for specific concepts. They might react emotionally but claim they are responding intellectually on the subject. Or claim they are responding emotionally but are actually not. Like when a christian tries to claim they have compassion for humanity when they actually don't.



Can I say neither? What about a person who is indifferent to the experience? Would you honestly say they are being irrational? That they MUST experience something and have an emotional reaction to it? Or if they are not reacting emotionally then they in some way are responding in some intellectual way. No...



I disagree once again. I actually think a fanatical person actually is picking and choosing. On certain subjects they might be responding with more emotion then with their logical reasoning. In other cases they are responding more intellectually then with emotion. A good example are extremists who will murder non believers or apostates, yet turn around and claim they have compassion for humanity. Intellectually their dogma is dictating that they behave in an unsympathetic way and they justify it while lacking actual compassion or empathy for their victims. But all of this stems from their emotional affliction towards those who are nonbelievers and apostates. They are trying to live out their gods emotional reaction towards these people.



I would actually go on to say that they actually believe they have actual facts and why they believe so strongly. A person doesn't actually say, I believe this even though there are no facts. They actually invent the "facts" which support their belief regardless of the merit of supposed "facts". This means that they honestly believe they are behaving rationally and logically when they are not. I wouldn't exactly call that an emotional reaction.



I don't think I have ever met such a person. In fact I would go as far as to say, such a person doesn't actually exist. I have never heard someone who is using actual intellect make a claim that they believe something is real because they know it is real. It is not a very logical statement to make. We can only make assumptions about reality and those assumptions might be based on experience that can be tested but I highly doubt the person would say that is why they believe because they know it to be. To the actual intellectual nothing can be known with absolute certainty, not even our own experiences. This is why a purely logical response to reality doesn't work despite the many attempts to do so.



I will disagree with you. I think religion lacks the needed intellectual, logical approach. I see religion as basing everything on emotions. Show me where a religious person is using logic to support their beliefs and NOT emotional ones. If you can do that then I might agree with you that religion would bring some sort of balance to the table.

Fair point, but one which I've addressed before.

Al Capone was a practicing Catholic, but you wouldn't likely refer to him as a Christian Gangster or Christian Murderer.

It's my contention that the Serbs in Bosnia murdered the Bosniaks of Bosnia not because they were Muslims, which the Serbs were inspired by fanatical Christian beliefs to destroy, but because they were not Serbians; members of a different tribe.

There is a reason it was widely labeled "ethnic cleansing" and not "religious purging."

Undoubtedly, their being Muslims was a major component of the difference, that made them targets, but it wasn't the primary driver of Serbian animus.

Serbian murderers weren't invoking Christ and quoting Biblical scripture whenever they addressed their goals and their deeds.

Even should we accept that the Serbians were Christian Terrorists, their terrorism didn't match the scope of Islamic Terrorism.

Serbian Christian fanatics didn't fly planes into the Kabah or skyscrapers in Dubai. They weren't part of a worldwide series of Christian terrorist acts wherein Philippino Catholics blew up an Indonesian nightspot, or Coptic commandos stormed a hotel in Cairo and slaughtered Egyptian Muslims.

The threat of Islamist terrorism is global, the best that those who disagree with my assessment of its relative impact can do is cite very provincial examples, like witch burnings in Uganda, Serbian murders of Bosniaks and the quite rare murder of someone associated with conducting abortions in the US.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I know the way so many of the members of A2K respond to posts that offend their tender sensibilities:

1) Murder is heinous. Murders by Muslims are no more heinous than murders by Christians.

2) Nothing in my argument suggests that Christianity is superior to Islam as a religion or that Christians are, perforce, better human beings than Muslims.

It is clear, at least to me, that the scope of Islamic terrorism in our time is far greater than anything that can be called Christian terrorism.

You fancy yourself a historian Set. Do you think that years from now historians will look back on this period as a time of religious inspired terrorism or Islam inspired terrorism?

Horrendous deeds have been committed in the name of Christ, but not so much lately as compared to similar deeds committed in the name of Allah.

If it will satisfy you and others, I will be happy to stipulate that terrorism has been conducted, throughout history, by Christian fanatics, and there is nothing about Christianity that assures it cannot reach such lows again.

It just isn't happening now.

The Left in this country are like a bunch of kids jumping on the latest fad. The latest Liberal fad in America is to:

a) Deny that religion has anything to do with Islamist terrorism
b) In the alternative, assert that Christians are as bad as Muslims. (Note that they never seem to argue that Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, or Taoists are as bad as Muslims)

This is so clearly politically driven that it stuns me that anyone of intelligence denies it.

The Left (in general) is anti-Christian. That's perfectly fine in the sense that there is no requirement for them to embrace Christianity, but they go out of their way to cast aspersions against Christianity as opposed to any other religion.

Certainly some of them are clear thinking atheists who are not fond of any religion, but because America is essentially a Christian nation, focus on that particular creed.

Too many others are responding to the same Pavlovian signals that prompt them to trash patriotism, capitalism and gun ownership.

I value and condemn all religions equally.

You and others want to make this issue of intolerance which, at least in my case, it is not.

The two Great Sins of Man as defined by the Left:
1) Hypocrisy
2) Intolerance

Violence doesn't seem to make the top tier.

Perhaps you think I am splitting hairs when I assert the Bosnian Serbs weren’t motivated by religion. OK, I’ve continued my argument granting that they did.

Tell me, do you really believe that current Christian terrorism presents as great or greater a threat to civilization as current Islamic terrorism?

You are seriously ignorant of the propaganda which was used to inspire the Bosnian Serbs. That's not my problem, though. You just want to deny that because you have a brief to portray Muslims as more savage and less civilized than christians. That's not my problem, either. I am quite happy with the two thoughts that you can never acknowledge that you might be wrong, and that you are essentially, as far as concerns Muslims, a religiously motivated bigot. One can apply your politically motivated dodge to most, if not all terrorist acts. I don't consider any form of terrorism to be a threat to civilization.

By the way, you're a liar. You do not "value and condemn" all religions equally. When a handful of Muslim fanatics commit merderous acts, you condemn the entire religious confession of Islam. When a handful of christian fanatics commit murderous acts. you excuse christianity on the grounds that these are fanatics, uncharacteristic of the religious confession. Additionally, you say that the nothing matches the scope of Muslim terrorism, although the number of Bosnian Muslims killed in Srebrenica alone is more than twice, almost three times as many as those killed on September 11th. You ignore the Russian war on Chechnya and Ingusetia--the Chechens and the Ingush are Muslims. I'm sure you'll rush to say that the Russians are not christians, or that they are not religiously motivated. Some are, some aren't--but the Muslim world certainly sees it as a continuation of the crusades, which is just how the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are successfully portrayed. The civil war in the Sudan, the one that didn't get all the press that the war in Darfur got, lasted for more than a generation, and was fought between the Muslims of the north and the animists and christians of the south. But that doesn't count, huh? Surely those Sudanese christians weren't religiously motivated.

There are a host of other lies in your post. I don't "fancy myself an historian," and have assiduously pointed out over the years that i am not an historian, but simply a student of history. You're using an idiotic pair of straw men, too.



This is a bullshit line which you attribute to "leftists." You don't even know that i am a "leftist." In fact, i was raised by conservative Democrats, and have always hewed to the political line i learned in my grandparents' home. But i don't know of any leftists who deny that Muslim terrorists are not motivated by religion. I haven't asserted that "christians are just as bad as Muslims," although i freely assert that you have a lunatic fringe in every religion who are capable of and who have committed murderous acts. Hindus have been pretty damned murderous in India, which is why East and West Pakistan were created in 1947. They've been murdering Muslims in India again in recent years. I don't know of any murderous acts by confessional Jains, but i'd be very much surprised if there were none. I have routinely condemned Buddhists in these fora because of their hypocrisy, including ignoring how readily Buddhists will murder one another, or people of other confessions--witness Sri Lanka. I have pointed out that the sohei of Japan 500 years ago were Buddhist warriors, and that the Ikko Ikki sect of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists were not only warlike, but actively fomented peasant insurrections. In a wonderful bit of historical irony, Oda Nobunaga, having destroyed the power of Mt. Hiei Tendia Buddhist monks and their hold on the bureaucracy in Kyoto, he used them as sohei to attack and help destroy the Ikko Ikki fortress monastery at Honganji. I've mentioned all of these things many times in these fora.



Here's another lie of yours, another bit of straw man bullshit you dredge up because you don't in fact have a solid argument. You can rant to your heart's content with your reactionary bullshit claims, it won't change the fact of the double standard which you consistently apply in any discussion of Muslim terrorism.

Try to discuss this without lies and straw man attributions.

For me, fanatics of all shades, are simply those who takes themselves for granted. They lack almost any kind of humility because they lack almost any kind of self awareness. They guard, to within an inch of their lives, against any and all kinds of intellectual and emotional vulnerability because otherwise the illusion would be shattered. The illusion being what really lies beneath their actions and their lives: naked self interest. Instead they remain largely unaware of that driving force and mask it in the particulars of their fanaticism.

Of Gods and Men is a beautiful film in my opinion but specifically, it's a nice example of well grounded, religious tolerance that is disturbed by wider political forces. But of course, with the above in mind, those political forces are perhaps hard to disentangle from the religious picture itself.