dlowan wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:dlowan wrote:Yeah - I read it. I just think it is nuts....What is your actual point?...
Since other have raised the question in several threads, I am curious to establish which religion is the most violent. My motive is irrelevant. All that I have done is to write reasonable criteria for which events ought to be included. Your idea about nothing being definable won't cut it. If I refer to acts of violence actually related to the religion, just do your best to apply it sensibly.
Crap. Which religion is most violent is a matter of circumstance and opportunity etc.
Your agendum is transparent and idiotic.
Exclude history and reality all relevant factors - sure, you can "prove" your nonsensical theorum.
It is a hollow and mendacious victory, though.
The question exists independent of your speculation as to my motive, and, in fact, exists independent of my actual motives. To ask which religion is the most violent is a perfectly meaningful and interesting question, which may or may not possess a clear answer, and, in fact, it was Setanta who first asked it here. Your attempts to discredit a simple, objective, meaningful question by speculating about the motives of the person asking it are illogical.
Brandon9000 wrote:dlowan wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:dlowan wrote:Yeah - I read it. I just think it is nuts....What is your actual point?...
Since other have raised the question in several threads, I am curious to establish which religion is the most violent. My motive is irrelevant. All that I have done is to write reasonable criteria for which events ought to be included. Your idea about nothing being definable won't cut it. If I refer to acts of violence actually related to the religion, just do your best to apply it sensibly.
Crap. Which religion is most violent is a matter of circumstance and opportunity etc.
Your agendum is transparent and idiotic.
Exclude history and reality all relevant factors - sure, you can "prove" your nonsensical theorum.
It is a hollow and mendacious victory, though.
The question exists independent of your speculation as to my motive, and, in fact, exists independent of my actual motives. To ask which religion is the most violent is a perfectly meaningful and interesting question, which may or may not possess a clear answer, and, in fact, it was Setanta who first asked it here. Your attempts to discredit a simple, objective, meaningful question by speculating about the motives of the person asking it are illogical.
So - cite a source which is capable of answering your question- as you appear to believe is possible. I will then examine it. I can find no such source.
Lol - you believe there s reality sans observer effect in such matters?
That is very disingenuous Brahmin.
The report suggests that Al Quaeda has recruited British born Muslims - not that this is a British act of terror as such.
Shame!
dlowan wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:dlowan wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:dlowan wrote:Yeah - I read it. I just think it is nuts....What is your actual point?...
Since other have raised the question in several threads, I am curious to establish which religion is the most violent. My motive is irrelevant. All that I have done is to write reasonable criteria for which events ought to be included. Your idea about nothing being definable won't cut it. If I refer to acts of violence actually related to the religion, just do your best to apply it sensibly.
Crap. Which religion is most violent is a matter of circumstance and opportunity etc.
Your agendum is transparent and idiotic.
Exclude history and reality all relevant factors - sure, you can "prove" your nonsensical theorum.
It is a hollow and mendacious victory, though.
The question exists independent of your speculation as to my motive, and, in fact, exists independent of my actual motives. To ask which religion is the most violent is a perfectly meaningful and interesting question, which may or may not possess a clear answer, and, in fact, it was Setanta who first asked it here. Your attempts to discredit a simple, objective, meaningful question by speculating about the motives of the person asking it are illogical.
So - cite a source which is capable of answering your question- as you appear to believe is possible. I will then examine it. I can find no such source.
Lol - you believe there s reality sans observer effect in such matters?
I see myself as doing the creative part of the effort and really feel that it would be better for others to do the "leg work." I prefer to monitor and coordinate.
dlowan wrote:That is very disingenuous Brahmin.
The report suggests that Al Quaeda has recruited British born Muslims - not that this is a British act of terror as such.
Shame!
where in the following report is it sugested that the al quaida and nothing but the al quaida has recruited british born muslims ?? all that the scotland yard guy said was that the terrorists were not foreigners -
have you ever heard of the erstwhile baader meinhof gang?
BBC REPORT -
Bombs 'probably work of Britons'
Metropolitan Police/PA
Terrorists born or based in the UK were "almost certainly" behind the London bombs, a former Met police chief says.
Suggesting foreign attackers were to blame was "wishful thinking", ex Police Commissioner Lord Stevens told the News of the World.
No, it does not assume that. You, yourself, started a thread asking which religion was the most violent, and you even answered the question, which was more than I did. All I did was to add a few reasonable criteria for an event to be included. My post does not say what you are attributing to it. It says what it says. It asks Eric to provide correct statistics and that's all that it does. Citing statistics correctly cannot be called hatred or prejudice. I assure you that I have never in any way been impolite to a person from the Middle East or a Muslim unless that particular individual did something wrong himself, and I have no memory of even that happening. I do, however, suspect based on what I hear in the news, that if the question you asked were posed in a way I consider more relevant, talking about the modern world, incidents actually related to religion, and so on, that the Muslims would be the "winners." I don't know that it's true, but I certainly hear more incidents of that type in the news.
Which religion is most violent is a matter of circumstance and opportunity etc.
Exclude history and reality all relevant factors - sure, you can "prove" your nonsensical theorum.
"I think what is troubling here has been the silence from the Muslim community at large in the face of these attacks."
Result of 2 seconds of Googling:
http://www.anglicannifcon.org/Islamic%20Voices.htm
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2005/07/07/story210573.html
http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php
http://news.corporate.findlaw.com/prnewswire/20050707/07jul20051158.html
A few of result after result after result of a search for Muslim condemnation of terror attacks.
?'I do not know what more we can do to convince a writer like Andrew Carey that we are against terrorism. But we also have every right to defend our faith against the likes of Jerry Falwell. Every faith has the right to defend itself when attacked, and Muslims would support them in doing so. But no mainstream leader in Britain has ever condemned such individuals to death. Freedom of expression for the majority community in any part of the world at the expense of minority communities is totally unacceptable.'
?'I am dismayed to see that Andrew Carey has not heard the Muslims' chorus of ?'no' to terrorism, which, is indeed, often committed by Muslim governments against their own people. In Pakistan a few years ago Muslims were killed in a mosque during Ramadan while at prayer. More recently Christians were killed while attending Sunday worship. For me these were equally heinous crimes against humanity. Somehow we Muslims seem to be expected to share guilt for an act of terror committed by someone bearing a Muslim name, in a way that does not happen to the Christian community, or to the Buddhists after the subway deaths in Tokyo. Mr Carey says that debate is being stifled about peace and jihad. This shows he has not heard the debate going on within the community about human rights, minorities, conversion, peace, justice and human dignity.'
?'Religion is only ?'newsworthy' when bad things happen. Muslim clerics condemning violent acts rarely make the news. All movements, whether political, economic or religious, contain extreme factions, and as long as the media continues to give such minority groups a platform, more liberal, rational followers of any movement will not be heard. A few Muslims are involved in violence and aggression, yet there are also world leaders doing similar things under the name of ?'democracy.''
The Muslim Council of Britain said it "utterly condemns the perpetrators of what appears to be a series of co-ordinated attacks".
Karim Mohammed, manager of Hilal House restaurant on Edgware Road, said: "Everyone is subdued and people are wondering what has happened. People are asking how will it affect us, are we going to be treated in a nice way after this?
"We have nothing to do with this."
Leaders of the American Muslim Political Coordination Council (AMPCC) held a meeting in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to issue the following points related to the terrorist attacks:
1) We assert unequivocal condemnation based on our religious values and our identity as American Muslims;
2) We do not need to defend every maniacal incident emanating from the Muslim world or the Muslim community, just as other religious groups need not defend their extremists;
In 2004, CAIR launched an online petition drive, called "Not in the Name of Islam," designed to disassociate Islam from the violent acts of a few Muslims. SEE: http://www.cair-net.org/asp/article.asp?id=169&page=AA
The Anti-Muslim attacks that are prevelant on this forum really make me angry. This thread has three purposes:
1) To debunk the prudjudice, distortions and outright lies people here use to justify ethnic hatred.
2) To have one place to express my disgust, anger, revulsion for ethnic hatred that is being expressed in other threads. This includes pseudo-intelligent rationalisations of predjudice, to outright name calling.
3) To show that this kind of ethnic hatred (not the victims of it) are the cause of the worst atrocities that humanity has commited.
First the debunking...
There are several reasons people have put forward to justify their hatred of Islam as a religion, and Muslims in general.
1) Muslims are involved in more wars than any other religion. This is easily shown to not be true. In the current active wars, There is a major Christian involvement in conflicts in Columbia, Uganda, Congo, Sengal, Ivory Coast, Afganistan, Iraq, and Chechnya. There is a major Muslim inolvement in Iraq, Afganistan, Israel, Aceh, Algeria, Somalia and Sudan. There are some wars (e.g. Nepal) that neither religion is involved in.
Of course one of the distortions used to support predjudice is to classify any war that contains a Muslim nation or interest as a "religious" war, and any war that waged by Christian nations as something else. This is obviously nonsense.
Muslims and Jews lived peacefully together for centuries before they started fighting over land. Yes... the conflict between Israel and Palestine is over land, even though religious rhetoric is being used by both sides.
2) The Muslim religion is intrinsically more violent than other religions. People support this predjudice by two means. They look at history, and they look at religious writings.
There are a couple of obvious fallacies to this arugment. First of all, if you use the same means to judge almost any any religion you will get the same result. Christianity has certainly commited its share of barbarism, as have Hindus and Muslims. There are passages in the Jewish/Christian Bible that advocate killing "immoral" women and homosexuals. In the Bible, The Judeo-Christian God advocates the slaughter of men women and children after a militar victory.
Of course, there are millions of Christians, Jews and Muslims who value their religion, don't advocate murder and are normal people trying to live good peaceful lives.
Picking out one religion for slander, while ignoring the exact same traits in the other major religions, is hypocricy.
3) Muslims have commited more atrocities than other religions, both in the past and presently. People commit atrocities because they are evil people, not based on their religion. Religion has been used to advocate barbarism... but this is not necessary or relevant.
The most brutal atrocity commited in recent history was the genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda is 95% Christian and their is strong evidence that Churches not only stood by, but participated. Is there anyone who is pinning this atrocity on Christianity as a religion?
European anti-Semitism, which led to the Nazi horrors, and still persists today was part of Christianity. Martin Luther (the father of Protestantism) was famously anti-Semitic and blamed the Jews for murdering Jesus, and the Catholic led Inquisition was infamous for killings and forceable conversions of Jews.
Christians, Hindus and Muslims have all committed atrocities ... both in the past and in recent times. Again singling out one religion is hypocricy.
4) Muslims are only the religious group that advocates terrorism or other barbaric acts. Again it is very easy to show that this is not true. Many Christians in the United States explicitly advocate terrorism. The KKK is an overtly Christian group who commited their acts of terror-- "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." The doctrine of a Christian based racial holy war is still prevalent in American Extreme Christian groups.
Of course not all Christians accept this, but is is the extreme. It is also true that there is a Spectrum of Christianity. Many Christians accept parts of the KKK message, for example gun-rights, the belief America chosen by God, and anti-immigrant beliefs, even though they reject the message.
Terrorism as warfare has been used in by many different groups-- from the Irish, to the Basques to US supported anti-communist forces. The groups that turn to terrorism are the groups from a militarily inferior cause that they are desparate to win. The "Christian" west doesn't need to use terrorism, and the militant forces in the Middle East, who unfortunately use religion but have a political cause, use terrorism the reasons any other group has in the past. Many Christian, Jewish and Hindu groups have used terrorist tactics and just as strident religious rhetoric as the terrorists.
I am not supporting terrorism. I am just saying that the religion is not to blame. We all oppose the actions of Al Qaida and we want to see them defeated.
The point is you don't stop Al Qaida by attacking Muslims, any more than you stop the KKK by attacking Christians.
------
I am not opposed to religion-- although some are, and maybe based on the evidence I should be. I believe there are good people who find meaning in all religions. There are also extremists in each religion who use faith to justify barbaric acts.
But it is clear that when compared, no religion is clearly worse.
Why can't we condemn people who do bad things-- regardless of their religion-- and accept the rights of the rest of us to live peaceful lives without facing ethnic hatred and predjudice?
To many, it all started in 1989.
That was the year Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa condemning British author Salman Rushdie to death for his polemic account of Islam in The Satanic Verses. The controversy was largely seen as an intrusive threat -- an unwelcome import from Iran that played out on Western soil, targeting a man that had been a British citizen for two decades.
But European intellectuals and cultural critics who blasted the fatwa at the time were stunned to learn many British Muslims, born and educated in the U.K., openly supported the death sentence -- in defiance of Western law and European civilization no less.
"Suddenly it seemed that Islam was not compatible with European political principles and values," says Jocelyne Cesari, a principal research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), visiting professor at Harvard University and author of When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and the United States. The controversy, she says, challenged long-rooted European traditions of secularism that maintain a separation between religion and citizenship.
Since then, the debate over secularism seems to be widening, driven in part by globalization and demographic trends: In 1945, there were less than 1 million Muslims living in Western Europe; today there are an estimated 18 million. The proposed entry of Turkey into the European Union would increase this number to nearly 90 million.
That really makes sense. Who here did not feel total shock about the Rushdie "fatwa"? I knew good liberal people in my town who immediately went out and purchased that book to show their solidarity with Rushdie... the underdog.
Do you remember how you felt at the time? I'd be interested to know. I know my immediate reaction was pure astonishment, then flaming anger.
