Islam means peace like slavery means freedom

[johnb]

http://www.wral.com/news/2924670/detail.html

3 Killed In Iraq Drive-By Were Missionaries
Victims Were Working On Water Purification Project

POSTED: 11:27 p.m. EST March 15, 2004

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The three American civilians killed in a drive-by shooting in northern Iraq Monday were Baptist missionaries working on a water purification project.

The Southern Baptist International Mission Board has identified the victims as 60-year-old Larry Elliott and 58-year-old Jean Elliott of Cary, N.C, and 38-year-old Karen Watson of Bakersfield, Calif. Two other Baptist missionaries were wounded.

A friend from the Elliotts' home church said they were scouting the best location in Iraq for a water purification project.


The couple had previously spent more than 20 years as Baptist missionaries in Honduras.

Watson had arrived in Iraq earlier this month to help the Elliotts and others study how best to allocate the mission board's humanitarian efforts.

A spokesman for American forces in northern Iraq says the victims were traveling in one car when they were attacked near the city of Mosul.

[Anonymous]

Vote to delete, well, at least the title anyway.

Way to go John, it always tickles me when I see your true colors shining so brilliantly through.

[johnb]

Well Mark, maybe if you've ever studied or even, dare I say, understood, the status of non Muslims in a Muslim society according to the Shari'a, the people being referred to as dhminis (minority-whether they are a numerical minority or not) and their status as dhminitude, you would sound less ignorant.

You may eve come to a fact based understanding of the strife in the Balkans as well. Of course, that may get in the way of your socialist politics and we can't have facts doing that now can we?

[Mark]

Facts do get in the way John. Like the fact that what you're trying to express is a lament on the intolerances of political Islam but getting stuck on blaming Islam itself.

Here's what I understand about Islam. Islam, as a religion, is no more or less tolerant than Christianity or Judaism. All three require of their practioners to believe that through its teachings, and only through its own, is the way to some spiritual betterment. They all require you to think that everyone else is wrong about their particular plans for salvation and their particular eschatalogies.

Where Christianity and Judaism are different (this is Friedman's thesis on this topic, by the way) with respect to politics is that they've successfully becoming divorced. Christianity and Judaism both operate in places where a secular state and government exist independently from the religion. On the other hand you have Islam, which has not yet worked through its own internal struggle with that issue. So here you have Muslims thinking, "Hey, look at this. The Jews, the earliest and most imperfect message of God are doing better than us. Christians, who got the second revised message from God are doing better than us. But we, we got the most perfect message from God, we're right but we're still not getting it right." Essentially positing that, to use Friedman's terminology exactly, each of the major religions represented the next step in development, much like software. Religion 1.0 (judaism) 2.0 (christianity) and 3.0 (islam).

Islam is wrong about that characterization though, because it's more like version 1.4, 2.3 and 3.0 as the first two have undergound many internal struggles and division by which they were finally able to allow the greatest possible religious and political freedoms. Islam isn't there yet, but it may, and likely, will be. One wouldn't have though from the texts in the JudeoChristian tradition that there could be such religious and political freedom either, so it is seems wrong to say that Islam, as such, is inconsistent with political tolerance.

Now Friedman says that Islam will have and need to have a civil war. I don't quite buy that, but that's the basis of that belief.

The point is, Christian societies, states run according to explicit Christian principles, have committed atrocities and persecutions in their past too. If you're going to indict Islam for its intolerance you must indict the other two as well. But, I don't think you need to, or should, do that. Because, when we think of, say, the Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition, these events leave the impression that they were not so much religious acts as political power plays. We can then indict the leaders and the politics while sparing the religion. So too with Islam - it is its politics which are most at fault, not its texts.

[johnb]

Mark,

Before you embarass yourself too greatly, I am going to suggest you come to grips with some facts.

The Koran is only one source recognized as authoritative in matters of doctrine and discipline within Islam. ALL branches of Islam recognize the existance of various haddiths. I've seen numbers as high as a total of over 10,000 separate haddith's recognized as authoritative by the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence (there are four primary). The authenticity of most is utterly dubious and can be traced to places and individuals far removed from 'Mohammed". Textual criticism of the Koran has cast doubt on the existance of a single individual, a "Mohammed", responsible for this warrior religion. It appears to be more a piece of work in progress whose development was arrested almost a thousand years ago. That said....

There is a wonderful site at

http://www.dhimmitude.org/

which will help you understand the miserable status of non-Muslims in Islamic societies. The oppression, the forced conversions, the genocide are based upon haddith's which call for Muslims to Jihad, violent, physical Jihad originating in the Dar el Salaam ("House of Peace" - don't laugh) against Dar el Harb ("House of War" that's all non-Muslim dominated societies.)

Here is where you are wrong.....authoritative sources in the foundational documents of Islam call for the repression, the forced conversions, and even the extermination of non-Muslims.

Nowhere does Christ tell people to go barbeque a Jew. Nor a pagan. Nor anyone else for that matter. Part of the Islamic contempt for the Jesus of the New Testament is based on this loathing of a figure who preaches "turn the other cheek". THAT is distinctly un-Islamic. The saviour Islam looks forward to is a military conqueror - dare I say it, an Osama like character. Islam rejects the New Testament and Jesus Christ in part because of the pacifist nature of the Gospel. That is incomprehensible to the culture and as it follows the religion.

What individual Christians may do is irrelevant. The Roman Catholic Church could and did in fact barbeque a lot of Jews, Protestants, and others who rejected Roman hegemony. There is no way to justify that in the words of Christ as recorded in the Gospel. None at all. They had to create their own paper trail for that. That doesn't incriminate 'Christianity', it incriminates one denomination, Roman Catholicism and it's canon law. That is quite different. Mohammed is claimed in the haddith or in the sura's of the Koran for the death of apostates, for the death of polytheists, for the death of missionaries attempting to convert Muslims. No one can claim Jesus Christ said anything like that. If a Christian were to kill a Jew claiming he or she did it because Jesus told him or her to Christians could rightly say, No, theologically that is ridiculous. A Muslim cannot say that when some wackjob straps on a bomb and murders a group of Jewish kids on a school bus. Osama is JUST as theologically correct, if not more so, than the "Islam means peace" crowd.

The ONLY "peace'" Mohammed allowed his religion to admit was in and among itself, it is, by the definitions of it's founder, at war with the rest of us. You can't change that. I can't change that. No Muslim can change that. The only guy that could, if he ever existed, died in the 7th century.

You should get on the mailing list for Daniel Pipes. It would be of interest to you to learn from peopled educated in Islam, who speak Arabic, and are scholars of the culture.

www.danielpipes.org