They should reach 20,000 terrorist attacks this week (aka spontaneous protests and workplace violence.)
Islam: Making a True Difference in the World – One Body at a Time
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Most killings are of Muslims by Muslims. Christians killed other Christians just the same for the best part of 2000 years, up to and including WWII.
So the answer is yes, Islam is no different. We’re just lucky enough to be alive now rather than with the “witches” of Salem or the inhabitants of Magdeburg.
If you are trying to say that Islam is still in the Dark Ages, you won`t get any argument from me.
Islam is technically not in the Dark Ages. Islam has been exposed to Modernity, and all the convulsions can be traced back to different answers to Modernity.
Our societies were exposed to Modernity in WWI (Europe) and I believe Vietnam (for the USA). The destruction of the Myths of Invincibility on one side, and of The-Government-Knows-Best on the other, are not easy episodes to recover from.
WWII was not a religious war. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Hirohito were not Christians.
WWII was the continuation of WWI, and WWI was fought by God’s chosen people (amazingly, on both sides!)
Apart from the Turks (WWI) and Japanese and Chinese (WWII) those were mostly a matter of Christians slaughtering other Christians, plus exterminating the Jews while they were at it.
Not even WWI scholars can agree on what started WWI.
Where in the Bible does Christ advise warfare on his neighbors?
In fact, it has been and still is a long standing open questions, how come the followers of Christ have been so willing to kill other people and especially other followers of Christ, at all times and at all latitudes.
Still, that’s what they have been doing. In Europe they mostly stopped when the USA and USSR got in charge in 1945, but as we have seen in the dissolution of Yugoslavia there is always somebody willing for a good war.
“In fact, it has been and still is a long standing open questions, how come the followers of Christ have been so willing to kill other people and especially other followers of Christ, at all times and at all latitudes.”
omnologos, you are smarter than this. Christ did not instruct his followers to make war, ergo, one who makes war is not a follower of Christ.
Are you anti-Christian or something?
Of course not. I am not following you though…there were many Popes waging bloody wars for many years too. Were they not Christians? They definitely thought they were!
“Were they not Christians? They definitely thought they were!”
Hoe do you know what they thought? They “said” they were Christians. But can you or anyone else read the minds or hearts of men past or present?
Hitler also took a leadership role in the church.
I know you are smarter than this. What gives?
Ok let’s reformulate the question. Why have there been so many people who thought/said they were Christians and still did not think twice in launching/participating to extremely violent endeavors?
Take Richard Lionheart at the Crusades. Can we agree he went there to fight as a Christian?
Sorry, “How do you know…”
@omnologos: “plus exterminating the Jews while they were at it”
If you are referring to Hitler, then you have completely lost it. Hitler was a Christian in name only. In practice, he was into the occult and Norse Mythology.
“Most killings are of Muslims by Muslims.”
Yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that many of those killings are particularly brutal and quite frequent.
“Christians killed other Christians just the same for the best part of 2000 years, up to and including WWII. So the answer is yes, Islam is no different.”
Apples and oranges. Since when do Christians of any denomination fly planes into buildings, behead school children, or board buses and blow themselves up? Did they dance in the streets when Osama Bin Laden was killed? As far as WWII was concerned, Hirohito was a Shinto emporer, Stalin persecuted Christians in his own country, and Hitler, well, see above. The British, American, and Canadian Christians (and those of other faiths and lands) were right to fight back against these evil people who were enemies of freedom. Would you rather them have been pacifists who sat at home and did nothing?
P.S. If you want to play a game of body-count poker, I play “Mao (a non-Christian) killed 45 to 50 million of his own people in the Great Leap forward”.
“Take Richard Lionheart at the Crusades. Can we agree he went there to fight as a Christian?”
(sigh) Go back and reread this thread. If you still do not understand what I have said, I cannot help you.
I’m shaking my head in disbelief.
I will pray for you.
I did reformulate my question…
If the answer is as you appear to be saying, that whoever wages war is not a Christian, still my question remains…why did so many fought wars as “Christians”?
In WWI there were plenty of available chaplains on both sides ready to bless the troops…and to tell them they were fighting a Just War. Those chaplains were “followers of Christ”. Were they not?
Omnologos, the conceptual framework you are looking for is referred to as “Just War” which dates back to the intellectual discourse of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. That is to say, killing is permitted in the defence of justice or to protect the innocent from evil. It would have to be invoked by a state authority. I.e., government, the pope, etc. Individual killing not sanctioned by such an authority would remain classified as murder. It would certainly not be rewarded on theological grounds. Nor is war itself fundamental to the Christian religion in the sense of it being a principle or tenant of that religion.
Will – if war is Just because authority sanctioned then all you have to do is find a suitable authority willing to justify your war. We’ve seen this in the UK with the Blair government making sure the Attorney General toed the party line on the Iraq invasion. Likewise with the Pope sanctioned Sack of Constantinople a few centuries back by Crusaders who “forgot” to fight for the Holy Land.
Of course… I am not defending Christianity… I’m sure it can look after itself. However, it is not correct to imply that religion x is equivalent to religion y. There are very few Buddhist suicide bombers.
Modern suicide bombing was invented by the Tamil Tigers.
They are primarily Hindu, not Buddhist. Also I don’t believe there is heavenly reward involved for blowing themselves up.
omnologos, I think we can sum up the difference here quoting the founders of the respective religions. Jesus said to, “But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!” (NLT Matthew 5:44). Mohammad says (about the infidel, which is anyone who is NOT a Muslim): Qur’an 9:123 “murder them and treat them harshly”.
I can make the argument onmologoes, rather well based upon the The Bible that if a Christian says he loves God but is willing to murder people then he is not a Christian. I can also make a very good argument, based on the Qur’an, that if a Muslim does not treat harshly and murder people who are not Muslims then they are not Muslims.
savebyj – every Sacred text contains a lot of statements of all sorts and could be quoted one way or another.
For example Sura 2,62: “Those who believe (in the Qur’an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.”.
Sura 5, 69: “Those who believe (in the Qur’an), those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Sabians and the Christians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness,- on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.”
Sura 22, 17: “Those who believe (in the Qur’an), those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Sabians, Christians, Magians, and Polytheists,- Allah will judge between them on the Day of Judgment: for Allah is witness of all things.”
This is 1,333 years before the Roman Catholic Church came to the same conclusions at the end of the Vatican II Council.
ps how do those quotes manage to co-exist with the one you mention? Well, that’s the thing about Sacred texts. They just aren’t meant to be handbooks.
Yes, but the Sacred texts contradict the very sayings and the life of Mohammed himself. That would be like First Council of Nicaea coming out and saying, “What Jesus really meant was to hate your enemies and do bad things to those who do evil to you.”
As a Christian I don’t need the Vatican Church to tell me that I need to love my enemies. Jesus said it himself. It’s great that the Catholic Church caught up 1300 years later. If you say you are a Christian then you are expected to follow what Jesus said and what he did. This goes back to his disciples such as James, who says that if you “say you love your brother but you have what he has need of and do not give it then you are a liar.” James followed Jesus while he was still on this Earth.
This is the problem I have with Muslims. To be a Muslim you must contradict the founder. To be a Christian you obey and follow the founder.
That seems to be a matter for interpretation. Omnologos’s point is valid and I would have made the same point if I’d been asked. On the other hand, one had to acknowledge that J. was ascetic and M. was a warrior. Hence one religious text has a different flavour when compared with the other.
“I can make the argument onmologoes, rather well based upon the The Bible that if a Christian says he loves God but is willing to murder people then he is not a Christian. I can also make a very good argument, based on the Qur’an, that if a Muslim does not treat harshly and murder people who are not Muslims then they are not Muslims.”
Savebyj is correct, and it still astounds me that others cannot see this. However, I remember seeing a study where a stone age tribe was asked to pick out the one blue cube from a wheel of mostly green cubes, and they could not. Why, because they had no word for “blue” and consequently no understanding of the difference. In their world the color of import is green and they have many words to differentiate between the many shades of green. The same experiment was conducted on civilized peoples, but this time using one slightly different shaded green cube. The natives easily discerned the difference, but the others struggled.
Because I was raised in a Christian household, the words are familiar, and for me their meaning is not up for debate. My ability to differentiate between messages may have been heightened by being raised in a religious environment, just as life in the jungle helped those natives to find healthy plants to eat. Minds must be trained, trained to distinguish, and trained not to be programmed else they will be.
And also remember, we are speaking of Christ, and not the Old Testament. Christ never taught anything but “love thy neighbor’, in good times, and in bad. However Mohammad changed his tune from one of peace, to one of warfare when he consolidated power, when he went from Mecca to Medina. Allah changed his mind, according to Mohammad. That is not the case with Christ.
Savebyj is correct in his statement above, and that distinction that he provides is an important distinction for all of us jungle dwellers.
Jesus wrote nothing. Christianity is Jesus’ message through multiple Hellenistic lenses.
And as a matter of fact, for a Muslim Mohammed didn’t write anything either.
But we’re losing track. My point is that any religion can be used for bad and there’s little in history to tell Christians from Muslims.
I never said Jesus “wrote”, I said Jesus “taught”.
And omnologos, those of us who strive to be followers of Christ, take great offense at being compared with those who try to emulate Mohammad, who was a murderous pedophile who extolled the virtues of decapitations.
I’m sorry you do not understand the difference, and I will try not to take you comparison personally.
Come on gator…’murderous paedophile’ is not a definition to be used among reasonable people.
How many of us would have been Muslims had we been born in a Muslim culture? All of us.
Muhammad consummated his marriage to Aisha when she was nine. He also ordered assassinations and took lives in battle, and after conquest…
“Over 800 surrendered men and boys (and at least one woman) from the Qurayza tribe were beheaded by the prophet of Islam in a bloodbath that is of acute embarrassment to today’s Muslim apologists. It is an episode that is not only completely at odds with the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion, but also the claim that it is the heir to Christianity, since even that religion’s most dedicated critics could hardly imagine Jesus and his disciples doing such a thing.”
There is no “reasonable” comparison of Jesus to Muhammad. A “reasonable” and educated person would never do so.
1. There’s no need to compare Jesus and Muhammad (the former being more important than the latter even for Islam, and the Deity for Christians)
2. Ancient chronicles didn’t follow contemporary hyper-realism rules. We would have to figure out what if anything was the meaning of each word, including “9 years” and “consummated”. English translations won’t do.
3. David for example exterminated tribes and cut personally the foreskins of slain enemies. Just imagine that! Yet nobody would define David as a sexually disturbed corpse-violating mass murderer.
4. It’s exactly as followers of Christ that we should keep in mind Luke 8, 10-14, a parable that means we cannot under no circumstance describe ourselves as better than anybody else.
1. Yes there is a need, to illustrate the baseness of Islam.
2. Not even Islamic scholars question the age of Aisha, it is a known. Muhammad was in his fifties.
3. Davis is a strawman and a distraction, that is old testament, Jesus brought the revolution that is Christianity.
4. Strawman alert! I am not comparing myself to another, I am comparing Christ to Muhammad to show how one is a taught men to love peace and serve one another, and the other is a creed of violence. and submission.
Well at least we agree that Christians aren’t better than Muslims, although each one might well consider his own religion better than the other one, for perfectly logical reasons.
As long as you don’t request your reasons to be universally recognized as absolutely valid, I am fine with that.
I believe we are all created equal, it is what we do after our creation that separates us. Promoting violence and submission makes you less of a person.
Forty years or so of climate delusion. 1400 years of Islamic delusion.
Shrapnel = Pieces
Islam = Religion of Pieces
It is the Will of Allah ! Allah be praised!
You should all praise Allah! You- everybody- were all born Muslims! ( According to Mohamed.)
LLAP – I don’t think anybody has come close to Tamerlane in sheer killing efficiency (yes, he was a Muslim). But we were discussing in general, the age-old problem of people killing other people whatever their religion. And just like civil wars are the bloodiest, likewise nobody will kill Muslims like a “fellow” Muslim will.
Even Mao and Pol Pot, as respectively Chinese and Cambodian, will never be surpassed in the killing respectively of Chinese and Cambodians. There is something in the human psyche that makes us unparalleled exterminators of our own tribe first.
ps Christians didn’t fly planes into building, but I do recommend reading the history of the city of Magdeburg.
@Omnologos: “But we were discussing in general, the age-old problem of people killing other people whatever their religion”
Be that as it may, the most brutal killers of the 20th century (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, etc), whose body counts far exceed that of anything in the previous 19 centuries, were not religious people. In fact, their regimes were violently anti-religious.
Yup. Atheism may arguably be even worse than being of any religion, when one has power and the willingness to kill.
You’re wrong about Hitler and Naziism…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
@Eric: Good ol’ Wikipedia, eh? I wonder if that page is as biased as Wiki is towards AGW? Hitler didn’t kill in the name of Jesus, regardless of what official policies the Nazi party may have had. Hitler, like all bloodthirsty dictators, was an extreme narcicist and his brainwashed people revered him as a god.
“violently anti-religious”.
You can’t argue your way out of that quote when the vast majority of the population identified as protestant or Catholic. I think a little more precision is in order, especially when throwing in Stalin/Pol Pot, etc. There’s more involved than what you implied.
@Eric: “the vast majority of the population identified as protestant or Catholic.”
Identity is one thing, practice is another. By the way, there were many Catholics who were murdered by the Nazi regime, just not nearly as many as Jews who were massacred.
Oh, so violently against the “practice” of religion. I suppose they showed up on sundays and would violently spill milk or something if any actual praying occurred? Got a reference for that?
@Eric: “Oh, so violently against the “practice” of religion”
That wasn’t what I meant.
By the way, the Nazi’s did kill 6 million (or more) Jews didn’t they? Isn’t that being violently anti-Jewish? Last time I looked, Judaism was a religion.
P.S. Read this:
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/new_documents_reveal_hitler_wanted_pope_pius_xii_kidnapped/
“Hitler, who wanted to abolish Christianity, feared the Pope would obstruct his plans for global domination”
If you group religion and ideology together, which I think it is useful to do, then the distinction between ‘atheistic’ doctrines and ‘religious’ doctrines, can be dispensed with.
Another event in Europe was the maintenance of the Holy Roman Empire and all the bloodshed that ensued. Just start from Ferdinand I (10 March 1503, Alcalá de Henares, Spain – 25 July 1564, Vienna, Habsburg domain [now in Austria]) was Holy Roman Emperor from 1558, king of Bohemia and Hungary from 1526, and king of Croatia from 1527 until his death. Before his accession, he ruled the Austrian hereditary lands of the Habsburgs in the name of his elder brother, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
The key events during his reign were the contest with the Ottoman Empire, whose great advance into Central Europe began in the 1520s, and the Protestant Reformation, which resulted in several wars of religion. Many many conflict ensued, Christian against Christian for centuries.
The Empire was formally dissolved on 6 August 1806 when the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804, Emperor Francis I of Austria) abdicated, following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon (see Treaty of Pressburg). Napoleon reorganized much of the Empire into the Confederation of the Rhine, a French satellite. Francis’ House of Habsburg-Lorraine survived the demise of the Empire, continuing to reign as Emperors of Austria and Kings of Hungary until the Habsburg empire’s final dissolution in 1918 in the aftermath of World War I.
Then 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne (and the last part of the Holy Roman Empire), and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo, by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six Bosnian Serb assassins coordinated by Danilo Ili?. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary’s south-Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia. The assassins’ motives were consistent with the movement that later became known as Young Bosnia. Serbian military officers stood behind the attack. And arguably the start of WW1 was a continuation of the conflicts embedded in the intrigues of the Holy Roman Empire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_I,_Holy_Roman_Emperor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria
“…why did so many fought wars as “Christians”?”
You are smarter than this, and I keep trying to give you an out.
Ever hear of a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Have you ever heard Willie Sutton explain of why he robbed banks?
Good night my friend.
I suppose the answer you imply is a possible answer…
Good night!!
“omnologos says:
November 23, 2012 at 10:42 pm
WWII was the continuation of WWI…”
Most people don’t realize that. It’s like there is no Jaws II, if you don’t first have Jaws [and I never watched it]. The waste and destruction plus the “peace” terms of the war to end all wars prepared the seedbed for the rise of a Hitler.
This is highlighted in my book on the story of the Christmas truce of 1914…..see my website.
Let me also add that I keep finding atheists ready to tell me what OT means to be Christian. They cannot possibly fathom the truth and usually end up refusing to give me a pass because I don’t hate women or gays and don’t agree with the Pope on obscure theological points.
Needless to say this is all absurd. Only a Christian will know what it means for him/her to be a.Christian. And there’s no test or exam or license.
Likewise I would recommend against trying to describe what it means to be Muslim. We have no way to know, and whatever the Quran says on a topic there’s another interpretation of it or another passage that could be read as suggesting something completely different.
As for violent Muslim struggle there was little of it between the Siege of Vienna and Israel’s War of Independence or whatever it’s called in 1948. As I said we need differentiate between what’s intrinsic to a religion and what is a contingency of history, in this case a consequence of the obvious cultural superiority in terms of strength ad popularity of American culture compared to pretty much anything the Muslim world has to offer.
In Europe WWII has Americanized us completely (with a European flavor). It took several million dead before we gave up on ourselves.
Sorry …”what it means to be Christian” not OT
What it means to be “x” in the case of religion is defined by the religion itself. This is not ambiguous as you imply. If you don’t believe Christ was the saviour, than you are not Christian in the religious sense. You might describe yourself, of course, as a “cultural” Christian in the same way many progressive Jews do so today. I.e., they may not accept a literal interpretation of the Torah, but identify as Jewish due to a shared cultural background.
Well said Will. I would identify myself as a Christian (I believe Jesus was God in the flesh) and would agree that cultural Christians are not Christians. In the same way, I would argue that there are Cultural Muslims and religious Muslims. The religious Muslims are the ones that I have trouble accepting are following the ‘religion of peace’.
Whether its sanctioned by Government, the Pope, in the name of God, via Islam or Christianity, or even saving the climate, it is Noble Cause Corruption. Just wrong.
Hey Robin! You are absolutely correct. Hitler did it, the Spanish royalty did it, and progressives and marxists are doing it now. If you want to control the population, you must take over its head. So if the majority of a nation is Christian, you must claim to be Christian, and claim that you are doing the work of God.
I guess for some it is more complicated, and not easy to understand, and I guess that explains its incredible efficacy.
Humans have a dual nature, on the one hand capable of great benevolence and great self sacrifice in service to others, on the other hand they are capable of great evil, brutality, greed, and genocide. The same dual human nature is inherent in all groups, social, political, corporate, religious, etc. Up until the formation of the United States, the political structure of most cultures had a strong and direct religious element embedded within the very fabric of the political hierarchy.
Thus religious dogma, tenants and culture, intertwined within the political framework of society, became the emotional flash point of many wars, ostensibly fought for religious reasons, but more often land, wealth and power on earth was the goal, cause and motivation.
By the time of the Russian revolution people were very sick of “religion”. Many today still blame religion for past “religious” wars. The fact is that religion had very little to do with those wars. The cause was the inherent dark side of human nature, primarily greed and love of power over others.
Communism in both Russia and China arose from this mistrust of religion. Like a suitor changing her dress, this was very attractive to millions, who fled to the new lover in the different dress. To their shock they discovered that they had wed to the SAME dark side of humanity, only one wearing a different dress, and hundreds of millions died at the brutal hands of this secular lover. Only this lover was unrestrained by the religious tenants of “love thy neighbor” that were at least preached by most religions, and were beautifully practiced by numerous deeply inspiring lives of some of the saints of disparate religions.
Islam is the last of the violent religions of antiquity wed to political power, and unlike Christianity, or Hinduism, with it tradition on Ahimsa, (non-violence) or Buddhism, it very scripture , especially in the Hadith and Sira has become violent and genocidal. Much that was decent to her, (the idea that Sharia was strictly a personal war the soul fought against its human lower nature) has been weeded out by the Islamist. It will be difficult to teach Islam the wisdom of the founding Father’s of the US, when the US itself is struggling to remember it own heritage.
A persons declared ideals and beliefs do not in reality proclaim their religion, however their actions do, “By their fruits you shall know them”
And that’s how nature intended it. animals at the top of the food chain. 😆
Agreed David. Sharia law to me shows the proper interpretation and implementation of the Qur’an and when seen it is not pretty.
Milestone reached.