What is your point? Your point of view? Simply attacking him without a countervailing position is not helpful.

@Storm1752 my point is that this member posts on the same subject frequently with no argued response. For my viewpoint on lease see my responses to other posts of this poster.

@Geoffrey51 Oh okay so this is an ongoing thing...

@Storm1752 yes, the same discussion point with no apologetic to his position other than all Islam is terroristic. The same could be said for Far Right ideology which is deeply rooted in Christianity but there is not the same vitriol extant about the Christian religion.

Hating an ideology and hating the followers are not the same. I have been debating Islam for and against worldwide for over 36 years. I am both academically, professionally and in every other aspect well groomed to discuss Islam. I hate the disease but not the diseased. I have been taking a huge risk on my life trying to criticise Islam. No, not all religion and Islam are the same. Give me the context of the verses from the Quran I put here and prove me the context to be anything else than what it appear to be prima facie.

I know the Quran upside down, inside out. I would have given my life defending the Muslims from the attacker in Christchurch, But I will also give my life speaking against Islam. We won't be fooled any more. We ex Muslims have suffered a lot. No, we won't be fooled any more. Find me a single verse from the Quran where it orders to love people regardless of their faith and beliefs or to love universally without the precondition of loving "Allah" first. But I will be able to show you such verses from all other major scriptures regardless of filths in them as well. Here is another one for you: Chapter 8, verse 55 of the Quran: Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved, and they will not [ever] believe -!!
Come on tell me the context.

@mufassil I’m sure you’re right. Let’s agree to differ on the spirit of Islam. Your experience is obviously greater than mine.

In countries where Muslims are a minority, they behave a lot better than in countries where they dominate, but that doesn't tell you what they think. In the West, they hide a lot from us because they know we won't like it, but you get glimpses of it every once in a while, such as when 25% of those polled expressed some sympathy for the people who murdered the French cartoonists. If Right-wing bigots in Britain killed cartoonists who depicted the queen in a ridiculing way, no civilised admirer of the Queen would express any sympathy for those killers whatsoever.

All Muslims are culpable for the actions of terrorists who act on the vicious primary hate in the Qur'an - they propagate the hate and some of their most devout members act directly on it. With the Qur'an you have direct commands to kill that come from God.The Bible is also a vile pile of bigotry, but it depicts God as having people killed rather that providing direct lasting commands from him to kill, so while it's evil, it's a lesser evil. All religions with such hate in them should have it stripped out of their holy texts though by anyone civilised who wants to follow them. By leaving the hate in there and endorsing the container, they are responsible for all the violence it generates and they need to stop passing the buck. It's their violence so long as they fail to get rid of the hate.

@David_Cooper i have seen no such poll and i don't believe it exists, but i HAVE seen the muslims that made a circle of their own bodies around synagogues to protect jews from being attacked. they were not in the minority. how do YOU know what muslims hide? you don't. they don't. also it's not that when muslims are in the minority they behave better. it's that where there is no sharia law muslims are free to be normal people. you are confusing politics with religion. as for your second paragraph, it is bullshit from start to finish. i don't have the time or energy to pick it apart. every single thing in it is false. you are the one preaching hatred here. shame on you.

g

It was well publicised at the time. [independent.co.uk] Read more of the details and you find 2/3 of them opposing violence against the cartoonists, which doesn't reveal any lessening of the 24% expressing sympathy with the killers.

Do you understand why there is no sharia law in the West? Do you think a minority can impose it here? What happens in places where they can shape the law? I'm not confusing religion with politics: religions ARE politics when they set out laws.

No, I'm not preaching hatred - I'm the one calling out ALL the hate while you endorse some of it. I don't pander to Nazi hate, Muslim hate, Christian hate, Maoist hate, Stalinist hate, or any other kind of hate from any ideology that demonises and dehumanises innocent people and incites their murder. All of those groups produce terrorism and all of them have generated genocides. All the people who endorse those ideologies are deliberately or inadvertently proliferating the primary hate tied up in them, and they are to blame for the genocides and the other violence and abuses that come from them. You are the one pushing bullshit due to your total ignorance of the content of the holy text in question here. Ten thousand Yazidis were killed recently by people acting directly on a command in a holy text, and I don't consider it acceptable for that holy hate to be tolerated by any civilised person. You are the one who should be ashamed for endorsing hate and for calling an opponent of hate a hater.

@icolan thank you! you saved me the trouble. based on my experience of both groups, i still contend, as i suspect you do too, that most muslims do not live by the violent bits any more than most christians do. they live normal lives. the more religious they are, the more in danger either type of theist is of taking such commands to heart, but it takes a lot for that to happen. your muslim neighbor is almost certainly no more out to kill you than your christian neighbor is.

g

@icolan re your second comment, about culpability, again i thank you! some of these contentions are outrageous, are they not?

g

@icolan exactly!

g

@icolan - Thanks for finding all that. I have not read the OT, but have heard Dawkins quoting the parts that he considered the most vicious from it, and they all seemed to be ancient stories about specific events where God destroyed various populations, so I assumed there wasn't anything as significant as the stuff you've found. Now that I've seen it, it just confirms the mechanism by which this kind of primary hate in holy texts generates all manner of abuses all the way up to genocide. It all needs to be stripped out of the holy texts to put an end to that violence. It's very much on a par with the Qur'an and explains a lot about where Muhammad got his hate from.

@icolan "All muslims are not culpable for the actions of other muslims any more than all christians are culpable for the actions of all other christians." --> They are to blame for any abuses generated by the hate in the holy texts that they have endorsed. There is a clear connection between them.

"For someone to be culpable of an action they must have some supporting connection to the action." --> and there is such a connection, just as there is with the Nazi literature which demonises and dehumanises people, thereby encouraging people to kill them like vermin.

"Catholics that are supporting the Catholic church today with full knowledge that their support is helping to fund an organization that protects pedophiles is culpable in the actions of those pedophiles." --> I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that endorses anything to do with paedophiles - that is a case of predators exploiting a system that gave them cover and them all collaborating to keep their activities quiet, or in many cases their belief in a mechanism of forgiveness related to confession which blinded them to the reality that they were actually enabling the abuses to continue. Those are faults with the design of the religion which are the result of it not being properly debugged by its inventors.

"A muslim family living quietly in the US, who has no connection to any terrorist organizations is not culpable in the actions of a terrorist organization regardless of a shared religion." --> They endorse the hate (by pretending it isn't hate or by failing to condemn it), and that hate generates atrocities. They lend respectability to something vile and lethal, and that makes them inextricably part of the problem. If you don't disown the hate, it becomes your hate and it's your job to fix that.

In India and Bosnia, neighbours and friends suddenly turned on each other when a spark ignited the genocide bomb. The hate was in them all along, just waiting to express itself. They were informed by that holy hate and huge numbers of them died because of it. That hate in the holy texts cannot be tolerated in a peaceful, civilised world. It all has to go, and it has to be removed from all the religions and ideologies that contain such hate in their literature. I don't understand why you're so determined to defend the hate when it so directly impacts negatively on everyone, and especially on the people who harbour it.

@David_Cooper what i don't understand is how anyone could interpret anything i've said as defending hatred.

g

If someone was to defend Nazis on the basis that some of them believe Nazism is peaceful (despite all the viciousness in its literature) and they deny the Holocaust, would you side with them and back their position or would you criticise them and tell them to disown all the hate and accept that it drove the Holocaust? Religions with the same kind of hate in their holy texts generate the same kinds of genocides, and that hate needs to be condemned too. The people who propagate it are culpable for impacts of that hate. I don't want anyone to condemn the people for making that mistake, but I do expect them to condemn the hate and to call for it to be outlawed. If all that hate was stripped out of the holy texts of all religions, nothing good would be lost - they would be substantially improved and become fully respectable and benign. Is that too much to ask? But instead of condemning the hate, you condemn me for condemning the hate. I see that as you defending hate.

To help you understand my position on this, I'll repeat something I posted in another thread which you may have missed:-

My position is entirely neutral. I condemn all the primary hate in all the holy texts of religion (and other religious literature) and all the primary hate in all the manifestos of ideologies (and other related literature) without exception. That is being 100% neutral. You, however [the person I was replying to in the other thread who is not involved here], endorse the vicious hate in (at least some of) these religions because you refuse to condemn it and instead you condemn me for condemning it, making out that I hate the people who inadvertently propagate that hate when the reality is that I don't even condemn the terrorists - I condemn their actions, but they are merely victims of the hate.

I've heard a number of Islamist terrorists talking about how they got involved in groups like Al Qa'ida. One of them described how he spent a few years working in a facility in Afghanistan where they were experimenting with poisons, but they were deeply devout people who genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. They tested the poisons on rabbits, and every time they killed one, it upset them - they prayed a lot and held special ceremonies for them. These were caring people, but they were blinded by hate that had been programmed into them. After one of their attacks hit the wrong target and killed children, he had a realisation that everything they'd been doing was wrong, and he ended up working for GCHQ, alerting them to attacks that were being planned, but he was very clear about the fact that the people he was working with were not evil murderers - they were simply deeply misguided people who meant well.

That is in no way a unique case. Someone who lived near me went to fight for ISIS, and he was a well-respected person too who was acting on sincerely held religious beliefs. He was killed in a drone strike and we have no idea whether he killed anyone or not first, but this is the thing - there are doubtless many bastards out there who just love violence, but there are many others with them who don't, but who are trying to do what they believe is right. They have been misled by the hate in the holy texts that they revere. That hate has been given a high status by the status of its container, and that status if further magnified by all the people who endorse that container. That is the mechanism by which the holy hate has so much power to suck people in and make them act on it. The fix for this is to get rid of all the hate of people and for everyone to turn their ire against the real cause of the violence, and that's the holy hate itself. The terrorists are just hapless victims like everyone else.

@David_Cooper interesting how 1. you ignore my question (in response to an accusation you made against me) and 2. you compare peaceful muslims living normal lives in american communities and NOT having neighbors disappear into death camps, NOT being members of terrorist groups and often speaking out AGAINST terrorist groups with nazis. you don't know anything about history OR current events, do you? -- nor how to have a reasonable debate. if you're going to ignore my question and change the subject and make false conflations, then i guess there is no point in continuing the dialogue. it's futile. you act like the pigeon who shits on the chess board and thinks it's won the game. think what you like; you're not my problem. maybe someone elsereading this will understand what i say.

g

@icolan "No, they are only responsible for the hate they generate. You cannot lay blame for a violent person's actions on someone else simply because they happen to worship the same god. Islam has many different denominations just as christianity does, and not all of them endorse the violent aspects of the book any more than all christian denominations endorse the violent aspects of their book." ----> This has nothing to do with denominations. Muslims all endorse the Qur'an and it's the hate in the Qur'an that generates the violence. (The hate in the Hadith adds to that violence by expanding the Qur'an's hate, but not all Muslims endorse the Hadith, and indeed, it's blasphemous, breaking the rules set out in the Qur'an which is supposed to be complete in itself.) If any Muslims want to disown the hate in the Qur'an, the obligation is on them to produce a version of it with the hate removed and to condemn all the hate that's been stripped out of it.

"This is a false comparison, the German people elected the Nazis to leadership, supported them in publishing their propaganda and hatred, and supported the pogroms and death camps. An ancient book used in worship that no one alive today had a hand in writing is not a connection on the level you are attempting to make it. Muslims can and do cherry pick from their book just as christians do, violent muslims cherry pick the violent aspects, peaceful muslims cherry pick the peaceful aspects. This does not create a connection between unrelated groups just because they use the same book." ----> If you endorse a book with vicious hate in it, you put yourself in the wrong. The same applies to the Christians that you attempt to use to excuse Muslims, but the Christians too are at fault for failing to condemn the hate in the OT which we know led to centuries of genocide against experts in herbal medicine from a different religion, and you yourself found the holy hate that drove that. Todeay's Christians attempt to excuse that by claiming that Jesus made the OT redundant, but it caused genocides by Christians regardless, demonstrating the extraordinary power of the hate in holy texts to kill. It could all happen again because they are still propagating that hate instead of stripping it out and condemning it absolutely.

"So what if the muslim family and their entire mosque condemns hatred in all its forms, specifically the hatred by other muslims of non-muslims? You cannot lump an entire faith together and categorically say this is the fault of all of you. If you are to do that then every christian in the world is culpable for the actions of the KKK, and every other christian hate group." ----> If the KKK is acting on holy hate from the NT or OT, then all the people who endorse the relevant text ARE culpable for the actions of the KKK. To absolve themselves of blame, they need to strip out that hate and create clean versions of them, while the older versions should be banned (outside of restricted libraries where they can be studied by licensed academics).

"Anyone can twist or cherry pick the parts of a book to justify their actions, you cannot blame every person who follows that book for the violent actions of other followers." ----> If a book has a thousand lines saying "bless the jewel in the lotus" for every one line saying "kill all x", that doesn't cancel out the viciousness of the command to kill and doesn't prevent people from acting on it. The cherry-picking argument is ridiculous. The hate is in there and it kills. It needs to be removed. No amount of cherry-picking can turn a benign text into a vicious one.

"And just worshiping the same god is not providing any support." ----> It is their endorsement of the same hate that is the problem; not the "God".

"A muslim mosque that performs charitable works, provides community outreach, a space for its worshipers to pray, a space for community programs, and actively condemns hatred is not responsible for the actions of an extremist group on the other side of the world. They are no different than and in some ways better than many christian churches in this country." ----> Jimmy Savile (Britain's most infamous paedophile) performed endless charitable works as a cover for his actions, and he believed that it absolved him of his crimes. Condemning some hatred is also insufficient - they are failing to condemn the key hatred that is at issue here, and that is the hate in their holy text(s). No amount do doing good can outweigh the harm done by elevating the status of holy texts that contain hate that drives genocide.

@genessa "interesting how 1. you ignore my question (in response to an accusation you made against me)" ----> I didn't ignore anything.

"and 2. you compare peaceful muslims living normal lives in american communities and NOT having neighbors disappear into death camps, NOT being members of terrorist groups and often speaking out AGAINST terrorist groups with nazis." ----> They endorse hate. If they stop endorsing hate, I will stop comparing them with other people who endorse hate and pretend it isn't hate.

"you don't know anything about history OR current events, do you? -- nor how to have a reasonable debate." --> "Well, speak for yourself. I know more than enough about history to see the patterns running through it where that holy hate generates genocide after genocide after genocide, on and on down the centuries. You're delusional.

"if you're going to ignore my question and change the subject and make false conflations, then i guess there is no point in continuing the dialogue. it's futile. you act like the pigeon who shits on the chess board and thinks it's won the game. think what you like; you're not my problem. maybe someone elsereading this will understand what i say." ----> I haven't ignored your question or changed the subject or made false conflations. I've simply told you how it is. The hate in holy texts drives the violence, and those who endorse the holy texts or who are apologists for them (i.e. you) are to blame for that violence going on and on instead of being stamped out.

@David_Cooper okay whatever. i'm done with you. deny all you want but you DID TOO do what i said you did. for my own convenience i will block you. then i won't be tempted to reason with you anymore, since that is obviously futile.

g

@icolan you're making too much sense. it doesn't work. sense is meaningless to people who push hatred this way. i am glad you said what you said, for the sake of others who may otherwise be influenced by his bad reasoning, but i know you know he won't buy it, either because he cannot or because it doesn't fit into his agenda.

g

Excellent point.

He's on an almost religious crusade against, what was once, his own religion. Move on mate, move on.

It is just an "Us v. Them" doctrine and mentality, as are ALL religions and politics.

@OwlInASack Of course, there are good people and there are bad people regardless and in spite of religions and/or politics.

@OwlInASack On this site???? Where??

@OwlInASack I disagree with you on that one. I've seen no such "narrative".

@OwlInASack I'll take your word for it. I see no more derision for islam than all the rest of them.

@OwlInASack Oh yeah, just like the Conquistadors weren't ALL Christians! MOST of them had nothing to do with wiping out whole civilizations and millions of people! No, don't blame THEM...they're fine!

@KKGator Owl is inventing a narrative by warping what other people say. In reality he's dealing with neutral people like me who condemn the hate in the holy texts of all religions and the manifestos and other literature of any other ideologies that contain it in a completely unbiased way. When I condem all of that hate and say that all the people who endorse any of those ideologies are culpable when that hate generates atrocities, he shouts Nazi at me and accuses me of being a Muslim hater.

@David_Cooper Everyone is going to do what they do. No way around it.
I detest islam, just like I detest every other religion.
I'm not going to allow anyone to defend another man-made religion, I don't care what it is.