64 replies to this topic

[Redezra]

Redezra, sometimes its nice to keep your mouth shut. Some of us ( I can speak for most) are tired of you being a prattler. 

 

 

Redezra, sometimes its nice to keep your mouth shut. Some of us ( I can speak for most) are tired of you being a prattler. 

+100000

 

Thank you.

 

Don't h8 me, cause you aint me.

 

#swag.

 

 

 

 

Hell yes, always wanted to use that line xD

 

Anyway, I might not like listening to closeted pricks like you either. But I do, cause I like opposing points of view. Maybe you should, you know, open your minds. If you have any. I really hope you do.

[Manoka]

Tee-hee, I'm just messing around anyways.

 

But seriously, you crazy atheists seem like Jehova's Witnesses to me. xP

[PrinceVegeta]

Tee-hee, I'm just messing around anyways.

 

But seriously, you crazy atheists seem like Jehova's Witnesses to me. xP

 

Hello Manoka, can you spare a moment of your time for Stephen Hawking?

[Redezra]

We have cookies! made with SCIENCE

[*Anastasia]

Yes I have MP. That and the Torah, which isn't as bad..or really bad at all in my opinion.

Nope, couldn't possibly be anything objectionable in the Bible. I mean it's not like it advocates brutally executing women who happen to not have hymens when they get married.
 
 

But if this charge is true, and evidence of the girl's virginity is not found, they shall bring the girl to the entrance of her father's house and there her townsmen shall stone her to death.

Oh. Hmm. Well, at least it's not making women men's property to be bartered or sold as they please.
 


 

When a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, he shall pay her father the bride price and marry her.

Huh. But this doesn't apply if he rapes her, right?
 
 

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver.

 
Okay, okay, but this is all Old Testament stuff. Jesus did away with all these unjust laws, and New Testament Christian society elevated women to a higher standard.
 
 

But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

 
Son of a bitch.

[Manoka]

Tee-hee, I'm just messing around anyways.

 

But seriously, you crazy atheists seem like Jehova's Witnesses to me. xP

 

Hello Manoka, can you spare a moment of your time for Stephen Hawking?

 

Stephen hawking has retracted a lot of what he's said in the past, and it's still crazy. xP

[Haflinger]

The Koran has quite a lot of fire and brimstone stuff in it. All of those things about Allah is an enemy to unbelievers is about the afterlife: unbelievers will be punished after they die, and believers will be rewarded (with lovely sofas).

 

Most of the Koran talks about one of two things: how to conduct affairs while alive, and the rewards/penalties for behaving the way you do after you die. On the whole, it suggests a tolerant attitude towards unbelievers on this earth; punishing them is assigned to Allah (which is just Arabic for God; Arab Christians use the same word). This is actually pretty similar to the New Testament overall. Of course there have been plenty of misguided Christian efforts through the years to "convince" other people to follow the religion using military engagements, some with the support of the church, and the same is true for Islam.

 

There is one key difference to note as well: the church in Islam is decentralized. There is no Muslim pope. There are instead mullahs, who do not generally report to anyone. It's set up more like a Presbyterian system. Individual mullahs make up their own minds by and large what they want to preach, and some do indeed pronounce really hateful stuff that doesn't really have a basis in the Koran; some mullahs do claim that suicide bombers earn a place in Heaven from their sacrifices. Others are, frankly, more progressive than what's in the Koran. It varies from mullah to mullah quite considerably.

[Redezra]

And yet it's somehow the most backward and violent cultural system known to man.

 

Can someone please bring up where Shariah law comes in? Cause all I see is a bunch of wannabe Muslims with no reality checking. I mean really.

[Haflinger]

Islam is not a cultural system. It's a religion.

 

Sharia law is based on some parts of the Koran. It's an attempt to implement in law the requirements that the Koran gives about how to live. So it does things like limit the number of wives a man can have, forbid alcohol, and so on. But it's really an extension, like how the Talmud is an extension of the Torah in the Jewish system.

[Manoka]

Basically Shariah law is only the crazy fundies.

 

There are sunnis and shi'ites, and then terrorists, basically.

 

 

But don't take it too personally.

 

Red finds every religion that's not her own to be dah debil. xP

Edited by Manoka, 21 March 2013 - 06:29 AM.

[*Anastasia]

Sharia, interestingly, isn't all the "off with their heads" stuff that Western media likes to portray it as. I took a lot of flak for writing Sharia into both revisions I made of the Constitution of the Jamahiriya, but I'd do it again. As Haf said, Sharia, like any other legal system, isn't so much a set of laws as it is a way of implementing laws from various sources; specifically, Sharia as a legal code recognizes three sources of law: the Qur'an, the Sunnah, or teachings of Muhammad not from the Qur'an, and the consensus of the Muslim community. This last part is important, because it's not only where Sharia gains its ability to adapt to changing situations and societal shifts, but it also makes its precepts vulnerable in a way that can lead to undesirable situations that give fodder for critics to attack Sharia, and Islam, as a whole.

The consensus of the Ummah, the Muslim community, is called ijma'a. As a tenet of Sharia, ijma'a is meant to allow for the development of the Islamic legal and moral code and its application to changing situations. For as much as the Islamophobes in this thread keep talking about Islam as though its stuck in the Middle Ages, Sharia actually recognizes through its own creation that the world wasn't ever going to stay the same as it was in the Prophet's day, and duly allows for the extension and adaptation of Quranic and Sunnah law to evolving societies through the consensus of the Muslim community. This is, in theory, a good thing, because it avoids problems certain other religions have in their inability to modernize their beliefs without having to completely ignore parts of their scripture.

However, as I mentioned, it is also a weakness of Sharia, because it makes it vulnerable to extremists when disagreements arise within the community. Learned Islamic scholars and judges issue fatwas on various issues in an attempt to build a consensus on how the tenets of Islam should apply to situations that were not relevant in Muhammad's day. Some of these are quite banal (for example, does fasting for Ramadan begin when the moon can be spotted with a telescope, from the top of a very high building, or only with the naked eye?), while some, such as the punishment for various criminal offenses, can be quite controversial. When extremists gain a foothold in a given area, often the consensus of the Ummah as a whole goes out the window, and the individual rulings of scholars can become de facto law, leading to the mutilations and brutal executions for petty crimes we see under the Taliban in Pashtunistan, under the Wahabi government in Saudi Arabia, under the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, and in northern Nigeria. These individual instances become hugely reported and criticized, while the tamer, more sensible application of sharia in dozens of other locations gets lost in the Western media's reporting.

After all, common-sense application of the law with just outcomes for society isn't a good story. A stoning, though? That's an audience-getter.

[Haflinger]

Sia-chan knows a lot more about sharia than I do, but that's consistent with what I do know.

 

There've been controversies here in Ontario because it's possible for couples who agree to it to use sharia law in divorce proceedings. Basically, our family courts are understaffed, so we encourage people to resolve their disputes using arbitration. The couples have to agree on an arbitrator before going to one. But it's possible to get arbitrators who use sharia here. (Also the Talmud, i.e. rabbinical law, and a whole host of other systems.)

[*Anastasia]

Is that still available? I was under the impression they binned the whole faith-based arbitration system after all the controversy erupted over use of Sharia. Admittedly, it's not a story I was following closely, so I may be wrong.

[Haflinger]

I don't think so. I find our politics very difficult to follow though. We have a lot of really stupid politicians so they may have binned it without me noticing. But I doubt it, I do try to pay attention. B)

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Islam is a religion, as Haf says, but it is also a cultural system, even a civilization, in the way that "Christendom" once was.  And like Christendom, is a fractious entity.  But there is an Arab saying:  Myself and my brother against my cousin.  Myself, my brother, and my cousin against everyone else.  As both a religion and a cultural system Islam seeks to spread, and in many cases to turn back the clock on social progress.  That makes Islam a threat to the Western way of life, or at least that's the argument.  And while it is an argument often voiced loudly and by the kinds of people with whom most of us do not care to assert, i.e. haters and racists, nevertheless it is not entirely wrong.  There are any number of organizations and regimes who would be only too happy to impose Islam on the West by force, they simply lack the capacity to do so.  The question is whether that will always be so.  There are some who feel a large-scale armed conflict between "the West" and "Islam" is inevitable.  Many think this will take the form of a US-Iran war.  You have to admit it's a distinct possibility.

[*Anastasia]

Do you not find it inherently bigoted and ethnocentric to define a distinction between Western society and Islam based on "the clock [of] social progress"?

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Nope.

[Manoka]

Uh... not all Islamic people want to eradicate the west.

 

Actually a lot of non Islamic people do. It's not Islam it's specific individuals. xP

[Redezra]

Do you not find it inherently bigoted and ethnocentric to define a distinction between Western society and Islam based on "the clock [of] social progress"?

No, but I honestly think you've cocked up somewhere if you somehow think oppression of women is somehow cultured. If somehow anti scientific viewpoints are somehow forward. If a solely patriarchal theocratic religion of violence and death that worships a god damn asteroid is somehow progressive.

You can't separate the shariah law from Islam. Someone, for whatever reason, has packaged the two together. And it is without a doubt one of the most oppressive regimes in existence.

I love how all of you are quite happily arguing that somehow it's good and enlightened and that "oh that's just teachings nobody reads" when I can easily point to its source in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, to point out how oppressive it is, and how I can point to unrest by Muslims trying to override our centuries of progressive, enlightened culture with their own, in countries including Britain, France, Germany, and Australia.

The culture is not compatible, it is aggressively expansionist, is manipulative, and violent. It must be opposed. And those of you here that have deluded yourself into thinking "oh because these guys I know are ok, it must be fine" must realise that you are at some level part of this problem.

Damnit people why the hell did you bring up god damn Islam in the god damn forums?!?!

[Manoka]

Not all of Islam is like that, though.

 

There are oppressive Islamic regimes, there are even oppressive Buddhist/Toaist regimes; look at China.

 

 

To condemn an entire group of people based off of the bad people is silly.

 

Since both the Qu-ran and bible are largely up to interpretation it wouldn't matter if it was the exact text.

 

 

There are protestants, catholics, pentacostls etc. who don't agree on the exact interpretation of the bible, and becuase of the fact there are so many written, sometimes even modified by say, Ceasers, it's impossible to say which bible is the one true bible.

 

Hence saying it's "in the qu'ran" is a horrible argument becuase new qu'rans and versions of shariah law have been made, and there are differant views on what the story means.

 

 

In hinduism there are those who are literally athiest, and believe in no god, and see everything as a metahpor, those who only believe in one of those gods, many of those gods, and some who believe in all of them; there are some who see it as a metaphor but still see the world in a spiritual way, such as that the Gods forms were simply avatars, but they were just, pure God energy, which is all connected and leads to Nirvana, sort of like an all binding spiritual force instead of multiple Gods; it gets pretty complex.

 

To try to chalk it up to some black and white simplistic view is to ignore basic knowledge on the subject.

Edited by Manoka, 22 March 2013 - 01:50 AM.