Beheaded girls 'Ramadan trophies', court hears

[Fiveyearlurker]

@tomndebb

Aquila Be], Those hadiths each talk about launching raids in which women and children are at jeopardy, not the deliberate massacre of the women and children. And they are clearly not identified as Muslims–as were the people killed near the watermelon-filled truck.

Your interpretations of the passages may well be correct, but they’re irrelevant. What matters is the interepretation of the guy driving the truck, and the imam who no doubt instructed him.

[tagos]

@Fiveyearlurker

Your interpretations of the passages may well be correct, but they’re irrelevant. What matters is the interepretation of the guy driving the truck, and the imam who no doubt instructed him.

And this is the crucial point. Religions are what the religious do. The Crusades and the inquistion etc made Xtianty a brutal ugly religion. Terrorism, the widespread support for terrorism revealed in the Pew Poll among many others and the batshit craziness of responses to cartoons etc is a substantial face of Islam today.

What the mumbo jumbo behind it all says is completely irrelevant although in the case of Islam it takes a particularly discriminating eye and a penchant for selective quotations to see it as a religion of ‘peace’ in anything other than it’s own sense. Peace being submission to Allah.

To quote Sam Harris again

Let us take stock of the moral intuitions now on display in the House of Islam: On Aug. 17, 2005, an Iraqi insurgent helped collect the injured survivors of a car bombing, rushed them to a hospital and then detonated his own bomb, murdering those who were already mortally wounded as well as the doctors and nurses struggling to save their lives. Where were the cries of outrage from the Muslim world? Religious sociopaths kill innocents by the hundreds in the capitols of Europe, blow up the offices of the U.N. and the Red Cross, purposefully annihilate crowds of children gathered to collect candy from U.S. soldiers on the streets of Baghdad, kidnap journalists, behead them, and the videos of their butchery become the most popular form of pornography in the Muslim world, and no one utters a word of protest because these atrocities have been perpetrated “in defense of Islam.” But draw a picture of the Prophet, and pious mobs convulse with pious rage. One could hardly ask for a better example of religious dogmatism and its pseudo-morality eclipsing basic, human goodness.

It is time we recognized—and obliged the Muslim world to recognize—that “Muslim extremism” is not extreme among Muslims. Mainstream Islam itself represents an extremist rejection of intellectual honesty, gender equality, secular politics and genuine pluralism. The truth about Islam is as politically incorrect as it is terrifying: Islam is all fringe and no center. In Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

A violent understanding of Jihad, the abrogating properties of the ‘Sword verses’ etc are perfectly legitimate interpretations of texts and held by it seems, millions of Muslims. To quibble about doctrinal interpretations is both irrelevant in the face of this reality and a pretty clear example of the ‘no true scotsman’ fallacy.

Christians have murdered, raped and tortured in the name of their invisible friend throughout the ages too. Christianity also is what christians do.

Debating what is ‘true’ Christianity or ‘true’ Islam is just apologetics in the worst sense of the term.