Oh lucky us, turns out the more explicit condemnations against gays *only *started around 1200 years ago instead of 1400 years! Now we don’t have to worry about millennia plus precedent and tradition to deal with. Oh wait…
Seems to me like a rotten foundation to build on, with ever more rotten pillars holding up the faith over time.
This is dumb.
Magiver’s claim is that Islam is inherently and unalterably homophobic because Mohammed said it had to be. The point of noting that the hadith was written 200 years after his death indicates that we have no way to know that Mohammed actually said it, so that argument is flawed.
Beyond that, we have evidence, already posted, that Islam has not been unrelentingly homophobic throughout its entire history, so your “1200 years” is silly nonsense that only indicates that you have not actually paid attention to the discussion.
May I answer? Hell, yes! It’s easy. If one Christian sect says “The Bible says God is Triune” and another sect says “The Bible says God is One,” then one of the two sects has misread the Bible.
This happens all the damn time.
The way I look at interpretation of religious texts is that there exists a range of reasonable interpretations that do not do violence to the text and can be justified by reasonable arguments - be they based on knowledge of the language, the culture at the time the text was drafted, internal consistency, comparative religious studies, or whatever.
It is possible for two groups to examine the same text and come to quite different conclusions: both may well fall within the range of reasonableness.
So, for example, one may conclude based on the texts that god is triune, and another that he is not; it is a matter of argument which is ‘more correct’, but they are both within a range of reasonable interpretations.
Someone arguing that the god described in the text is actually Cthulhu is outside that range … 
I actually agree with that completely. Both Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians are reading the same Bible, not so much wrongly as differently. Each is still Christian. Each can (and often do) say that the other group is wrong, but only rarely do they excommunicate each other over it.
(I read a Catholic magazine article on sects and denominations that flatly declared that Jehovah’s Witnesses “…Are not Christians.” I call bullshit on that. Of course they are.)
If absolute attention to every word is demanded…then there isn’t anyone who follows their sacred text perfectly. How many Christians actually give away their shirt and their cloak, or help an enemy carry his burden an extra mile?
Also, don’t be too dismissive of the Cthulhuians! There aren’t many of them, but they have night-spawned powers of indescribable clutching terror! (If they offer you calamari, just say no.)
Are you denying Mohammad had a violent history?
Moses killed more people than Mohammed.
I am not even addressing your favorite topic. I am noting that regardless whether he was violent or not, history has disproved your claim that his violence necessarily led to a violent religion. In 1400 years, there has not been a consistent pattern of violence. In 2000 years, the followers of the non-violent Jesus have been excessively violent on numerous occasions.
You do not even have the necessary evidence to fall into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, (except by ignoring history), so your desire to portray Mohammed as exceptionally violent is irrelevant.
Well that reinforces Mohammad’s lifestyle but what’s your point?
I never suggested he was exceptionally violent. He was a warlord who laid down harsh laws. There are literally hundreds of millions of Muslims who approve of those laws. Not a handful, not 10,000, hundreds of millions. This lack of tolerance for any criticism is the foundation for the massive amounts of violence.
I don’t even have to dig past a few days for another example. 3 places were attacked in Saudi Arabia and ISIS cut someone’s head off for blasphemy.
It negates your premise that Islam is special. Moses killed lots of people, but Judaism is peaceful. Mohammed may have been violent, but his religion has been peaceful at various times.
You keep failing to accommodate these simple facts. Islam is just like other religions, sometimes violent and sometimes peaceful…and never all one thing at a time. Even in the most violent epochs, there were still lots of peaceful people.
You might as well be arguing, “Nazis were bad, therefore German-speaking people are bad.” The best you can do is argue some kind of undefined “correlation.”
You all might find this map of battles fought over time interesting.
Islam has been fighting for over a thousand years, that suggests to me it’s one of the most violent religions.
I don’t know if the violence and depredations attributed to Mohammed are accurate, I just know that if we are to believe what is currently codified in the Quran, Sira, and Hadith both he and his example is astonishingly violent.
Let’s assume He was really a peaceful Ghandi like figure whose example was distorted beyond all reason and rewritten by his followers. What does that get us? Nothing and nowhere. How are we to verify such claims? And without such verification, what hope is there to convince modern muslims of the distortions of the texts?
I get why apologists for Islam want to write off the texts modern Islamists rely on, but that is not a valid move. Maybe in the past the leaders were more concern with their own personal interests, I presume the vast majority of the population was illiterate, and so they would know nothing about what the religious texts actually said, and would rely on what their religious leaders told them. That is not the reality today, and even for nations and peoples where a good chunk are not terribly literate, they have youtube and social media or friends that show them things on the internet. Ideas spread, both good and bad across the world much more easily in modern times. And what is spreading today is not some mythical peaceful Islam. And anyone who paid the slightest attention to that map can see that the Islamic world has been fighting wars of conquest for basically it’s entire history.
And there might be a reason why. The guy I linked above actually analyzed the contents of the Quran, Sira, Hadith, and counted how often it spoke about non muslims , Kafir.
A doctrine, seemingly obsessed with the politics and interests of non muslims, how to interact with them, how to treat them. This is a doctrine that is designed to turn the “other” into supplicants or worse unless they convert.
To the extent that even a fraction of any of that is true, I have a problem with it, as any DECENT liberal worth a teaspoon of salt ought to be.
Try this one on.
Were all nazis bad people? What about members of the nazi party? Were they all true believers like Himmler? Were some kind of “so so” nazis?
Even for a clear cut case of a wicked ideology, you will have gradations of adherence to the belief set.
Saying that Muslims throughout the centuries have varied in their violence levels tells us nothing more than the fact that they are human and vary in their behavior. That does not absolve the doctrines of being a greater or lesser catalyst of violence in the minds of men.
The God of the Old Testament was far more violent than Muhammad in the Quran. Hell, even Jesus beat the crap out of the money changers in front of the temple.
But if the New Testament is much more peaceful and less violent than the Old Testament, why are Jews so much less violent than Christians?
But the above is mostly irrelevant. You keep bringing up instances of violent Muslims as if that conflicts with anything we’ve been saying. There are plenty of violent Muslims, and they suck. They try to justify their violence with the Quran, and that sucks. That’s awful. But they ignore the passages of the Quran that conflict with their violence, just as you accuse peaceful Muslims of doing with the passages that seem to advocate for violence.
Again:
Boo to the violent Muslims who selectively interpret the Quran to follow the passages that advocate for violence while ignoring the passages that advocate for peace and kindness.
Bravo to the peaceful Muslims who selectively interpret the Quran to follow the passages that advocate for peace and kindness while ignoring the passages that advocate for violence.
Both groups are selectively interpreting the Quran. Both groups are ignoring passages that conflict with their lifestyle and ideology. One interpretation is much, much better for the modern world, and should be encouraged. The other interpretation should be challenged and criticized and absolutely not claimed to be a superior or more valid interpretation of the texts.
ISIS wants you to say that their interpretation is the better/more accurate interpretation of Islamic texts. The peaceful Muslims want you to say that ISIS’s interpretation is no more valid than that of the peaceful Muslims.
Either one is a choice. Since there are directly contradictory passages in the Quran, neither interpretation is “literal” – there can be no literal interpretation of a text that has contradictory passages (which pretty much includes all religious texts ever). I know what choice I’m making, and I have no idea why anyone opposed to violence would choose to agree with ISIS.
Agreed. And, in fact, sure, there were “so so” Nazis, and even some Nazis who were secretly opposed to Hitler and military aggression. And there were a bunch of people who signed up to become members of the Nazi party…just for the free beer. There are probably “so so” members of the KKK today, people who haven’t ever committed a crime, and, in fact, don’t really approve of violence.
The doctrines of Islamic extremism are a catalyst of violence. The doctrines of Islam cannot be so shown. That’s the thrust of the argument here: some people hold that “Islam drives homophobic violence,” and that cannot be shown to be true. Only a violent and extreme subset of Islam does this.
Inane claims of “correlation” just don’t work.
The Jews came to terms with their demons. Your insistence that all religions must have hard core followers doesn’t reduce the effect a religion has on its followers.
That’s a new one. I didn’t realize turning over tables was beating the crap out of people.
No such claim made but good luck with that argument.
Actually I keep bringing up the hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe in capital punishment for blasphemy and apostasy. That, oddly, correlates with terrorist groups and governments who kill over blasphemy and apostasy based on that religious conviction.
What ISIS wants anyone to think is irrelevant. They could truly care less. ISIS and the rather large list of Islamic terrorists groups didn’t sprout out of the earth yesterday after drinking Mohammad’s kool aid. They grew out of a mindset that thinks it’s OK to kill people over insults or a change of religion. The world isn’t divided up between peace loving and evil Muslims. Removing Islamic terrorists won’t remove the fundamentalist aspect of the religion from which they sprang.
John 2:13: “And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple”
Helps if you’re actually willing to (perish the thought) actually read the text, rather than just make pronunciamentos about it without bothering to know what you’re talking about.
John 2:15 – “And he made a whip out of cords…”
Thanks, Trin. I had the verse wrong. :smack:
Odd you left out the entire text. “So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.”