Being “born again” doesn’t make one a surgeon, being Orthodox Jewish doesn’t make one a psychiatrist, and being Muslim doesn’t make one an engineer. These people became professionals through one thing and one thing only-science. Without their religion, they would still have all the knowledge and skills they had before, and I believe they would still have the willingness to help others because I still trust in Human nature.
IMHO, religion is dangerous because it brings debate to a dead stop. You cannot reason with someone who not only truly believes that their diety cannot be defeated(taking away any motivation for compromise), but that their diety created all morals which means that, by definition, their diety cannot be wrong! This puts those who disagree with those of a religious bent in a rather dangerous position usually, because they can be seen as not only wrong but evil, and evil MUST be defeated.
And for context (again), here is the rest of the account…
I will be honest with you…I don’t why Jesus requested the swords only to tell the disciples to not use them, unless he felt he needed to heal the servant in front of the priests…maybe someone else could answer this. But he did halt the violence, not incite it.
Well, Shaka Zulu conducted a “witch smelling” among the Zulus which led to thousands of people being accused of witchcraft and impaled. IIRC, this was a cover for eliminating political enemies. Even today, you still read of angry mobs attacking and killing accused witches in places like India and Africa. This is not exactly unique or unusual to the West.
Inasmuch as Mohammed himself led military expeditions, I’m inclined to accept those passages at face value.
It is true that science is what makes one a surgeon, a psychiatrist, etc. Linty Fresh was responding to Der Trihs’ asserrtion that these people, by definition of being religious, have a psychological disorder. I don’t think Linty was trying to assert that if there was no religion, no one would go into altruistic professions. The point is that some of us really doubt that so many distinguished people are all walking around with some terrible mental disorder
As far as bringing debate to a dead stop, I have known PLENTY of completely non-religious or athiestic people who are just as guilty of bringing debate to a dead stop, because they have their own brand of ideology that cannot be reasoned with.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that a wiki article? And isn’t there a lot of question about who and why the massacre happened?
Mohammed condemned all non-defensive violence. Your own tendentious desire to perceive Islam as violent also has no bearing on how MUSLIMS interpret those passages.
Weren’t there some websites encouraging the murder of doctors who performed abortions and weren’t those based on religion? I’d think that would qualify as recent.
And yet he indulged himself in it. It is quite plain that Muhammed was perfectly willing to use military force to advance his goals. Your desire to whitewash Islam’s long history of bloody aggression against non-Muslims flies in the face of the facts.
Islam has no such history.
And the Holocaust didn’t happen. And evolution is a lie. And the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy. And the moon landing was a hoax … :rolleyes:
You’re the one making the assertion. Let’s see some cites.
Ummm … have you actually been reading the thread?
Heh.
Genocide committed in the name of Allah: 3,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus Killed during the Pakistan-Bangladesh war in 1971. From 1894 to 1896 Abdul Hamid, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, killed 150,000 Armenian Christians. In India, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur along with his disciples was burned to death by the Moghul ruler Aurangzeb in 1675. Another Sikh, Bhai Mati Das was sawn into right and left halves while he was still alive. In July 1974, 4,000 Christians living in Cyprus were killed by Fahri Koroturk, president of Turkey and his Islamic army. From 1843 to 1846 10,000 Assyrian Christians including women and children were massacred by the Muslims. From 1915 to 1918 750,000 Assyrians were killed in the name of Islamic Jihad. In 1933 thousands of Assyrian villagers were murdered by the Iraqi soldiers in Northern Iraq. Since 1990 more than 10,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. Over 280,000 Ugandans killed during the reign of Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979. Over 30,000 Mauritanians have been killed by the Islamic dictators since 1960. In 1980, 20,000 Syrians were murdered under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, President of Syria. Since 1992 120,000 Algerians have been murdered by the Islamic fundamentalist army.
Y’know, gum, quoting one religionist group in conflict with another religionist group is not necessarily going to provide an accurate representation of events.
The majority of the massacres named in that quotation were the result of cultural conflicts in which religion was a marker, but were not carried out for religious purposes.
The massacres of Armenians was the result of the policy of “unity” that the Ottomans were attempting to enforce, in which the Armenians, who hoped to hold to their own identity, were punished for their religion AND their language AND their desire maintain “non-Turkish” customs.
The “Assyrians” killed between 1915 and 1918 were actually the Armenians who had been forced out of their lands. They died because of Turkish policies to eliminate individual groups, regardless of their religion, not in jihad.
The Christians massacred on Cyprus were killed for their Greek ethnicity, not their Orthodox Christian religion.
The massacres of Idi Amin had nothing to do with religion.
Several of the other massacres noted were the result of “business as usual” of any dictator consolidating power and were not committed for religious reasons.
The violence in Bangladesh and Kashmir was a cultural conflict that did have some religious points at its center, but mostly because some laws were written to favor the practice of one religion over the other and religion became the flash point for cultural divisions.
There are some religious massacres noted, but the site is trying to portray Islam as the source of all evil and they are willing to lie to establish their point. (The site also conveniently ignores the Muslims who have also died in India, Bangladesh, and Kashmir at the hands of Hindus, although I suspect that they, too, were victims of cultural and ethnic division where religion was a marker rather than victims of a desire to impose Hinduism on aprticular lands.)
I want to clarify that by calling religion a “human construct,” I am in no way trying to deny the existence of God. God does or does not exist…humans cannot will God into being if he does not exist (or erase his existence, for that matter). What I was trying to say is that RELIGION…that is, HOW God is worshipped is a human construct. Even within a given religion, the opinions on this vary wildly…look at the zillions of Protestant denominations for evidence of that. You could say to me, “you are a Christian like the people who kill abortion doctors” and I can say, “no, I am a Christian like Mother Theresa.” Who decides which of these types of Christian a person is? The person himself does. Even in the Catholic Church, which is presumably “run” by the hierarchy at the Vatican has an incredibly wide variety of thought, opinion, and belief. In my parish alone, there are enough different factions to have split off into at least 3 or 4 different churches, if we were Protestant instead of Roman Catholic (we Catholics just sort of try to agree to disagree a lot of the time.) This is what I mean when I say that religion is a human construct.
gum, I’ll reply to your post only in the areas that I have knowledge of.
Bangladesh: The Bangladesh Liberation War was a civil war between what were East Pakistan and West Pakistan, as a result of discrimination against Bengalis in the East. The Bengali population as a whole was attacked, Muslims and non-Muslims. Though the Pakistani army did have a policy of targeting Hindus and minorities, it was by no means a war between Muslims and non-Muslims. Indeed, the leader of the Awami League, whose call for Bangladesh’s independence sparked (not caused) the war, was Muslim. For the record, his name translates as ‘he who responds to the call of Allah’ (Mujibur Rahman). To make it into a war between Muslims and non-Muslims is to distort facts and lie. And the numbers of casualties vary from 25,000 (a Pakistani lie) to 3,000,000 (in all likelihood, a Bangladeshi lie).
**Cyprus **and Turkey: There’s no such thing as an Islamic Turkish Army, not since the 1920’s at any rate. It’s purely secular. This happened after a couple of incidents, namely, the First World War and the Kemali revolution, in case you haven’t heard of them.
Uganda: Idi Amin??? The pro-Soviet crazy dude? I challenge you to give me one cite that shows his policies as Islamic in any way. Why bring religion into it when saying that the political and economic conflicts between various ethnicities resulted in long term low-intensity violence can provide a far simpler explanation?
Mauritania: When and how did a president of Mauritania dispaly Islamic ideology??? And how’s their reign different from that of secular or Christian African leaders? The problems of Mauritania and Uganda are common to Africa and developing countries, regardless of religion.
Syria: Hafez al Assad is the anti-Christ to the Islamic types (heh). He consolidated his hold over Syria only after massacring the Muslim Brothers in Hama in 1982. He’s Alawi, his ideology is socialist and his regime secular.
Algeria: You do realise that the Islamic Armed Group was murdering mainly other Muslims, in what they thought was a good bid for power? If anything, Algerians, Arab and Berber, hate the Jama’ah.
Now I admit to not knowing much about the Assyrians (on preview, thanks tomndebb), but in the other examples you came up with, how the hell does Islam fit in?
As for this thread, it is an oversimplification to assume that Muslim perpetrators of violence are solely motivated by religion. Economic, cultural, and historical factors can provide a much more encompassing and in-depth explanation.
It was clearly religious violence, and who caried it out is not debatable (a group of Mormons lead by John D. Lee). There is some debate as to whether Brigham Young, and the other Mormon leaders, directly ordered it.
Hmm . . . Had I known that Christianity included accessorizing, I might have gotten into it . . .
Woo-hoo! Geeve a look at some of our past Mother Teresa threads and see which of the two you name is more evil and deadly!
Obviously, I was using Mother Teresa as an example. I really don’t think this is the place to get into the controversy regarding her again…but suffice to say, I do not buy into your idea that she is “evil.”