Posted on 04/17/2013 5:26:53 PM PDT by Biggirl
Shereef Elnahal is a native of Virginia, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a first-year internal medicine resident who helped triage explosion victims with ruptured eardrums and major limb injuries on Monday at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
There are actually a lot of Muslims out there, and in the US, who desperately crave a “non-violent, modernist” form of Islam, that is distinct from the radical forms that predominate today.
And, quietly there is an effort to reform the teachings of the Koran, deemphasizing the primative, barbaric parts and emphasizing the more social and benevolent parts.
In all fairness, Christianity went through several aggressive and pacifistic changes as well. In the first couple of hundred years, it was quite pacifistic, not just doctrinally, but out of necessity. Aggression would have been self defeating.
After the Roman Emperor Constantine converted in A.D. 312 and began to conquer “in Christ’s name,” Christianity became entangled with the state, and warfare and violence were increasingly justified by influential Christians.
The violent Christian justifications continued for many years, both against Muslims and against each other, such as in the 100 Years’ War.
Finally in the early 19th Century, Christian pacifism reemerged, just when the Napoleonic wars were devastating Europe, and people began seriously questioning the use of Christianity to justify the slaughter of Christians and anyone else for that matter.
To a great extent today, pacifism has come to dominate much of Christianity, not just in its pure form, but in supporting the use of force to stop even greater violence. It was part and parcel to abolishing slavery in most of the world, reversing colonialist exploitation, and replacing the rule of kings and nobility with democracy and republicanism.
Yet this was 200 years of social evolution that Islam did not experience. And many of them are realizing that they must evolve, but do not have the 200 years of grace in which to do so.
Many Muslims are cowed by the most radical, violent and ruthless of their number, so it is very hard to make these changes when they are near these oppressors, and when their numbers are so small.
Some parts of the West offer them sanctuary, however, that they have run to, to escape the oppression their fear in their native lands. The *last* thing they want to do is aggravate their hosts. Which means that events like this put them on the horns of a dilemma.
Everywhere the more peaceable Muslims go, the more radical ones follow, which is why many of them are terrified of the prospect of being under Sharia law again.
It's the worst form of plagiarism. They claim to have a divine mandate. It's a perverted excuse to enslave everyone but themselves.
Let the Damage Control begin.
Muslims...is you want to practice your religion you're going to have to find some little tidbit in your koran that enables you to live with other human beings of other religions....
you see, you win and we win....
And some are cheering, too.
Their special tallent is declaring proactive victimhood.
Here is where you defeat your long winded apology for Islam. "...when their numbers [peaceful Muslims] are so small"
You are absolutely filled with posionous crap. There are no non-violent muslims. None. Never existed and never will. You have either swallowed, or, are promoting sharia by jihad. The Koran does NOT teach peace. PERIOD. The so-called “peaceful ones”, are the meek battering ram. Keep lying about it. I dare you.
Hi Nully!
Hi CG!
Sorry, I am not one of those individuals who steadfastly maintains an “us vs. them” attitude about life and things, because it is fatalistic and defeatist.
I also would hazard to guess that I know a great deal more about Islamic history as well as the fact that within living memory, alleged Christians were brutally murdering and terrorizing each other, a last vestige of the way things used to be, with their Catholic and Protestant clergy egging them on.
If you want to look at things from a different perspective than religion, consider this to be a struggle between civilization and barbarism. In such struggles, civilization almost always wins, unless it is so hopelessly corrupt that it is no longer civil.
It succeeds because, even to an ignorant and illiterate peasant, it is obvious that it is better, more efficient, than barbarism. So the only way that the barbaric lords can prevent the collapse of their system is to continually brutalize their own people and seek to destroy civilization itself as an alternative to their primitivism.
This is not an effective strategy, because all civilization has to do is continue to exist, protect itself from the barbarians, and somehow convey knowledge of its existence to the people living in thrall to barbarism. Eventually, the rank and file in the barbarian lands desert, leaving their obstinate leaders behind.
As an example of this, Saudi Arabia is terrified right now, because black Muslims in Africa are converting to Christianity at a tremendous clip, usually Anglicanism or Evangelism. This is making some of the African Anglican bishops and archbishops as powerful as princes.
While the motivation of these black Muslims is to escape the slavery offered them by Arab Muslims, it is also to escape Islam itself, because no current form of Islam there is suitable to their needs. In turn, this has forced the theological leaders of Islam in Saudi to consider offering black Muslims a more liberal form of Islam, where there is no slavery.
That is, they are so desperate that the very extremist Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia is considering reform, out of fear that their “pure” form of Islam is otherwise doomed in black Africa.
Far more liberal reform movements exist is both Turkey and Egypt, and are starting by laying a philosophical framework for a “reformed Islam”.
The only reason there hasn’t been a much greater schism among Sunni Muslims, apart from their mutual hatred of Shiites, is that the vast majority of their clergy are trained in Wahhabi madrassas schools in Pakistan. Yet because of the war in Afghanistan, these schools lose a huge number of graduates to the war, instead of fanning out all over the world as clergy.
The US would be a natural place for extensive schism among Muslims, except that no matter the sect, they probably only have radical Wahhabi clergy, that bug the heck out of the more peaceful Muslims, and try to recruit their sons to be radical jihadists, to leave the US and go somewhere where they will get themselves killed.
It succeeds because, even to an ignorant and illiterate peasant, it is obvious that it is better, more efficient, than barbarism.
Again your pretentious attitudes fail. Eskimos live in a savage state which is lower on the hierarchy of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The highly civilized Germans were able to murder on an industrial scale. I have never hear of Eskimos bothering anyone. So Eskimos must feel shame they are not civilized?
Back to Muslims. It's not that Arabs are inherently brutal. The Christian Arabs do not carry out the daily riots that the Muslims do. One can only fault the core beliefs of Islam which has no place for an individual free will to believe in a religion of their choosing. The root of the evil in Islam is Islam. It's a perfect religion for the common street criminal.
You insist on comparing a reformed peaceful religion with another that has not yet reformed.
Christianity was in past just as brutal as is Islam today. For example, take the example of Simon de Montfort, tasked with exterminating Christian Cathars and Catholics in the south of France. He led the siege and subsequent sack of Béziers on 22 July 1209 when the entire population of twenty thousand Cathars and Catholics were slaughtered.
Thousands sought sanctuary in the Cathedral of St Nazaire which was set on fire and also in the Eglise de la Madeleine inside which all were butchered to death. “Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens” - “Kill them all, God will recognize his own”, said de Montfort.
Just eight years ago, there was Christian participation and enabling of the Rwandan genocide, in which as many as one million people died. It was mostly an ethnic fight, but the clergy joined sides. Some members of the clergy even participated in the massacres.
In 2006, Father Athanase Seromba was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for his role in the massacre of 2000 Tutsis. The court heard that Seromba lured the Tutsis to the church, where they believed they would find refuge. When they arrived, he ordered bulldozers to crush the refugees within and Hutu militias to kill any survivors.
Yeah, it’s that evil Christian faith. Inherently violent.
Of course, the vast majority of Christianity today has reformed strongly against such brutality. But though you can cite endless doctrinal justifications for both Christians and Muslims to be brutal, Christians have overcome, and Muslims have yet to do so. It doesn’t mean it is impossible.
Hmmm. Equivocation, is at best a childish argument. Your veiled reference to the “troubles”, in the United Kingdom is shallowed, by the depth of communist influence in that conflict. Islam is not a religion. It is a true ideology. Your statement regarding barbarism vs civilization, is the basis for Jihad. Africa is succumbing to an Islamic putsch. As you well know, Christianity in Africa is not going well. Islam is submission, literally, thus slavery. May we meet our fates, well accounted.
Making assertions without facts is an even more childish argument.
“Christianity in Africa is not going well.” Using what standard?
“In Africa in 1900 there were only 8.7 million adherents of Christianity; now there are 390 million, and it is expected by 2025 there will be 600 million Christians in Africa. The number of Catholics in Africa has increased from one million in 1902 to 329,882,000, about the population of the United States today.”
In Africa, 6 million muslims convert to Christianity every year. According to Shiekh Ahmed Khatani, the President of The Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, which is an institution specializing in graduating imams and Islamic preachers.: “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Ever year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed”.
“The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.”
Current. Boots on the ground, in multiple countries. Take your islamic studies groups, far away from this forum and rot.
Since you have no tangible arguments or facts to cite, and have now twice just resorted to insults, I think it is you who should reconsider posting to this polite forum, instead of to somewhere more appropriate to a simplistic, knee jerk frame of mind, where just anger, not reason, dominates.
You and reality are mutually exclusive.
The usual suspects of moon god apologists and blame deflectors start cranking out the smoke screen for Allah. You can set your watch by it.
Well today they had their rear-ends handed to them BIGTIME.
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