Shedding light on Islam (A Moderate's Perspective)

The Memphis Commercial Appeal ^ | November 14, 2004 | Bima Said

[SauronOfMordor]

The first huge problem with the credibility of Islam is that they recognize Jesus Christ as a prophet. Since Jesus Christ said He was God, he cannot be a prophet. He can either be who He says He is (God), or he can be a blasphemer, or crazy person. The fact that the Koran is so wrong about Jesus shows you cannot trust anything else in it.

The way the Koran gets around this is by saying that the Gospels are altered from the actual word of God, and that only in the Koran is the true account revealed, directly from God to Mohammod.

Therefore any inconsistency between the Koran and the Gospels is due to the false writings of those who wrote down the Gospels. IOW, what Jesus said is only accurately rendered in the Koran, and therefore the Koran is consistent with Jesus, by definition

[weenie]

The Quran is replete with scientific heresies, historic blunders, mathematical mistakes, logical absurdities and grammatical errors. Could the Creator of this Universe possibly be as ignorant as He appears to be in the Quran???

You're cooking...

The Quran is so "nuanced" it sounds like it was written by John Kerry.

[weenie]

Could the Creator of this Universe possibly be as ignorant as He appears to be in the Quran???

...would the creator of the universe condone the stoning of a little girl for adultery when she was raped by older brother or uncle.

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I think they are "PROUD" of the barbarism of their cult. It is a bloodletting cult. People need to use the word 'CULT' instead of religion.

I know I said cult repeatedly. I did it on purpose. That word has to be associated with the word islam.

[Siamese Princess]

I agree that virtually all of this article is an apologetic, but it does have some interesting and informative points for the Western reader. For example, the writer comments that religion permeates every aspect of life in a Mohammedan country. This is certainly true. It is also true in Orthodox countries though not to the extent that it does in Islam. Those of you familiar with daily life in Orthodox countries can understand what I am saying. In the West, the only places I can think of where religion played a role even close to this in the modern era are Ireland and Poland.

A major difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity offers its followers lofty moral ideals but leaves the practical applications to individuals, communities and nations. There are also disagreements between various Christian sects on both moral and theological issues but no one is persecuted for dissenting. Islam, on the other hand, is all-encompassing manual to not only ethics, but economics, politics, everything. There is a website that is occasionally mentioned on FR called "Ask the Imam" (www.asktheimam.com) where believers ask for religious guidance regarding the most mundance matters (my favorite is whether or not it was Islamic to peel a banana from the bottom -- the answer was no). In traditional Islam, there is no room for freedom or personal choice in anything -- EVERYTHING is governed by religious law.

If you think about it, this probably means that a traditional Muslim has a problem with the idea of self-government, of democracy or a constitutional republic: he doesn't know how to think for himself, he fears freedom, he prefers to be told what to do. If he votes, he'll probably vote the way his imam or mullah tells him, which renders the action meaningless.

[weenie]

I completely agree...they make Charles Manson look like a meek, mild-mannered librarian

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'The qur'an is so "nuanced" it sounds like it was written by John Kerry'.

I love it. You hit the nail on the head.

[GeekDejure]

The Quran is so "nuanced" it sounds like it was written by John Kerry.
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I think you're on to something there... 'cuz Mohammud (may pyss be upon him) was unable to read and write !!!

[Siamese Princess]

It is a function of Islamic law to protect the privileged status of minorities, and this is why non-Muslim places of worship have flourished all over the Islamic world.

Hogwash. According to Islamic law, unbelievers may not build new places of worship nor repair already-existing ones. Church bells may not be rung. In various ways, the second class status of non-Muslims was pressed upon them: a special tax for the "privilege" of continuing to practice their faith, special clothes, prohibition from holding high government position, forbidding a Muslim woman from marrying a non-Muslim man but allowing the reverse, etc.

In practice, occasional Muslim rulers ignored these rules, and nowadays in some Muslim countries there is legal equality between Muslims and non-Muslims (on paper), but that is contrary to traditional Islamic law and attitudes.

[MissAmericanPie]

Islam is a phantom of the Judio/Christian religion and the two groups do not worship the same God, period. Jews and Christians worship I Am, Jehovah.

Islam worships Allah, and Allah is a complete 180 degrees from the "One" that Jews and Christians worship.

[GeekDejure]

...would the creator of the universe condone the stoning of a little girl for adultery when she was raped by older brother or uncle.
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Of course... that is to say, providing the supposed creator was Satan... in the form of that diabolical moon god known as Allah !!!

[expat_panama]

You sound like the type that the concentration camps in Europe had....  ...Are you perhaps a democrat in disguise...
..
Whoa, hold on guys, I like food fights as much as the next guy ("you're a democrat." "no, you're a democrat") but maybe we're misunderstanding each other.   I thought you wanted to kill 1.3 billion people.   I was wrong.  We shouldn't assume that anyone here wants mass death for billions.  Let's all say that no one here likes mass death.

My point is that condemning Islam because some so-called Moslems do, means we have to condemn Christianity too.  Some of them ran death factories to murder millions of members of inferior religions --factories run by workers with crosses and "God is on our side" on the uniforms to prove they were not a member of one of those blood thirsty cults.

Y'all are probably going to say that the Nazis weren't really Christians and that Christianity forbids such behavior.  Sounds like what Moslems in the article that Doc posted are saying about Islam.

[miltonim]

A Muslim scholar states that the Muslims controlled Greece while allowing freedom of religion for the Christians. Would you consider that a true statement?

You can take the fifth. It will not be held against you.

[Fiddlstix]

Moderate Islam =

[weenie]

My point is that condemning Islam because some so-called Moslems do, means we have to condemn Christianity too.

The difference is that Islam condones torture, honor killings, the abuse of women, death to the infidel, and on and on and on...

Christianity does not condone any of those things.

When a muslim does any of those things, he is acting according to his religion.

When a Christian does, he is stepping out of the will of God and is violating his covenant with Jesus.

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You border naivete. Or you are totally clueless. I hope it's the former because we can work with that.

The 1.3 billion are ready, willing and able to kill the remaining 4.7 billion non-muslims on this planet. You don't seem to have a problem with that. I do.

How dare you insinuate or even compare what we are saying to Nazism. You are deluding yourself if you think we can all sit in a circle holding hands and sing kun-bah-yah. I will attribute to your apparent naivete.

When it comes to protecting myself and my family, I will not count on you to protect the American way of life. You are an appeaser that is clear. I, on the other hand believed when Bush said, You're either with us....or against us.

P.S. We kicked the Nazis asses for pulling that %hit...didn't we..

[matchwood]

""Many crucial systems such as algebra, Arabic numerals and the concept of the zero (vital to the advancement of mathematics) were transmitted to medieval Europe from Islam. "

And lately, what has Islam accomplished? The entire GDP - minus oil - of the Middle East is less than that of Finland.

Arabs can't even build a washing machine and probably wouldn't know what to do with it if they did.

The roughly 200 million Arabs look down upon all other Muslims. Muslim children must learn the Koran in Arabic even though they don't have any idea what the words mean.

Muhammad was illiterate, had visions and scribes wrote those visions down - some accurately some inaccurately.

There is no chronology to the Koran - it appears to be arranged "largest first, smallest last."

The practice of Islam today proposes that all civilizations regress to the 6th century. It ain't gonna happen - get over it.

[pyx]

...rock and roll was born here[Memphis]...

Its really funny when homegrown FOREIGNERS like Bima Said presume to know ANYTHING about the origins of American Culture and then publically demonstrate they are IGNORANT TURD-WORLDERS[sic].

Even a cursory look reveals information from Gospel Music, Chess Records, 1950's Cleveland Dee-Jays and singles such as Rocket-88 none of which have anything to do with Memphis and the much beloved World Famous Grand Ole Opry.

[Kolokotronis]

"A Muslim scholar states that the Muslims controlled Greece while allowing freedom of religion for the Christians. Would you consider that a true statement?

You can take the fifth. It will not be held against you."

Well, if you take the statement within the context of the times, it is partially true. The Greeks were held in a state of dhiminitude which most times meant that they were subject to one petty (or not so petty) insult after another. Rather like in Egypt today. Occasionally there were real pogroms. At others we were not allowed to educate our children in the Faith or history of the Greek people and developed the "Secret Schools" to teach the children. The kids would travel by moonlight to a cave somewhere where the priest would teach them about the Faith, how to read and write etc. If the children were caught, it was off to Turkey with them and the if the priest were caught, death. At some times, the Turks would come to a village and kidnap the most handsome and strong young boys and the prettiest girls and take them off to Constantinople, the boys to be converted to Mohammedans and made into Janissaries and the girls thrown into the harem. One of my ancestresses was carried off to the harem but escaped and walked, at night, all the way back to her village in Southern Greece. If a Greek converted to Mohammedanism and then wanted to convert back to Orthodoxy, he or she would uniformly be executed, throughout the entire period of the Turkokratia. By the late 1700s a Greek political consciousness had developed and that, along side the Orthodox Faith is what gave rise to the Greek Revolution.

All of the foregoing notwithstanding, most of the time the Turks pretty much left the Greeks alone. Frankly, Greek overlords might, save in the religious arena, have been nearly as bad as the Turks on a day to day basis.

[Kolokotronis]

You make a good point. The role of the Church in the West notwithstanding, in the Orthodox East the people have always played a major role in the Church and have never, ever, felt compelled to keep silent in the face of hierarchial misconduct or heresy. While democracy was certainly not current in a secular sense during the days of the Turkokratia, nevertheless the essential Christian democracy of Orthodoxy meant that we developed along social and political lines (really Hellenistic lines) which were and are antithetical to Islam. Interestingly, a few years back my town was visited by a delegation from the Palestinian Authority. Because several of them were Orthodox Christians, we were invited to host the group one evening. I spent a long time discussing political views with several of the Mohammedans in the group and was surprised to here from them purely Hellenistic social ideals. When I asked them about the Ulema and Sharia, they scoffed and said that was for the lunatic fringe under the influence of the Saudis and the Egyptian Brotherhood. I don't think they were lying, though it is clear that the lunatic fringe has gained substantial ground among Palestinians since then.