Posted on 10/11/2001 10:52:36 AM PDT by Chuckmorse
Is Islam Violent?
As Americans we are steeped in republican values such as limited government, individual rights, and a separation of church and state.
We traditionally view our neighbor with a live and let live attitude and, while we may not always approve, more often than not we tolerate our differences.
This is why, with all our imperfections, and God knows we have many, we somehow hold together as the most genuinely diverse society ever known to man.
As a result, we seem to have this almost myopic view of the rest of the world.
We assume that all faiths, political as well as religious, are like ours, which tends to involve a personal relationship with a God whom we look to as the creator of our natural sovereign rights.
We have trouble imagining a nation under the direct rule of clerics, or commissars, who interpret the will of God, or science, and use the muscular force of the state to carry out their interpretations.
Our nation was born after a bloody revolution against a tyrannical British monarch, King George III.
This experience imbued our founding generation with a respect for the sovereign rights of nations.
America has often championed the cause of independence from Latin America in the nineteenth century to Europe during the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait.
We instinctively loathed European colonialism with its attempt to physically dominate the world.
Likewise, we as a people rejected the maniacal new world order visions of both Nazism and Communism.
While weve certainly had our share of imperialists operating in the inner reaches of our government and amongst a small segment of our most wealthy establishment, the American people have been notoriously opposed to world dominating schemes.
It has never been an element of our religious or political faith.
Our idea of utopia has always been to live in peace, under our proverbial fig tree, and leave our neighbor alone to peruse the same.
Jefferson expressed this best when he noted in the Declaration of Independence that the truths we hold to be self-evident are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The vast majority of Muslims who have settled in America have, thank God, adopted the same peaceful American faith that most of the rest of us have regardless of individual means of worshiping God or not worshiping as the case may be.
The same cannot be said of the nations of the world which are presently dominated by religious Muslims.
The religious Muslim movement, like Nazism and left-wing Communism before it, has seized the reigns of power in several sovereign states.
Like the Nazis and Communists, they are using that power to spread terror across the planet.
The citizens of these Islamic states chafe under the same type of brutal authoritarianism and one party religious dictatorship as Europeans suffered under Nazism or that Chinese, Cubans or North Koreans suffer under the brutal jackboot of left-wing Communism.
The mobs coursing through the streets of Islamic cities chanting anti-American slogans are the same as the Nazi brown shirts looting Jewish businesses during Kristalnacht or Communists burning and looting American inner cities during the summer of love.
Even though we may be loath to admit it, religious Islam clearly does contain seeds of violence of a type similar to that of its Nazi and Communist counterparts.
Like their counterparts, Islam advocates war, or Jihad, as a means of conquering the non-Islamic world.
Moderate Muslims have westernized the meaning of Jihad to mean peaceful personal struggle and this is a genuinely progressive development.
Like the Nazis and Communists, however, the religious Muslims believe that world peace and happiness will be obtained under what they maintain is the only true faith.
Like the Nazis and Communists, they believe that anything is permissible in the pursuit of this glorious goal including total subjugation of peoples and mass murder.
Chuck Morse Is the author of Why Im a Right-Wing Extremist www.chuckmorse.com
FreeGuards,
Karen aka KLT
I believe no FBI agents died at Waco. The original raid, with the shot agents, was by the BTF. I have no idea what the assignments of the dead agents was.
that it's perfeclty understable that the 2nd tower hit (with the fuel tank fireball outside the building) was the first to fall.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. The second tower was hit much lower. The structural members being weakened by the heat of the fire carried at least twice as much weight as those in the other tower. Of course it collapsed in less time.
I believe no FBI agents died at Waco. The original raid, with the shot agents, was by the BTF. I have no idea what the assignments of the dead agents was.
that it's perfeclty understable that the 2nd tower hit (with the fuel tank fireball outside the building) was the first to fall.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. The second tower was hit much lower. The structural members being weakened by the heat of the fire carried at least twice as much weight as those in the other tower. Of course it collapsed in less time.
Before getting too self-righteous about this, examine some of the Christian beliefs and practices imported from pagan religions. The list is quite long. Many Christians believe, of course, that these practices have been purified and sanctified by their adoption into Christianity. Muslims could justifiably claim the same.
I think you overlooked something.
I suspect there was plenty of fuel to go around. If you have actual data from engineers or others with an expert opinion on this, I'd like to see it.
The alternative scenario would apparently involve a large bomb or a number of small bombs expertly located at the exact level of the tower where the plane hit. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. If they had the ability to bring the tower down without the plane hitting it, why didn't they do it right after the first plane hit, before most of the occupants had evacuated?
The video I have seen shows no indication of additional massive blasts after the planes hit.
If you care to attempt substantive refutation instead of engaging in baby talk, I'm more than willing to continue the conversation.
Agreed. The possible alternatives are extermination or permanent subjugation, both of which would entail changing the US permanently into a very different type of nation.
I also suspect that the rise of a unified Islam under a caliph is far more likely if we remain in the Middle East, than if we get out, after killing Bin Laden. Without a U.S. devil to focus on, the various Islamic groups are far more likely to continue with their fracturus ways.
Agreed again. The problem is that if we pulled out of the Middle East, the economies of Europe and America would collapse. We are just too dependent on their oil, at present. And nobody is (yet) willing to do what would be necessary to break that dependence.
You posted that Islam was a ridiculous religion because it (according to you) had borrowed from earlier pagan religions.
If this is so, then Christianity (which has borrowed much more from similar sources) must be at least equally ridiculous.
I was making fun of your premise, not your religion.
I notice you have still not attempted to show that Christianity has not borrowed from pagan religions. I advise against it, since even the Catholic Encyclopedia freely admits such.
A parable about glass houses comes to mind. Jesus had something to say about the need to remove the beam from one's own eye before presuming to address the splinter in your brother's eye. Perhaps this should be taken to apply to religions as well as to individuals.
If you want to diss Islam, I think there are far more effective ways to go about it than dredging up ancient names of forgotten gods.
You're the one claiming the broadest knowledge, rattle loudly for your own entertainment.
I claim no special knowledge. Everything I have stated about the background of Christian religious practices is readily found in any standard encyclopedia.
BTW, I have been polite and respectful in addressing you. Why do you reply with insults rather than reasoned discourse?
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