Posted on 06/15/2002 4:58:56 AM PDT by Clive
What happened to two American missionaries, husband and wife, in the Philippines recently was surely the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
A pair of innocent, noble people trying to educate the poor and introduce better health care were kidnapped by Muslim terrorists and then abused and starved. When government soldiers tried to rescue them, one hostage was killed, another badly injured.
Once again, the people who shot, slashed, bombed, tortured and maimed did so in the name of Islam.
I'll follow the statement immediately by saying the majority of Muslims I have met have been fair and fine people, and that many Muslims live in dreadful conditions around the world and have a right to demand change.
Problem is, most of their governments are Muslim, too. Many need to stop blaming the West, Christianity or Israel for sufferings imposed on them by their own regimes.
Nor will I play the white liberal card here and say their religion is the same as mine.
I respect Islam, but I do not believe in it and also consider it misguided. I've said so when I've spoken in mosques, dined with Muslim leaders, shaken their hands and embraced them.
In many instances, Islam has either lost its way or, more worrying, some of its leaders have encouraged it to walk down a twisted path.
It is not Christians, Marxists or secular nationalists who strap explosives to themselves and mass murder children in Israel. It is not Jews or Hindus who plant bombs in Kashmir and kill innocent people.
It is not Roman Catholics or Unitarians who fly airliners carrying mothers and children into buildings full of the harmless.
Theological support
Yes, of course, people of all faiths do dreadful things. But none with such regularity and with such theological support from so many. Important this.
It is simply untrue to claim the Muslim world universally despises violence.
Equally untrue to claim that thugs in, for example, Northern Ireland, act in the name of religion. Their actions are immediately and genuinely condemned by most Protestants and Catholics alike.
Similarly in Israel, where just a few days ago the members of a small Jewish group planning to bomb Arab targets were arrested and incarcerated.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Harakat ul-Mujahedin in Kashmir. Muslim terror gangs in the Philippines, India and the Balkans. Muslim teenagers bombing synagogues in France, Britain and Belgium. A novelist threatened with death for having an opinion, embassies invaded and trashed, journalists having their throats cut and their bodies dumped like garbage.
It's certainly true that parts of the Muslim world have been badly treated, colonized and economically deprived. But truth cries out to be heard.
There is now more money and wealth in large parts of the Muslim world than in many other places, and it doesn't seem to stop the violence and the anger.
I see passages in the Koran that appear to call for vile levels of brutality and bloodshed. Muslim friends tell me all this needs interpretation, and that the Bible is just the same.
Of the first, I am yet to be convinced. Of the second, I totally disagree. The old covenant tells a story in which terrible as well as wonderful events occur. The central messages, however, are of justice and peace.
Added to this is the fact that for Christians, everything must be viewed through the prism of the New Testament.
Let me be direct. This consistent and ideological cult of blood and death simply does not exist today among Jews and Christians, or among members of most non-monotheistic faiths.
It may well be that Islam is at a particularly difficult and confused stage in its evolution, but then Muslims tell me their faith is unchanging.
Other religions certainly have used violence to pursue their ends, but most if not all have realized the error of their ways. We cannot constantly refer back to early Medieval Spain and cite Muslim tolerance, which was true in its day. But today, we also have to observe the present and count the number of Muslim terror groups that roam the world.
Change has to come from within. Until that happens, many of the bullies, the bigots and the bad of the world will listen to the cries of Islam.
When he got launched on the skyjackers who were drinking in a Florida topless bar, he really got rolling on sin and betrayal of a religion.
Bump.
The first brief I have against Islam is "actions speak louder than words." Who cares if 99.44% of Moslems are indeed peaceful, law-abiding good citizens, when the violent minority is bombing and killing, this is irrelevant. Utterly.
The second brief is this- where the devil where the "good" practioners of Islam after 911? Their silence- their failure to denounce the violence- makes them complict. They lost their chance- with me, at least- to redeem themselves.
My third and final brief? Islam was "made up as he went" by Mohammed. Christianity and Judaism are based on scripture.
The great problem of all organized religion is that, as with governments, the people who fight most fiercely to rise within them are precisely the people who should not be permitted to do so. There is only one counteragent: the postulate of absolutes, which proclaims that each of us is expected to know right from wrong on the basis of fundamental principles that no "leader" can change. This is the founding postulate of the West, on the basis of which we conducted the Nuremberg trials.
Note that Christ did not radicalize His followers. He said plainly: "I come not to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it," at a time when the formal religious practices of the Hebrews were becoming less and less accessible to the common man. But He did not exempt any man from the Ten Commandments -- not even in dealing with others who held the Commandments in contempt.
In contrast, the Koran proclaims that Muslims are exempt from all moral strictures when dealing with "the infidel."
The clergy that bases its pronouncements on the Koran does not recognize the Judeo-Christian postulate of absolutes. It claims total power over its billion-plus followers, who would be required to lay down their lives on any basis the imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs decreed suitable.
At present, only a minority of Muslims accept the Islamic clergy's claim of totalitarian authority. Yet that minority is now the most deadly force moving in the world. It must be stripped of religious justification and divorced irrevocably by more sensible Muslims, lest its fate sweep them all up together.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
I think this sentence sums up the problem with Islam and the Arabs. In Saudi Arabia, for example, there is a "Royal Family" which lives in so much wealth that they could give half of it to the people and still live better than 99% of the world. I truly believe that the Saudi Royal Family is so greedy that it will talk with a forked tongue to hold onto its unbeleivable power and wealth. It is a regime, which if it were any where else, that would be toppled for its greed and selfish way of ruling its own people.
The rest of the Arabic world is pretty much set-up the same using as an example the Saudi Royal Family as basis for maintaining power. How else could a leader gain more support for telling children to go out and comit suicide so the leader will be a more recognized leader... Sounds weird to us, but that philosophy alone shows how twisted these regimes have become and the power of propaganda to uneducated and impoverished masses......
Clinton and Bush, did you see that? Muslim terror gangs in ... the Balkans.
So just what are devout Muslims doing to root out these "thugs"?
A good counter would have been "Well, the Godfather only killed Catholics---people of his own faith." :)
...perhaps you can expound on Catholic priesthood molesting children?
Closer, a Mosque in California debarred a guy who trashed a different church.
Even closer, in Arizona, a Muslim mosque and Jewish temple have meshed boys soccer leagues, and the Muslim and Jewish leaders are successfuly teaching their kids to get along in peace.
If you look, you'll find good news.
Dining with the enemy when they are a tiny minority is so thrilling, isn't it? I suggest, if you want real thrills, not cheap thrills, that you go as a Christian, to, say, ANY country with a majority Muslim population and declaim about Jesus publicly and evangelise them.
Then, get back to me and tell me more about MY "zealotry."
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