What one author says about the Muslim "religion"

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distracted said:
what made you want to come home?
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Well, you see I tried to find Christian Apologetics works because I was being challenged about my beliefs while I was living in Utah. 2 pretty decent guys wrote books that really helped me out. Their names were Karl Keating and Josef Ratzinger. I also read Against Heresies by St. Iranaeus whose name I probably just mispelled. It is amazing how much of what the good Bishop of Lyon wrote about the Gnostics still is true today for other entities. I also enjoyed greatly both Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism and Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

After we left Utah I started reading more, I started with the Ratzinger Report and Rome Sweet Home. After I read the Ratzinger Report I became a fan. I hope that “rooting” for a candidate in the Conclave is not a sin because I was rooting for the good Cardinal.

After reading Rome Sweet Home, I went back and read the Bible again with an eye towards all those verses that as protestants we tend to sort of gloss over (My body is food indeed, My blood is drink indeed, etc.) Then I started researching the early Church. and as someone said to know history is to be Catholic or something like that. There we are.

Thanks for asking. Please pray for me.
 
cthulhubryan said:
It is called “The 100” Here is the link to it on Amazon
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**Aha! **The subtitle is “A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History” – INFLUENTIAL, not “greatest”. If you read what he says, Mohammed is in the company of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, etc., and not some paragon of virtue.
 
planten said:
**J C, that man who wrote the book “100 Greatest men of the world.” was not a fool. He put Muhammad as number one in his list. It means that for muhammad, all is clean. That writer has wiped out all your false allegations against Muhammad.
**
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That’s a pretty bizarre claim. The opinion of one writer (completely unknown to most of us) hardly carries much weight, does it? Why should we all bow down and accept what this one guy said?

If Muslims would devote more energy to providing rational explanations of why they believe what they do, and less energy hunting down dubious statistics and isolated quotes and mysterious, unknown authorities to puff their religion, then the bigots and ignoramuses who revile your faith would have a lot less ammunition. You guys frankly don’t do a very good job defending your religion on the Internet. But then very few conservative religious believers do. Conservative Protestants don’t do a very good job either. Conservative Catholics also produce a caricature of their faith, but their faith is so rich and strong and deep that it fares better than most others even when caricatured. Hence the vibrancy of this website, in spite of its flaws.

So the question is: why has your religion (as expressed by you and other Muslims on this forum) become so cut off from its richest and deepest roots? Why is it that the religion of Thomas Aquinas and Dante does so much better on the Internet than the religion of al-Ghazzali and Hafez?

You and other Muslims here need to realize what a bad job you are doing of defending your religion. You need to wake up, grow up, and start thinking instead of just parroting bad arguments and bogus authorities.

Edwin
 
cthulhubryan said:
Well, you see I tried to find Christian Apologetics works because I was being challenged about my beliefs while I was living in Utah. 2 pretty decent guys wrote books that really helped me out. Their names were Karl Keating and Josef Ratzinger. I also read Against Heresies by St. Iranaeus whose name I probably just mispelled. It is amazing how much of what the good Bishop of Lyon wrote about the Gnostics still is true today for other entities. I also enjoyed greatly both Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism and Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

After we left Utah I started reading more, I started with the Ratzinger Report and Rome Sweet Home. After I read the Ratzinger Report I became a fan. I hope that “rooting” for a candidate in the Conclave is not a sin because I was rooting for the good Cardinal.

After reading Rome Sweet Home, I went back and read the Bible again with an eye towards all those verses that as protestants we tend to sort of gloss over (My body is food indeed, My blood is drink indeed, etc.) Then I started researching the early Church. and as someone said to know history is to be Catholic or something like that. There we are.

Thanks for asking. Please pray for me.
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do you ask everyone to pray for you or am i special? 😃

or both?

anyhow… I’m wondering: What made you want to read those authors? You must not have been too anti-Catholic - to be open to reading Card. Ratzinger… ?

i guess this shows something about me, that i would say such a thing… I have to remind myself that not all non-Catholics are anti-Catholic… or if so, they’re not all rabidly anti=-catholic… 😃

those ones i have known have been… whoppers!!! so to say… :eek: i coul tell you stories you may not even believe…

I’ve always been Catholic but when i became a catechized, enthused, out-spoken Catholic…an evangelizin Catholic, I lost many friends…

i just figure they weren’t friends in the first place…

I mean… If a friend of mine became, say, a Mormon, i would still be friends… wouldn’t even think of NOT being friends anymore… but there’s something about beig devoutly Catholic… scares people or something…:

weird, 'cause about the only thing i would consider basis for dissolving friendship would be if a person became a satanist… :hmmm:
 
sedonaman said:
I took a test for officers training school in the US Air Force, and I remember one question on the test was, “Would you still fight for your country if it no longer allowed freedom of religion?” You had to answer “Yes” or “No”.

I think the key word in your statement is “religion” – is a belief system a religion just because people say it is and its adherents worship a god ? Or should it have to meet some objective standards ?
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What on earth would “objective” standards be?

Either we respect people’s freedom of belief, whether it meets our “standards” or not, or we have a state religion and tolerate others to the extent to which their principles are tolerable by the standards of the state religion. I think there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. But since the U.S. clearly does not have a state religion, there is no alternative to absolute, unconditional toleration (except of course for actions that harm others).

Many American Christians want the best of both worlds–they want to establish Christian standards (their own particular Christian standards at that) without admitting that they are opposing the First Amendment by doing so. This is neither rational nor moral.

Edwin
 
distracted said:
this is why a certain level of Church - state separation is needed…

although the Sup Ct takes this separation thing to ridiculous extremes and mis-applies it…

even so, we should respect the right of all religions to exist in a free society… all except those that are treasonous… against out country … and those who advocate murder…

but then all so-called Crhistian religions that advocate murder (abortion) & euthanasia … well… They should be able to hold those beliefs but not practice them… just as Mormons were disallowed to /practice polygamy in the 1800s…

Muslim-ism is treasonous… to the USA
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Arguably so was Catholicism before Vatican II. I can’t see that the arguments of “nativist” anti-Catholics of the 19th and early 20th centuries were any worse than yours.

In fact, any religion that isn’t “treasonous”–that doesn’t put itself above national loyalty–is a pretty contemptible religion in my opinion.

Edwin
 
planten said:
J C, that man who wrote the book “100 Greatest men of the world.” was not a fool. He put Muhammad as number one in his list. It means that for muhammad, all is clean. …
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Did you notice how many Christians are on the list and how few Muslims? There is only one other Muslim. And Mohammed is not clean. If you go to the amazon link, you can read a few pages, and one of them shows a picture of Mohammed, not praying, but as a conqueror on horseback, sword in hand. By including a picture of him, your own reference blasphemed your “prophet”. The author explains in his first few sentences that he gave to #1 spot to Mohammed because he “succeeded” in both secular and religious areas, although I would not characterize duping a lot of people as a “success”; and his philosophy can hardly be considered religious if it is 97% war and 3% religion.
 
Contarini said:
What on earth would “objective” standards be?

Either we respect people’s freedom of belief, whether it meets our “standards” or not, or we have a state religion and tolerate others to the extent to which their principles are tolerable by the standards of the state religion. …
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The members of the Mafia believe they are engaging in a business. Are we to respect that belief and consider their activities a “business”?

IMHO, any so-called “religion” is not a religion if it has no concept of the Golden Rule.
 
sedonaman said:
That there is violence in the Bible is indisputable, but there is no general call for all time for all Christians and Jews to make war on infidels in order to take over the world by war and terror.
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No, but there is

a) a pretty horrific example of how God’s people are told by God to behave toward idolaters and other false believers, and
b) a promise of an apocalyptic bloodbath in which Jesus will return as a warrior and there will be blood to the horses’ bridles; and
c) harsh language in the N.T. directed toward “false brothers,” language which demonstrably expressed itself in violence once Christians were in a position to apply the N.T. teachings in this way.

Are these the same as the factors making for violence in Islam? No, they aren’t, and I said that they weren’t. So of course you can say “because we don’t have the same kind of violence-inciting texts therefore our violence-inciting texts are not as bad as yours,” but Muslims can do the same thing. Muslims can point to the clear limits put on religious violence in the Qur’an and the Sunnah and can argue legitimately that there are no such limits in the apocalyptic message of the Christian Bible. We can go round and round like this. There’s no point to it.

I’m sure you know that many Muslims do not agree that the Qur’an contains “a general call for all time for all Christians and Jews to make war on infidels in order to take over the world by war and terror.” Your polemical characterization of the Qur’an is no more to be accepted than the equally harsh and one-sided characterizations of the Bible by enemies of Christianity.
Jesus didn’t say “love your enemies” and then when it didn’t work, raise an army and lead it on the warpath to “punish” those who rejected his prophethood, but that’s what Mohammed did.
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No, but He did say “love your enemies” and then warn those who rejected His message that they would be eternally tortured by His loving Father. Eternal damnation is much harder to reconcile with love than holy war is (The Qur’an, of course, also speaks of eternal damnation–I’m not letting it off the hook here!)
Be that as it may, whether or not there is violence in the Bible is irrelevant to the invocations to violence in the Qur’an:
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It’s relevant to the moral and logical position of Christians who use this as a polemic against Islam.
B cannot excuse his wrongdoing by claiming that “A did it too.”
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But of course that is not what is going on here.
Your mentioning violence in the Bible is merely a poor attempt to drag Christianity down to the level of Islam … period.
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That’s just silly. Pointing out an obvious fact which you do not deny is not a “poor attempt” to do anything. The point I’m making is that both religions have some explaining to do, since both have often been used to sanction or glorify violence and both have passages in their holy books which appear on the face of it to support such use. The point is not that the two religions are in exactly the same position–clearly the problems they face are different (naturally the more triumphalistic and unthinking adhrents of each are going to use this difference to argue for the superiority of their own religion). The point is that if you insist on the most literal, hardline interpretation of the Qur’an as the only tenable one, then you have to treat Scripture the same way. Or rather, the point is that telling members of another religion how to interpret their own Scriptures is a remarkably silly (as well as rude) thing to do.
Not exactly. If Mohammed used the Bible for validation, then why didn’t Islam learn from Christianity’s supposed mistakes?
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One could argue that on a few points it did (Islam has for the most part done better than Christianity in terms of promoting brotherhood among people of various ethnic groups, although it certainly doesn’t have a perfect record in that respect, nor does Christianity have a record of utter failure). But generally I think it didn’t, and as a non-Muslim I naturally put this down to Muhammad’s faults and limitations, and those of his followers!
In view of the Muslim claim that the Qur’an is the perfect word of Allah and cannot be changed, how can there be an interpretation other than a traditional Islamic interpretation? If there is, what has changed and when? How is an alternate interpretation not “changing the perfect word of Allah”?
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That’s a pretty bizarre argument coming from a Catholic. I would expect it from a fundamentalist. Do I really have to explain the concept of development of doctrine to you? Of course you can claim that Islam has no room for such a doctrine. But again, who made you the Pope of Islam? (And, of course, there is also doctrinal corruption, something in which many Muslims clearly believe–the fundamentalists as well as the liberals, although their examples are somewhat different!)
Then there is the Muslim “perfect” example of Mohammed. Is it not true that the Qur’an says that all Muslims are to imitate Mohammed in every detail of their lives? If so, then a “moderate” Muslim would be one who did what Mohammed did, and not what some new interpretations say he should do. If not, then how is he a “perfect” model for living your life?
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Where does the Qur’an say that all Muslims are to imitate Muhammad in every detail?

I am aware that the imitation of Muhammad is an important constituent of traditional Islamic piety. I do not know that this is in the Qur’an, and I doubt that it really applies to “every detail.” Again, you take it upon yourself to tell Muslims what they are supposed to believe, instead of allowing them to tell you. If some Muslims want to take a more nuanced approach to the imitation of Muhammad or to any other part of their faith, then you have no right to stop them or to dismiss their efforts as “not really Islam.”
Selectivity and straining are not necessary
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Then why do them?
where are the Muslim admissions that perhaps Islam’s wars of conquest were also? None are offered
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Based on what research do you make this confident negative claim?

I do know that many Muslims justify the initial conquests on the ground that they were directed against tyrannical empires and that they generally made life better for the conquered. I am not in a position to say that this is false. The Byzantine Empire of the era of Heraclius was a very oppressive institution in many respects and was brutally intolerant of heretical Christians, Jews, and pagans. That doesn’t mean that I think the Muslims were right to make war on it. Given the long-term effects of those conquests, I find them deplorable. But I can’t simply portray them as “good guys vs. bad guys,” and I am not shocked by the fact that Muslims defend them, just as many of us can find arguments to defend the Crusades.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
If Muslims would devote more energy to providing rational explanations of why they believe what they do, and less energy hunting down dubious statistics and isolated quotes and mysterious,
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and hunting down Americans…
 
oh that’s right… i’m not supposed to be responding o you …

never mind…
 
Contarini said:
No, but there is

a) a pretty horrific example of how God’s people are told by God to behave toward idolaters and other false believers, and
b) a promise of an apocalyptic bloodbath in which Jesus will return as a warrior and there will be blood to the horses’ bridles; and
c) harsh language in the N.T. directed toward “false brothers,” language which demonstrably expressed itself in violence once Christians were in a position to apply the N.T. teachings in this way.

Are these the same as the factors making for violence in Islam? No, they aren’t, and I said that they weren’t. So of course you can say “because we don’t have the same kind of violence-inciting texts therefore our violence-inciting texts are not as bad as yours,” but Muslims can do the same thing. Muslims can point to the clear limits put on religious violence in the Qur’an and the Sunnah and can argue legitimately that there are no such limits in the apocalyptic message of the Christian Bible. We can go round and round like this. There’s no point to it.

I’m sure you know that many Muslims do not agree that the Qur’an contains “a general call for all time for all Christians and Jews to make war on infidels in order to take over the world by war and terror.” Your polemical characterization of the Qur’an is no more to be accepted than the equally harsh and one-sided characterizations of the Bible by enemies of Christianity.

No, but He did say “love your enemies” and then warn those who rejected His message that they would be eternally tortured by His loving Father. Eternal damnation is much harder to reconcile with love than holy war is (The Qur’an, of course, also speaks of eternal damnation–I’m not letting it off the hook here!)

It’s relevant to the moral and logical position of Christians who use this as a polemic against Islam.

But of course that is not what is going on here.

That’s just silly. Pointing out an obvious fact which you do not deny is not a “poor attempt” to do anything. The point I’m making is that both religions have some explaining to do, since both have often been used to sanction or glorify violence and both have passages in their holy books which appear on the face of it to support such use. The point is not that the two religions are in exactly the same position–clearly the problems they face are different (naturally the more triumphalistic and unthinking adhrents of each are going to use this difference to argue for the superiority of their own religion). The point is that if you insist on the most literal, hardline interpretation of the Qur’an as the only tenable one, then you have to treat Scripture the same way. Or rather, the point is that telling members of another religion how to interpret their own Scriptures is a remarkably silly (as well as rude) thing to do.

One could argue that on a few points it did (Islam has for the most part done better than Christianity in terms of promoting brotherhood among people of various ethnic groups, although it certainly doesn’t have a perfect record in that respect, nor does Christianity have a record of utter failure). But generally I think it didn’t, and as a non-Muslim I naturally put this down to Muhammad’s faults and limitations, and those of his followers!

That’s a pretty bizarre argument coming from a Catholic. I would expect it from a fundamentalist. Do I really have to explain the concept of development of doctrine to you? Of course you can claim that Islam has no room for such a doctrine. But again, who made you the Pope of Islam? (And, of course, there is also doctrinal corruption, something in which many Muslims clearly believe–the fundamentalists as well as the liberals, although their examples are somewhat different!)

Where does the Qur’an say that all Muslims are to imitate Muhammad in every detail?

I am aware that the imitation of Muhammad is an important constituent of traditional Islamic piety. I do not know that this is in the Qur’an, and I doubt that it really applies to “every detail.” Again, you take it upon yourself to tell Muslims what they are supposed to believe, instead of allowing them to tell you. If some Muslims want to take a more nuanced approach to the imitation of Muhammad or to any other part of their faith, then you have no right to stop them or to dismiss their efforts as “not really Islam.”

Then why do them?

Based on what research do you make this confident negative claim?

I do know that many Muslims justify the initial conquests on the ground that they were directed against tyrannical empires and that they generally made life better for the conquered. I am not in a position to say that this is false. The Byzantine Empire of the era of Heraclius was a very oppressive institution in many respects and was brutally intolerant of heretical Christians, Jews, and pagans. That doesn’t mean that I think the Muslims were right to make war on it. Given the long-term effects of those conquests, I find them deplorable. But I can’t simply portray them as “good guys vs. bad guys,” and I am not shocked by the fact that Muslims defend them, just as many of us can find arguments to defend the Crusades.

Edwin
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I might agree with some of what you said if the leaders and thinkers of Islam would condemn the acts of terrorists. What do we get instead? “Islam says: ‘Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!’” – That great Islamic holy man, Ayatollah Khomeini
 
Based on the way that muslims treat people of other faiths in Saudi Arabia, I would be worried if they were to become a majority in the USA. It matters little to me whether or not the Koran is being interpreted properly. The fact of the matter is that wherever muslims populate in large numbers they bring with them fanaticism, suppression of women’s rights, persecution of homosexuals, and oppression of other religions. Can anyone name a single country with an Islamic majority that doesn’t have these problems?

The muslim people that I know in the real world seem like decent folks. But I have never felt it approprate to ask them their views on the application of Sharia law. But I’m afraid that the rank and file muslim condones the actions we read in the media.
 
VARC said:
The muslim people that I know in the real world seem like decent folks. But I have never felt it approprate to ask them their views on the application of Sharia law. But I’m afraid that the rank and file muslim condones the actions we read in the media.
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I agree with this - mainly due to the concept of fard kafayah. As long as some Muslims somewhere are fighting/jihad against disbelievers, then it absolves Muslims elsewhere from having to do anything themselves (other than send money etc.). So, I think the average Muslim is secretly glad that another Muslim elsewhere is fighting so that he/she doesn’t have to. 🤷
What fard kafayah means is that if it is not undertaken by enough people, then all the people are guilty of sin, but if enough people undertake it, the rest will be relieved of blame. Initially the command is addressed to all of them, as in the case of an individual obligation (fard ‘ayn), but then in the case of fard kafayah the obligation is dropped if enough of the people undertake to do it, unlike the case with fard ‘ayn where the obligation is not dropped if someone else does it. Jihad is a fard kafayah according to the majority of scholars.” (Al-Mughni, 9/163)
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Sheikh ‘Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz said: “We have previously explained on more than one occasion that jihad is fard kafayah, not fard ‘ayn. **All Muslims are enjoined to support their brothers with their selves (i.e., physically, by joining them), or with money, weapons, dawah and advice. If enough of them go out (to fight), the rest are freed from sin; but if none of them do that, then all of them are sinners. **
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The Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Africa, North Africa and elsewhere are obliged to do their utmost, and if there is a Jihad in one country, the surrounding countries should hasten to help them, the closest then the next closest. If one or two states, or three or more, manage to fulfill the obligation, then the rest are freed of responsibility. They deserve to be supported, and it is obligatory to help them against their enemies because they are oppressed. **Allah has enjoined jihad upon all Muslims, and they must fight against the enemies of Allah until their brothers are victorious. If they fail to do that, then they are sinners; but if sufficient people undertake to do that, then the rest are absolved of sin.” **(Fatawa ash-Shaykh Ibn Baz, 7/335) islamawareness.net/Jihad/types_jihad.html
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(emphasis is mine) Also, please note that these quotes are from an Islamic site, (not an anti-Islamic site.)
 
sedonaman said:
**Aha! **The subtitle is “A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History” – INFLUENTIAL, not “greatest”. If you read what he says, Mohammed is in the company of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, etc., and not some paragon of virtue.
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There are two books in question: “100 Greatest Men in History” by Michael Pollard and Angela Royston and the book that you are talking about by Michael Hart. They both rank Muhammad in the first place, but you are right about the meaning of those rankings. They don’t mean “best” or “most morally upright”. Planten doesn’t seem to understand this.
 
VARC said:
Based on the way that muslims treat people of other faiths in Saudi Arabia, I would be worried if they were to become a majority in the USA. It matters little to me whether or not the Koran is being interpreted properly. The fact of the matter is that wherever muslims populate in large numbers they bring with them fanaticism, suppression of women’s rights, persecution of homosexuals, and oppression of other religions. Can anyone name a single country with an Islamic majority that doesn’t have these problems?

The muslim people that I know in the real world seem like decent folks. But I have never felt it approprate to ask them their views on the application of Sharia law. But I’m afraid that the rank and file muslim condones the actions we read in the media.
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have you read *Not Without my Daughter? *

I thought i already knew how [all of the above is true]… but reading that book … blew me away…

They really do hate us… (and their wives…)

In that particular story, the guy hated his own child…

or let’s just say he didn’t know anything about love, apparently… 😦
 
distracted said:
have you read *Not Without my Daughter? *

I thought i already knew how [all of the above is true]… but reading that book … blew me away…

They really do hate us… (and their wives…)

In that particular story, the guy hated his own child…

or let’s just say he didn’t know anything about love, apparently… 😦
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I think I’ve seen the movie, starring Sally Fields. It’s base on true events. Honor and tradition is more important for them.
 
ferdie said:
I think I’ve seen the movie, starring Sally Fields. It’s base on true events. Honor and tradition is more important for them.
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i’m trying to find the movie…

but the book is better than most movies i’ve ever seen…

which… uh… .might not be saying a lot… :rolleyes:
 
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