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@Stephen
Excuse the break. At least it allows us to guage the level of interest in our spat generally!
I'm not going to be online very much either in the foreseeable future, so do can you worst unhindered by me.
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@Mopac
Re teaching, have you heard of the curse of knowledge?
"The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand."
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@Mopac
Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love for him who commands,
Typical of the religious 'for the sake of the good itself' and 'out of love for [God]' are joined. For a humanist atheist,there is no need for the 'love of god' bit and so might rewrite the passage as:
"If we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages, we resemble mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself, we are in the position of Mr Derek." ~ Basil the Brush. Boom boom!
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@Stephen
It's my experience that rank-and-file Muslims are no more expert in Islamic theology than the pew-fillers of Christianity. They rely on their Imam far too much.
If muslim kids in the uk are getting a solid british education and not being indoctrinated in Saudi funded madrasa (as happens in parts of the world) things are far from hopeless! As far as I can tell, Muslim schools in the UK return good results.
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@Stephen
Maybe there is more to the Mesopotamian epic than some people realise. Or care to admit?
there was a good radio 4 'in our time' about the epic of gilgamesh a while back..
The idea of these religious scribes, writing about their god of wrath and war, his laws, his jealous personality and his commandments didn't write - ' and god made adam and eve and gave them free will to do as they pleased including being disobedient and disloyalty to their father and creator '. The idea was to keep the ignorant masses in check, and not let them run amok doing what the hell they liked.
I don't think the ancient hebrew scribes were sophisticated enough to consider 'free will' to be something people had. People make free choices (or seem to) so they wouldn't imagine A+E to be any different in that regard. I don't really see the issue. I think they simply couldn't imagine an animate but unthinking automaton. They weren't Athenians!
The 'powers that be' would indeed want people to do what they were told, but given that they will inevitably occasionally not obey the dire consequences of disobedience had to be impressed on the plebs. It also eplained why there were occasionl disasters - they were punishments for disobedience. That idea runs through the historial books.
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@Stephen
Which makes it more interesting as to why he would even dream of giving his creation "free will".
To that I only know the atheists' answer: The writer of Genesis, not God, gave Adam and Eve free will so they could be disobedient..
If its a version of the longer Babylonian creation myth then mankind was created to serve as labourers in the gods' gardenNearly right. I think it was in mines.but Adam doesn't seem to have any work to do until after his fall.Then you haven't read the story. Specifically states that god created the adam to till the land and before the fall.
Oops - I only read Ch1 - I missed 2:15 "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it"
It appears we weren't specifcally miners or farmers in the enuma elish - just general labourers.
tablet 6 line 7 I will create Lullû—man
8 On whom the toil of the gods will be laid that they may rest.
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@Stephen
What do you suggest keith?
I suggest you read beyond the inroductory first few lines of wikipedia articles. Later on it says
Jan Michiel Otto distinguishes four senses conveyed by the term sharia in religious, legal and political discourse:[25]
- Divine, abstract sharia: God's plan for mankind and the norms of behavior which should guide the Islamic community. Muslims of different perspectives agree in their respect for the abstract notion of sharia, but they differ in how they understand the practical implications of the term.
- Classical sharia: the body of rules and principles elaborated by Islamic jurists during the first centuries of Islam.
- Historical sharia(s): the body of rules and interpretations developed throughout Islamic history, ranging from personal beliefs to state legislation and varying across an ideological spectrum. Classical sharia has often served as a point of reference for these variants, but they have also reflected the influences of their time and place.
- Contemporary sharia(s): the full spectrum of rules and interpretations that are developed and practiced at present
Only the first is immutable, but it is also abstract.
It appears that the so called "moderate muslims" have an uphill struggle, don't they?
I wouldn't expect Gatestone to be totally positive. But, like you, I choose my side on principle, not which is the easiest option.
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@Stephen
Normally you're up in arms because (you say) Muslims slavishly follow their religion!
Muslims sometimes break the Sharia laws - who knew?
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@Stephen
Sharia is the law code of islam. It is not considered to be divinely inspired.
The primary principles of Sharia are Ijtihad and taqlid, essentially 'reason' and 'precedent/tradition'. Contary to popular belief, Sharia is not set in stone nor considered perfect (that is for the quran alone). It goes without saying that conservative Muslims (such as the Saudis) want nothing to do with Ijtihad! Under their influence the notion has arisen that 'the gates of itjihad are closed', effectively freezing sharia in its centuries old form.
Reform of Islam involves re-opening thise gates (although arguably they were never and can't be closed).
Here's a link to the gatestone institute's take, which is pessimistic about itihad.
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@Stephen
Let's see... I said islam isn't great and you ask me what is great about it.
I
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@Stephen
ok, i'm not a Christian, but after reviewing the text i can't see any reason given why god created mankind at all. Or indeed any reason for creating anything. God just does it for his own inscrutable reasons!
If its a version of the longer Babylonian creation myth then mankind was created to serve as labourers in the gods' garden, but Adam doesn't seem to have any work to do until after his fall. Perhaps being idle in a paradise was depicted to emphasise how much disobedience to god can cost.
After all, the story is partly about the importance of obedience to God. YHWH of the OT did not want love... He demanded sacrifices and obedience - and got angry if they were not forthcoming.
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@Stephen
It is a major issue when it is said that we were perfect yet defied our father and in so doing caused death to come to all humans being forever.
If we pretend to believe in god then God could have created Adam and Eve to robotically obey commands given to them. Then God could have programmed them to avoid the tree of knowlege and they would have avoided it, like the good automatons they were.
But in that case Adam and Eve would not be anything like us. If you tell a robot to do something, they do it. Tell a person to do something and they might or might not do it. 'Wet paint' signs and 'vote remain' come to mind.
Why God created people with free will and not as mindless autonomons is a question above my pay grade!
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@Stephen
But what he didn't say was go out into the world and kill anyone who refuses to believe in him
He didn't say not to either.
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@Stephen
"WE" shouldn't be promoting Islam at all!
What a shame no one else cares enough to join in!
What concerns me is that if 'we' don't promote moderate Islam it gives the extremists a free hand. It is down to Muslims to put their own house in order, but creating or exacerbating social tensions can only help the extremists and hinder the moderates.
I doubt you love this country more than I do, but what do you want to happen here in the next 5, 10, 20 years? What are you trying to achieve with your posts? I think the Salafists are far more worried that Muslims will adopt more western values than we a should worry about an Islamist take over.
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@Stephen
I can see where you get your sly and devious attempts to discredit the the words spoken by the Christ.
I can see you are not a Christianophobe anyway!
I quoted Matthew because while Jesus did say 'turn the other cheek', he said other things too!
I think we don't need any more on-going threads about Islam. Hardly anybody else seems interested.
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@Stronn
sure, it's pretty tame in terms of physical harm The real barbarity is in the psychological harm Just look at the excuse the cleric uses for an example of a good reason for beating your wife--that she left the house without permission. The entire purpose is subjugation.
I don't think you'd have to go back many generations to find a time when that level of 'wife beating' would hae been considered indequate in Chrstendom! It is a conspicuous feature of Islamic culture that there is a rule for almost everything. There are no guidelines about wife beating in Christianity; only a vague phrases such as 'wives are subject to their husand' and husbands should not be harsh. No limit is set.
However in Christendom it is secular law, not Christian docrtine that limits spousal violence.
"An 1824 court ruling in Mississippi stated that a man was entitled to enforce "domestic discipline" by striking his wife with a whip or stick no wider than the judge's thumb". (wikipedia)
So until relatiely recently women had more protection under Islam than they did in Christendom. One should also note that the islamic guidelines would proably have marked a considerable advance for women more than a millennium ago.
Not all women could vote in the US until 1920 (black women until 1965). Husbands had legal immunity from rape of their wives in the uk until 1991!
i'm not saying Islam is great - it isn't. But before we get too 'holier than thou' it's well to note we are not all that much holier!
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@Mopac
@dave2242
I believe St Augustine mentions ping-pong in his treatise 'What to do in Heaven', but I can't find it on line.what a sadist those are people they are just dead and on the other end. i rather not see my fellow human suffer unlike some apparently. guess you can compare it to how people used to make spectacles out of execution
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@dave2242
heaven sounds kind of boring (but that depends on what you can do there)
According to Church Father Tertullian a popular pastime in heaven is watching sinners burning in hell. He wrote how much he's looking forward to it.
"I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows; unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord."
(chapter XXX)
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@3RU7AL
for completeness, they are examples of evidence for joy?
I think evidence has to be evidence for some definite propostion, but 'joy' is not a propostion!
So my own personal experience of joy is direct evidence of what, exactly? And is it exactly the same thing that someone's smile is evidence for?
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@Mopac
It's a bummer we'd have to die to see who is right.
Tell me, is heaven really so good you'd want to spend the next trillion years there, or is it just a better option than hell?
(Note: a trillion years is a long time!)
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@secularmerlin
@Mopac
St Peter: let's see... Merlin, Secular. Ah, here you are on the list. it's hell for you, sorry.
SM: I demand a recount.
SP: Pardon?
Sm: I demand a recount. God should have made it more obvious He exists.
SP: Oh, God! Another one. Look, its in black and white. John 3:16. If you don't believe in Jesus you don't get in.
SM: Well, it's not fair. Let me explain. 1) God gave us brains...
SP: One open-bracket?
SM: Don't interrupt. Now where was I?
SP: Going to hell.
SM: Nooooooooooo.......! (fades into distance)
SP: Next!
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@K_Michael
I'm embarassed by my post count. I need to get a life!
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@K_Michael
Very, very probably. But he seems to have gone.I am now convinced that this is Akhenaten from DDO.
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@Mopac
You don't change, Mopac.
I'm not in the mood to re-run threads already done to death.
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@Stephen
Consider the above an aside!
Raza Rumi has actually titled his piece:
The Prospects For Reform in Islam.
He says; in bold:“Muslims do in fact have a substantial body of both historical as well as contemporary thinking that they can draw upon to help improve their political and social structures and create more just, inclusive societies”.But Rumi - underlined - fails to tell us why it is that they do not "draw upon" this historical & contemporary literature & knowledge? . Could it be that the so called “islamists’ are following the Quran to the letter and simply refuse to “draw upon” anything that appears to contradict the Islamic book and Hadith? Or Simply because they believe, as he says “the view propagated by Islamists of all varieties is that Sharia law is “divinely ordained” ?He goes on to say islam/Shariah" cannot be questioned. Sharia, therefore, must be understood literally, and Islamists are driven by their belief that the Sharia represents a comprehensive political and belief system".
Salafists and Wahhabists take precisely the position you state. But the parallel is that is like saying fundamentalism is the only valid form of Christianity. Ask a Christian fundamentalist and they would say their way and only their way was the correct one. lucky for us, funamentalism is not as dominant in Christendom as Salafism is in the Muslim world. Non fundamentalist,progressive forms of islam exist. What we need is to encourage the islamic equivalent of Anglicanism!
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@Mopac
Not likely to happen much in the present climate. God would have a lot more influence if only he existed!
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@Greyparrot
I think it did that a while back...If only the government would make it illegal for whites to kill people.
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@Stephen
@disgusted
matthew 10:34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’[
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if any body else thinks I have made myself spokeman for the board please step forward! I am in no mood to apologise to Stephen for something that is only in his head.
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@Stephen
Nice ideal, "Tame", strange use of a word in this context, it implies the "form" we have to tolerate is not tame.
It's been hard to find a word you don't immediately bristle at!
I have a deep and abiding loathing for theocracy. Religion as a private matter I have only a little animosity for, but history and the example of the Muslim world shows that theocracy leads to cultural and intellectual stagnation and decline. If I was in the US i'd probably be more concerned with the rise of the 'religious right' than with Islam, but in the UK and worldwide it is clear that the only realistic contender for theocracy is Islamic.
You may or may not be old enough to remember the dark days of the '70s and Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech. I was mixing it with NF skinheads in those days. So in away we have been here before, but of course the present situation is not the same in many ways as you are no doubt itching to point out! But what is the same is the potential for firebrands on both sides to escalate things to the level of a low-intensity civil war. What happens is that the extremes co-opt their moderates.. A moderate who isn't 'for' their extremists is considered 'against' them. Moderates become enemies of one side and traitors to the other. Squeezed from both sides, the centre disappears.
Familiar recent examples are Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Rwanda.
As I said earlier, you will be itching to say how much it's different this time from the race-based issues of decades ago. You bet it is! The problem is how to avoid civil strife without capitulating to the theocrats. I think we have no choice but to be very clever in how we promote moderate - or tame! - forms of islam (which do exist) and make extreme forms unattractive.
I'm not a political scientist (obviously!) and I haven't pre-prepared a spiel so this post is very much a ramble, not a thought out manifesto.
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@Stephen
That is what the whole thread is about. Your hypocrisy and your double standards "specifically". But you ignored it.You also take it upon yourself to speak on behalf of the whole forum on that thread too.
I ignore many threads. I'm not bothered about my post count!
I have never EVER claimed to speak for anyone except myself. However, I reckon i am a typical, average sort of person so I assume the impression you make on me is the impression most people would get.
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@Stephen
Well I think you tried to derail it with making a mountain out what 'backward' meant when what is hardly central.
It seems we have some common ground - neither of want to see the west dominated by theocratic Islam!
Where we differ - correct me if i am wrong - is that you want to see no Islam in the west and whatever they like in Arabia. My ideal is close to a 'tame' form of Islam everywhere, as I see no prospect of eradicating religion in the foreseeable future.
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I like 'apart from'.....So apart from the obvious Ten Commandments...
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@Stephen
The christianophobie is another thread, you have posted on the wrong thread.
I point out that in #130 (above)you specifically called me out for double standards and hypocrisy.
I believe one is supposed to respond to a call out, so I did. This was the right thread.
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@Stephen
The church also teaches a lot of things that are simply not true. But what does the bible actually say about "free will"? What does god say about "free will"? Is it "free will" if it comes with a penalty of death? Why didn't god warn his perfectly created beings - who he actually says were good - that they would be tempted by a "beguiling" being? If they were created in the "image of god" then how is it that they "fell" immediately to the so called "serpent"? Why did they choose to defy their father/god over a stranger?
I think its safe to say that genesis predates most philosophical debate on the norbiddeature of free will! That Adam and Eve had free will is not explicit in the text for the same reason its not stated explicitly that they hard arms and legs. That Adam and Eve had the same power to choose as we have is no more a major issue than that they could walk as we do.
Adam and Eve are not presented to as perfect super beings but as ordinary people like you and I. God placed them in a pardise with but one instruction - don't eat the forbidden fruit. Anyone who has a sense of narrative knows what must happen after that set-up!
All Steve's questions are answered by the simple fact that Adam and Eve behave like real people do - and like real people they screw it up.
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@Stephen
Some examples are familiar to most people, such as
numbers 15:32-36 (stoning for breaking sabbath) - out.
Lev 20:13 (stoning for gay sex) - in (or possibly out)
I have no idea how many more there are. 'loads' probably.
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@Mopac
I am damn sure you only come here to be a victim. It's a sort of pennance - to be mocked and ridiculed yet stay steadfast in you faith despite the slings and arrows flung at you like some sort of cut-price St Sebastian, but without the physical danger!
The problem is you've got no interesting ideas. You just trot out the same old stuff you learnt by rote with no variation. You are the Mr Predictable of DA - which is an acievement because there is a lot of competition for that prize!
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@disgusted
“Don't give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses for nothing here is free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Keep these, the homeless, tempest-tossed from me,
I doused my lamp and closed the golden door!”
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@Mopac
Doing well are they, these doctors and computer programmers? Making lots of money? Do they drive nice cars?
As you point out, the orthodox church has been around a long time. The writings you quote come rom a different age when the bulk of the faithful were not doctors and computer programmers but illiterate peons.
O hypocrite! You denounce wordly knowledge and goods on one hand and hold them up as a sign of superiority with the other. You rail against the vanity and pride of others yet the pride in your false humility is without bounds.
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@Mopac
What it means to me is that your Church encourages people to avoid learning and knowing stuff. It teaches people to just think about god and leave the hard thinking to the priests.
it's a policy designed in a feudal society to keep the serfs in their place.
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@Mopac
i imagine it's an intellect free of sinful thoughts.
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@Mopac
Unless your on a quiz show.An undefiled intellect is more valuable than all the knowledge in the world.
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@secularmerlin
Truth is not revealed it is discovered. The Greeks tortured circles until they gave up the secret of pi.
Mopac uses capital-T Truth. The Truth is another name for God.
Then mopac says 'You believe in the Truth, don't you?'. If you say yes you believe in god if you say no you're crazy for not believong in the truth.
Been there, done it, got several teeshirts..
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@Mopac
I understand you faith just fine.
Since you've been away we have discusssed many things unrelated to orthodoxy, so you wouldn't have enjoyed it.
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Number 21:6 And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.
7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people.
8 And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.
9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.
Mopac's religion is very much based on the idea that being persecuted and forgiving the persecutor is what a Christian should do, in emulation of Christ. That's why he comes here and acts so annoyingly - he wants us to get angry with him so he can say he forgive us and how much he loves us even though he hate him.
I think if we're nice to him he'll go away.
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@Stephen
I know you think it's hateful that people refuse to call you a christianophobeNot at all. I am calling you and prosser out for your fkn double standards and hypocrisy, as you well know. .
I can't be bothered to engage with your 'anti-christian' stuff. The difference between anti-Christian posting and anti-Islamic posting is the current state of affairs in the world.
in my view, people here on DA know enough about Christianity to know what to make of your powder-puff attacks on it because they've grown up steeped in 'Christian culture'. But we don't have the same intimate aquaintence with Islam. To us Islam is exotic, alien and unknown. People fear what is unknown and hate what they fear.
You don't post to enlighten members about Islam; you post to ratchet up fear and hate. Be assured when you post in a way I feel ratchets up hatred and fear of Christians I'll call you a Christianophobe.
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