# Imagine a world without Muslims



## Luddly Neddite




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## Luddly Neddite

Other people say this:



> 90% of these are incorrect.
> 
> For example, Aristotle wrote in 300 bc that the world was round. Nearly a thousand years before Islam was created. Gallileo was not the western man credited with discovering the world was round... that was Copernicus.
> 
> Also many of the discoveries attributed to 'Islam' were actually attributed to Middle Easterners, but way before 600AD, which is before the Prophet Muhammed and the creation of Islam.
> 
> Henry the V's castle? Which one? Most of the castles of England (and indeed western Europe were built from 1000 to 1300AD, Britain's most famous castles were built by Edward I. The castle Sant Angelo in Rome was built by the Romans for Emperor Hadrian.
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> Also, some of Islam's most famous architecture was copied from the Byzantines, in the case of Hadj Sofia, stolen completely.
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> Irrigation was used by the ancient Egyptians 2000 years before the birth of Christ, so was paper, soap, perfumes, hospitals, music, cosmetics.. etc etc etc.... is this claim being made simply because Egypt is now a Muslim country? In which case this is a lie, because the ancient Egyptians had nothing in common with Islam.



and



> Note: The religion Islam was established between 650AD-700AD
> 
> CHESS is invented before 6th century BC by indians...... not muslims
> 
> Irrigation is done in India from 9000BC ie, from indus valley civilisation..... so definitely not by muslims
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> Indian temples and Roman bridges, which show the excellent human engineering techniques were build before the berth of Jesus Chirst. So architecture is not invented by muslims
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> The first university inthe world is established by Indians at Takshashila during 700bc.... so university is not invented by muslims
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> The first plastic surgery was carried out by Sushrutha, an Indian....... not a muslim
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> Bathing is invented by muslims?? Are u kidding me? First human beings Adam and Eve also took bath. They are not muslims. So bathing is not invented by Muslims. Heard about the Great Bath in indus valley civilisation?
> 
> Rest of the inventions are done by Europeans who are Christians


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## Freewill

Nothing productive can come from imagining such a thing.


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## Rikurzhen

I'm a young guy so all I remember is news of Muslim gripes or conflicts always dominating the news. For a region/religion of so little economic consequences (except for oil) the Muslims of the world sure dominate the news. I'm bone weary of dealing with Muslim strife everywhere and I've actually lived in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. I was a good guest, I didn't criticize my host, but my eyes were open and I don't really like their societies and more importantly I'd just like to live my life here in the West without dealing with their shit all the damn time.

For some of your people who have more experience in life, when did this Islam focus really begin? Did you hear a lot about Muslims back in the 60s and 70s?


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## Darlene

Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.



Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.


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## Dont Taz Me Bro

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
Click to expand...


Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.


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## Darlene

Dont Taz Me Bro said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
Click to expand...

Such as the Westboro Baptist Church.
Here's a big list of the victims of Christians: Christian Atrocities Victims of Christianity Catholic Church Inquisition Crusades


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## Rikurzhen

Dont Taz Me Bro said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
Click to expand...


So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?


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## theDoctorisIn

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
Click to expand...




The Enlightenment was based on questioning accepted dogma - religious and otherwise.


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## Rikurzhen

theDoctorisIn said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> The Enlightenment was based on questioning accepted dogma - religious and otherwise.
Click to expand...



And it was an organic development in the lands of Islam? Oh wait, no, it developed from the internal tensions of Christendom.


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## Darlene

Why Do Christians Lie So Much Truth and Christianity


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## pismoe

that was my point when I related my experience with little neighborhood calenders back about 1972 Rikurzen .   Post should still be up in this thread up towards the top .   Yeah , I as a 10 year old knew about Muslims but they were ' mohamadens ' when I first started being aware of them .  As a kid I only knew about them as Arabs , Bedouins , they were kinda cool , good with a sword , lived in the desert , admirable like the Knights that they fought during the Crusades that I read about in  a few books .     Also knew about the oil and hatred of Jews around the late 60s when I heard about the 1967-8 war and an Israeli exchange student kid had to leave my school to fly home because of the war .


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## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.



Yeah Dollface,

Someone DID imagine a world without Christianity. Several somones followed that same dream and most of all of the things even you might complain about is the result of those imaginings which became reality.

Look around you.

Like what you see?

Someone a few decades ago imagined a Godless America and SHAZAAAM!

Here it is.

Enjoy!


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## Delta4Embassy

I'd be happy if the UN passed a resolution banning all religion.  More I think about it, more I'm forced to conceed religion does nothing good for us.


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## Luddly Neddite

Rikurzhen said:


> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
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> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
Click to expand...


Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.


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## Mojo2

Dont Taz Me Bro said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
Click to expand...


How many of those atrocities have been BECAUSE of their religion and how many were committed AGAINST THE TEACHINGS OF THEIR RELIGION?


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## Darlene

I don't care what atrocities have been committed against whom. We are all humans and no matter the beliefs we hold, Jesus, Allah, or whatever you call your higher power would not want us to be treating each other the way we do.


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## pismoe

oh , and my neighborhood calander story is in another thread Rikurzen .   Main idea was that even though I knew about ' mohamadens ' [heard about them] there was no real thinking about them as they were in Arabia .    It was about 72 that I started seeing Muslim holidays being added to that little neighborhood calander with a circulation of maybe 200 calanders that I noticed and said , what the heck , who cares about their holidays .    Anyway , just my experience !!


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## norwegen

theDoctorisIn said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> The Enlightenment was based on questioning accepted dogma - religious and otherwise.
Click to expand...

 In America, the competing theology of the Rationalists (Anglicans) with that of the Evangelicals (Congregationalists, Baptists) inspired the Great Awakening of the 1740s.  Puritan, evangelical Christianity since then grew to be a powerful force in the American psyche, through and beyond its founding.

Christianity otherwise, certainly since then, has built more hospitals, schools, shelters, and other charities than any other faith, ever, and not just in America.  Christianity is a positive force in and a bedrock of Western civilization, like it or not.


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## Delta4Embassy

Delta4Embassy said:


> I'd be happy if the UN passed a resolution banning all religion.  More I think about it, more I'm forced to conceed religion does nothing good for us.



That said...Looking to my west on weather radar right now noting the tornado warnings, God send your angels to protect us.


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## Mojo2

Delta4Embassy said:


> I'd be happy if the UN passed a resolution banning all religion.  More I think about it, more I'm forced to conceed religion does nothing good for us.



The Ugly American syndrome on full display.


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## Pogo

Mojo2 said:


> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Yeah Dollface,
> 
> Someone DID imagine a world without Christianity. Several somones followed that same dream and most of all of the things even you might complain about is the result of those imaginings which became reality.
> 
> Look around you.
> 
> Like what you see?
> 
> Someone a few decades ago imagined a Godless America and SHAZAAAM!
> 
> Here it is.
> 
> Enjoy!
Click to expand...


Uh, where?
When's the last time you left your bunker?  1972?


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## Mojo2

Luddly Neddite said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
Click to expand...


Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?


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## pismoe

mohamadens ---  Mohammedan Define Mohammedan at Dictionary.com  ---


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## Pogo

Freewill said:


> Nothing productive can come from imagining such a thing.



John Lennon got a hit record out of it.


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## Rikurzhen

norwegen said:


> theDoctorisIn said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> The Enlightenment was based on questioning accepted dogma - religious and otherwise.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> In America, the competing theology of the Rationalists (Anglicans) with that of the Evangelicals (Congregationalists, Baptists) inspired the Great Awakening of the 1740s.  Puritan, evangelical Christianity since then grew to be a powerful force in the American psyche, through and beyond its founding.
> 
> Christianity otherwise, certainly since then, has built more hospitals, schools, shelters, and other charities than any other faith, ever, and not just in America.  Christianity is a positive force in and a bedrock of Western civilization, like it or not.
Click to expand...


New ways of seeing the world or of thinking arise in reaction to the present ways. Remove the foundation and then you're tasked with creating a new world view in isolation from influence. It doesn't work that well.


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## Darlene

Mojo2 said:


> Luddly Neddite said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
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> Click to expand...
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> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
Click to expand...

The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.

A kind word turns away wrath.


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## SAYIT

theDoctorisIn said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> The Enlightenment was based on questioning accepted dogma - religious and otherwise.
Click to expand...


Often at one's peril:
Galileo, the father of heliocentrism, was tried by the Holy Office, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", was forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Of course history found him not only innocent but correct.


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## pismoe

who da heck is john lemon , I hear the name fro time to time ??


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## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> I'm a young guy so all I remember is news of Muslim gripes or conflicts always dominating the news. For a region/religion of so little economic consequences (except for oil) the Muslims of the world sure dominate the news. I'm bone weary of dealing with Muslim strife everywhere and I've actually lived in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. I was a good guest, I didn't criticize my host, but my eyes were open and I don't really like their societies and more importantly I'd just like to live my life here in the West without dealing with their shit all the damn time.
> 
> For some of your people who have more experience in life, when did this Islam focus really begin? Did you hear a lot about Muslims back in the 60s and 70s?



No -- not with the bigotry we get now.  At the risk of sounding like Rudy Giuliani I'd have to say 9/11, followed by the right-wing hate machine working overtime to make a political act into a 'religious' one.

After all, religious fanaticism sells better than political.


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## Luddly Neddite

Mojo2 said:


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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
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> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
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> Click to expand...
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> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
Click to expand...


The bible?

You mean the same bible that is full of murder, rape, incest and more?

THAT bible?


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## Darlene

pismoe said:


> who da heck is john lemon , I hear the name fro time to time ??


John Lennon - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
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> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
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> Click to expand...
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> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
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> Click to expand...
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> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
Click to expand...


Let's work with that. This viewpoint is foundational to a lot of universalist and modern thought. Imagine the Christianity had never developed and spread the lessons of the Bible. Imagine instead that the model of Sparta had prospered. 

Would your world of today be better if Spartan values were used as a foundation for evolving ideologies?


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## Pogo

pismoe said:


> who da heck is john lemon , I hear the name fro time to time ??



John Lemon?  I think he was a Limey.

He worked with a pack of dogs called the Beagles.  After that he went to Yokohama.


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## Darlene

Rikurzhen said:


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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
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> Click to expand...
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> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Let's work with that. This viewpoint is foundational to a lot of universalist and modern thought. Imagine the Christianity had never developed and spread the lessons of the Bible. Imagine instead that the model of Sparta had prospered.
> 
> Would your world of today be better if Spartan values were used as a foundation for evolving ideologies?
Click to expand...

I don't know the Spartan values, so  I'm sorry, I can't answer that.


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## Luddly Neddite

Pogo said:


> Freewill said:
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> John Lennon got a hit record out of it.
Click to expand...


I don't remember who it was but one of the RW nutters here posted some horrendous crap about how it was the 'ugliest' thing he'd ever heard. Freaky. Just plain freaky.


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## Tom Sweetnam

Darlene said:


> I don't care what atrocities have been committed against whom. We are all humans and no matter the beliefs we hold, Jesus, Allah, or whatever you call your higher power would not want us to be treating each other the way we do.


 
"I don't care what atrocities have been committed against whom"

Real empathetic soul, aren't you Moonbeam? What if the atrocities were perpetrated against you, or your son, or against the baby you're carrying. Would you care then?


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## SAYIT

Darlene said:


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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
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> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
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> Click to expand...
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> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
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> Click to expand...
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> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
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> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Let's work with that. This viewpoint is foundational to a lot of universalist and modern thought. Imagine the Christianity had never developed and spread the lessons of the Bible. Imagine instead that the model of Sparta had prospered.
> 
> Would your world of today be better if Spartan values were used as a foundation for evolving ideologies?
> 
> Click to expand...
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> I don't know the Spartan values, so  I'm sorry, I can't answer that.
Click to expand...


They tossed the lesser babies from a cliff.


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## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> I don't know the Spartan values, so  I'm sorry, I can't answer that.



Here's a quick synopsis:

Sparta was above all a militarist state, and emphasis on military fitness began virtually at birth. Shortly after birth, a mother would bathe her child in wine to see whether the child was strong. If the child survived it was brought before the Gerousia by the child's father. The Gerousia then decided whether it was to be reared or not. It is commonly stated that if they considered it "puny and deformed", the baby was thrown into a chasm on Mount Taygetos known euphemistically as the _Apothetae_ (Gr., _ἀποθέται_, "Deposits").[81][82] This was, in effect, a primitive form of eugenics.[81] Sparta is often portrayed as being unique in this matter, however there is considerable evidence that the killing of unwanted children was practiced in other Greek regions, including Athens.[83] There is controversy about the matter in Sparta, since excavations in the chasm only uncovered adult remains, likely belonging to criminals.[84]

When Spartans died, marked headstones would only be granted to soldiers who died in combat during a victorious campaign or women who died either in service of a divine office or in childbirth. . . . 
When male Spartans began military training at age seven, they would enter the _Agoge_ system. The _Agoge_ was designed to encourage discipline and physical toughness and to emphasise the importance of the Spartan state. Boys lived in communal messes and, according to Xenophon, whose sons attended the agoge, the boys were fed "just the right amount for them never to become sluggish through being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough."[86] Besides physical and weapons training, boys studied reading, writing, music and dancing. Special punishments were imposed if boys failed to answer questions sufficiently 'laconically' (i.e. briefly and wittily) . . . . 

At age 20, the Spartan citizen began his membership in one of the _syssitia_ (dining messes or clubs), composed of about fifteen members each, of which every citizen was required to be a member. Here each group learned how to bond and rely on one another. The Spartans were not eligible for election for public office until the age of 30. Only native Spartans were considered full citizens and were obliged to undergo the training as prescribed by law, as well as participate in and contribute financially to one of the _syssitia_.[91]

Sparta is thought to be the first city to practice athletic nudity, and some scholars claim that it was also the first to formalize pederasty.[92] According to these sources, the Spartans believed that the love of an older, accomplished aristocrat for an adolescent was essential to his formation as a free citizen. The _agoge_, the education of the ruling class, was, they claim, founded on pederastic relationships required of each citizen,[93] with the lover responsible for the boy's training.

However, other scholars question this interpretation. Xenophon explicitly denies it,[86] but not Plutarch.[94] . . . . 

Plutarch reports the peculiar customs associated with the Spartan wedding night:

The custom was to capture women for marriage(...) The so-called 'bridesmaid' took charge of the captured girl. She first shaved her head to the scalp, then dressed her in a man's cloak and sandals, and laid her down alone on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom – who was not drunk and thus not impotent, but was sober as always – first had dinner in the messes, then would slip in, undo her belt, lift her and carry her to the bed.[104]​
The husband continued to visit his wife in secret for some time after the marriage. These customs, unique to the Spartans, have been interpreted in various ways. One of them decidedly supports the need to disguise the bride as a man in order to help the bridegroom consummate the marriage. So unaccustomed were men to women looks at the time of their first intercourse. The "abduction" may have served to ward off the evil eye, and the cutting of the wife's hair was perhaps part of a rite of passage that signaled her entrance into a new life. . . .

Another practice that was mentioned by many visitors to Sparta was the practice of “wife-sharing”. In accordance with the Spartan belief that breeding should be between the most physically fit parents, many older men allowed younger, more fit men, to impregnate their wives. Other unmarried or childless men might even request another man’s wife to bear his children if she had previously been a strong child bearer.[110] For this reason many considered Spartan women polygamous or polyandrous.[111] This practice was encouraged in order that women bear as many strong-bodied children as they could. The Spartan population was hard to maintain due to the constant absence and loss of the men in battle and the intense physical inspection of newborns.[112]

Spartan women were also literate and numerate, a rarity in the ancient world. Furthermore, as a result of their education and the fact that they moved freely in society engaging with their fellow (male) citizens, they were notorious for speaking their minds even in public.​


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## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
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> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
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> Luddly Neddite said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Let's work with that. This viewpoint is foundational to a lot of universalist and modern thought. Imagine the Christianity had never developed and spread the lessons of the Bible. Imagine instead that the model of Sparta had prospered.
> 
> Would your world of today be better if Spartan values were used as a foundation for evolving ideologies?
Click to expand...


What in the fuck do "Spartan values" have to do with the bible?  What kind of comparison is that?

And back up --- what exactly do we mean by "the *lessons *of the bible"?  Which lessons we talkin'?


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## Darlene

Also, its not just Christianity that believes in such peaceful mannerisms. There are others:
Peaceful Religions  

Buddhism vs Christianity - Difference and Comparison Diffen

Debate Argument Buddhism is better than Christianity Debate.org

Buddhism Is Better For You Than Christianity

I am not Buddhist but I thought these articles were pretty interesting.


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## Pogo

SAYIT said:


> They tossed the lesser babies from a cliff.



It was the lease they could do.


Hey, if yer gonna keep feeding me straight lines...


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## Darlene

I would never be so cruel to my children. Everyone has the right to life and the right to live peacefully.


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## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> I don't care what atrocities have been committed against whom. We are all humans and no matter the beliefs we hold, Jesus,* Allah, or whatever you call your higher power would not want us to be treating each other the way we do.
> *




Are you willing to make a wager that your statement is false?

*I think you assume Islam's values are similar to yours.*

In some respects they are. But in others they are not.

Muslim men are taught to try to emulate the life of the Prophet, if I understand it correctly. And this means one should look at the life of Muhammad for clues about what makes up the ideal Muslim.

Once you read about Muhammad and how his life should be an example for followers until the end of time, and you look at Muhammad's warrior, terrorist, period and you might well conclude that he would really dig the way Muslims are treating infidels and others today.

Except that maybe he might be impatient with today's Muslims for the lack of progress they've made toward getting more of the faithful to persevere with their Jihadi struggles..

Darlene, do your homework about Islam.

EDIT: Here's a clue...


Christianity and Islam: A Side by Side Comparison*

_* It is *not* the purpose of this site to promote *any* particular religion, including Christianity. 
However, we do enjoy refuting nonsense, such as the claim that Muhammad 
and Jesus preached a morally equivalent message or that all religion is the same._



_*"I will cast terror into the hearts of those who
disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads 
and strike off every fingertip of them." * *"Allah" *(Qur'an 8:12)

*"Fight everyone in the way of Allah and 
kill those who disbelieve in Allah." **Muhammad (Ibn Ishaq 992)

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."Jesus (Matthew 5:14)

Even though many Muslims regard terrorists who kill in the name of Allah as criminals, they cannot deny that Muhammad also killed in the name of Allah. What example of Jesus do Christians emulate which has them confused them with terrorists and criminals?

Each year, thousands of Christian homes and churches are torched or bombed by Muslim mobs, and hundreds of Christians, including dozens of priests, pastors, nuns and otherchurch workers are murdered at the hands of Islamic extremists.  The so-called justification varies, from charges of apostasy or evangelism, to purported "blasphemy" or "insulting" Islam.  Innocent people have even been hacked to death by devout Muslims over cartoons.

Yet, there is little if any violent retaliation from religious Christians to the discrimination,kidnapping, rape, torture, mutilation and murder that is routinely reported from nations with Muslim majorities.  Neither is there is any significant deadly terrorism in the name of Jesus, as there is in the stated cause of Allah each and every day.  Muslim clerics in the West do not fear for their safety as do their Christian counterparts. 

The "Christian world" and the Islamic world contrast sharply in other ways as well, from the disparate condition of human rights and civil liberties to economic status.  An astonishing 70% of the world's refugees are Muslims -  usually seeking to live in Christian-based countries. 

While Western societies take seriously "scandals" such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (where no one has actually been killed), Muslims routinely turn a blind eye to their own horrible atrocities, even those committed explicitly in the name of Allah.  The Muslim world has yet to offer a single apology for the tens of millions of lives consumed by centuries of relentless Jihad and slavery.

These sharp differences are almost certainly rooted in the underlying religions, which begin with the disparate teachings and examples set by Jesus and Muhammad...

(Really cool, really informative, really helpful matrix comparing Christianity vs Islam)

Comparing Jesus and Muhammad Christianity and Islam*_
[TBODY]
[/TBODY]
[TBODY]
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## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> Rikurzhen said:
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> 
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> Darlene said:
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> Mojo2 said:
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> Luddly Neddite said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Let's work with that. This viewpoint is foundational to a lot of universalist and modern thought. Imagine the Christianity had never developed and spread the lessons of the Bible. Imagine instead that the model of Sparta had prospered.
> 
> Would your world of today be better if Spartan values were used as a foundation for evolving ideologies?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What in the fuck do "Spartan values" have to do with the bible?  What kind of comparison is that?
> 
> And back up --- what exactly do we mean by "the *lessons *of the bible"?  Which lessons we talkin'?
Click to expand...


To get tot he world of today we need to look back to the world of yesteryear for customs and revolution are always a REACTION to the existing world order.

So, if we wipe out Christianity from the stream of history then some other way of organizing life must be substituted. Pagan Rome could be one. Sparta though illustrates the principle nicely.

If not Christianity, then what in it's place. From that starting point, customs and revolutions will REACT as time unfolds until we get to the present. Would the present in that alternative path look like the present of today? I doubt it.


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> I would never be so cruel to my children. Everyone has the right to life and the right to live peacefully.



Which is a belief that you've been bathed in because it arises from a Christian foundation and is then adopted by Enlightenment thinkers. Wipe out Christianity and the only way of thinking you would know would be based on a different moral foundation.


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## pismoe

not really much research or homework for anyone to do , results of islam are right in front of everyones nose for everyone to see .


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## Pogo

pismoe said:


> not really much research or homework for anyone to do , results of islam are right in front of everyones nose for everyone to see .



And if they're not, we'll just make 'em up and put 'em on AM radio.


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## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> Mojo2 said:
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> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
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> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
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> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
Click to expand...


Hmmm, yes.

And I've found that to be good advice!

But tell me, do you think James Foley ran out of words?


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## Darlene

Mojo2 said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> I don't care what atrocities have been committed against whom. We are all humans and no matter the beliefs we hold, Jesus,* Allah, or whatever you call your higher power would not want us to be treating each other the way we do.
> *
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Are you willing to make a wager that your statement is false?
> 
> *I think you assume Islam's values are similar to yours.*
> 
> In some respects they are. But in others they are not.
> 
> Muslim men are taught to try to emulate the life of the Prophet, if I understand it correctly. And this means one should look at the life of Muhammad for clues about what makes up the ideal Muslim.
> 
> Once you read about Muhammad and how his life should be an example for followers until the end of time, and you look at Muhammad's warrior, terrorist, period and you might well conclude that he would really dig the way Muslims are treating infidels and others today.
> 
> Except that maybe he might be impatient with today's Muslims for the lack of progress they've made toward getting more of the faithful to persevere with their Jihadi struggles..
> 
> Darlene, do your homework about Islam.
Click to expand...

I was not saying anything about Islam in particular. I just used to term Allah loosely as a reference. People across the world call their God by different names--not just Jesus. And if you want to get technical, Islam has many peaceful scriptures. Take a look: (note-Islamics aren't the only ones who read the Qur'an)
Verses of the Holy Quran About Peace
Peaceful Verses of Qur an 
Belief in Scriptures - The Religion of Islam 
Differences Between Radical Islam and True Islam:
Radical Islam vs. Islam Ashbrook 
Islam vs. Radical Islam hc Mediate


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> I would never be so cruel to my children. Everyone has the right to life and the right to live peacefully.



You know that passing reference to bride kidnapping in Sparta. It seems that this idea became popular in Central Asian societies. Imagine if this was YOUR NORMAL reality:







Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan: 11,800 girls kidnapped each year, 2,000 raped. "In our society, the man is always right." (Kidnapping victim)

Imagine a country where, on average, every 40 minutes a girl is kidnapped for the ostensive purpose of marriage: that is 32 girls per day, for an approximate total of 11,800 kidnapped girls per year. Welcome to Kyrgyzstan, where this has been the grim reality of countless women for decades.

Although precise statistics are difficult to come by, it has been calculated that half of all married Kyrgyz women have been "stolen," as jargon has it, by their future husband -- with about one-third of all marriages being nonconsensual. In the countryside, forced marriages account for a hefty 57 percent of the total. It is no surprise then that, while 92 percent of all kidnapped women end up marrying their abductor, 60 percent of those marriages will eventually lead to divorce.​


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## GHook93

Darlene said:


> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.


 
As a Jew I can say a world without my brave, courage and loving Christian brothers is not a world I would want to live in. However, a world without dirty, greedy and supremacist Muslims is a world I DESIRE to live in!


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## pismoe

and this idea that everyone has the Right to life , where does that belief come from and does every religion share that belief ??


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## Darlene

GHook93 said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> As a Jew I can say a world without my brave, courage and loving Christian brothers is not a world I would want to live in. However, a world without dirty, greedy and supremacist Muslims is a world I DESIRE to live in!
Click to expand...

True Islamic beliefs are anti-violence in nature, based on what I've read in my research.
Its the Radicals who give Muslims a bad name.


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## Pogo

Darlene said:


> GHook93 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> As a Jew I can say a world without my brave, courage and loving Christian brothers is not a world I would want to live in. However, a world without dirty, greedy and supremacist Muslims is a world I DESIRE to live in!
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> True Islamic beliefs are anti-violence in nature, based on what I've read in my research.
> Its the Radicals who give Muslims a bad name.
Click to expand...


-- like fanatics in anything.


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## Darlene

Islamism - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia


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## bodecea

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
Click to expand...

No...the Enlightenment was built despite Christianity....in fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers had to tread lightly in fear of religious repercussions.


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## Mojo2

Luddly Neddite said:


> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> The bible?
> 
> You mean the same bible that is full of murder, rape, incest and more?
> 
> THAT bible?
Click to expand...


Maybe THAT'S why your viewpoint is always so skewed to the weird. 

You seem to be afflicted with short term memory.

Which means you were unable to recall my question.

I'll re-state it here.

*Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?*


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## pismoe

the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.


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## Pogo

bodecea said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> No...the Enlightenment was built despite Christianity....in fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers had to tread lightly in fear of religious repercussions.
Click to expand...


True.  The Church was the First Estate then, i.e. the power brokers.


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## Darlene

Mojo2 said:


> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
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> Mojo2 said:
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> Luddly Neddite said:
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
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> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> The bible?
> 
> You mean the same bible that is full of murder, rape, incest and more?
> 
> THAT bible?
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Maybe THAT'S why your viewpoint is always so skewed to the weird.
> 
> You seem to be afflicted with short term memory.
> 
> Which means you were unable to recall my question.
> 
> I'll re-state it here.
> 
> *Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?*
Click to expand...

Just like the Qur'an, there are verses that promote peace and there are those that contradict each other. It's the Radicals in any religion that take things to the extreme and give that religion a bad name.


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## Darlene

Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts 
Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam 
Islam And Christianity A Comparison 
Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts 
Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity


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## Rikurzhen

bodecea said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> No...the Enlightenment was built despite Christianity....in fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers had to tread lightly in fear of religious repercussions.
Click to expand...


Perhaps I wasn't clear in how I made my point. The Enlightenment is a reaction to an existing order, a Christian order. That order frames the debate and the developments which sprout from the debate. Appeal to reason arises as rejection of appeal to authority.


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
> Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts
> Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam
> Islam And Christianity A Comparison
> Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts
> Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity



Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.


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## Darlene

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
> Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts
> Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam
> Islam And Christianity A Comparison
> Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts
> Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.
Click to expand...

Have you read it yourself? Is that what has made you so opinionated on this issue? Or was it the Radicals who made you dislike all Muslims?


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## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
> Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts
> Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam
> Islam And Christianity A Comparison
> Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts
> Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Have you read it yourself? Is that what has made you so opinionated on this issue? Or was it the Radicals who made you dislike all Muslims?
Click to expand...


Yes, and I actually lived in a few countries in the Middle East and North Africa.


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## Darlene

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
> Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts
> Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam
> Islam And Christianity A Comparison
> Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts
> Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Have you read it yourself? Is that what has made you so opinionated on this issue? Or was it the Radicals who made you dislike all Muslims?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Yes, and I actually lived in a few countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Click to expand...

I don't know why I asked because there's no way to tell if you're telling the truth. Anyways, I hope you have a good night. I'm signing off for now. This baby's hungry and I want to read my book.
Goodnight.


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## Pogo

Darlene said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
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> Rikurzhen said:
> 
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> Darlene said:
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> 
> 
> Here are some great comparison charts! They compare the similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam:
> Comparison Chart Christianity vs. Islam - ReligionFacts
> Comparing and contrasting Christianity and Islam
> Islam And Christianity A Comparison
> Comparison Chart Islam Judaism and Christianity - ReligionFacts
> Difference Between Islam and Christianity Difference Between Islam vs Christianity
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Have you read it yourself? Is that what has made you so opinionated on this issue? Or was it the Radicals who made you dislike all Muslims?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Yes, and I actually lived in a few countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I don't know why I asked because there's no way to tell if you're telling the truth. Anyways, I hope you have a good night. I'm signing off for now. This baby's hungry and I want to read my book.
> Goodnight.
Click to expand...



He's already a documented liar.


----------



## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> Also, its not just Christianity that believes in such peaceful mannerisms. There are others:
> Peaceful Religions
> 
> Buddhism vs Christianity - Difference and Comparison Diffen
> 
> Debate Argument Buddhism is better than Christianity Debate.org
> 
> Buddhism Is Better For You Than Christianity
> 
> I am not Buddhist but I thought these articles were pretty interesting.



Here's something for you, Darlene.



Spoiler: Islam is Incompatible With Democracy



Amir Taheri's remarks during the debate on " Islam Is Incompatible With Democracy"

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am glad that this debate takes place in English.

Because, were it to be conducted in any of the languages of our part of the world, we would not have possessed the vocabulary needed.

To understand a civilisation it is important to understand its vocabulary.

If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was not on their minds either.

There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.

Democracy as the proverbial schoolboy would know is based on one fundamental principle: equality.

The Greek word for equal isos is used in more than 200 compound nouns; including isoteos (equality) and Isologia (equal or free speech) and isonomia (equal treatment).

But again we find no equivalent in any of the Muslim languages. The words we have such as barabari in Persian and sawiyah in Arabic mean juxtaposition or levelling.

Nor do we have a word for politics.

The word siassah, now used as a synonym for politics, initially meant whipping stray camels into line.( Sa'es al-kheil is a person who brings back lost camels to the caravan. )The closest translation may be: regimentation.

Nor is there mention of such words as government and the state in the Koran.

It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963.

Lest us return to the issue of equality.

The idea is unacceptable to Islam.

For the non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer.

Even among the believers only those who subscribe to the three so-called Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam ( Ahl el-Kitab) are regarded as fully human.

Here is the hierarchy of human worth in Islam:

At the summit are free male Muslims

Next come Muslim male slaves

Then come free Muslim women

Next come Muslim slave women.

Then come free Jewish and /or Christian men

Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian men

Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian women.

Each category has rights that must be respected.

The People of the Book have always been protected and relatively well-treated by Muslim rulers, but often in the context of a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude.

The status of the rest of humanity, those whose faiths are not recognised by Islam or who have no faith at all, has never been spelled out although wherever Muslim rulers faced such communities they often treated them with a certain measure of tolerance and respect ( As in the case of Hindus under the Muslim dynasties of India.)

Non-Muslims can, and have often been, treated with decency, but never as equals.

(There is a hierarchy even for animals and plants. Seven animals and seven plants will assuredly go to heaven while seven others of each will end up in Hell.)

Democracy means the rule of the demos, the common people, or what is now known as popular or national sovereignty.

In Islam, however, power belongs only to God: al-hukm l'illah. The man who exercises that power on earth is known as Khalifat al-Allah, the regent of God.

But even then the Khalifah or Caliph cannot act as legislator. The law has already been spelled out and fixed for ever by God.

The only task that remains is its discovery, interpretation and application.

That, of course, allows for a substantial space in which different styles of rule could develop.

But the bottom line is that no Islamic government can be democratic in the sense of allowing the common people equal shares in legislation.

Islam divides human activities into five categories from the permitted to the sinful, leaving little room for human interpretation, let alone ethical innovations.

What we must understand is that Islam has its own vision of the world and man's place in it.

To say that Islam is incompatible with democracy should not be seen as a disparagement of Islam.

_Continued at the link._



Amir Taheri Islam Is Incompatible With Democracy


----------



## Darlene

I accept people of all races and religions. I prefer to be peaceful.


----------



## Book of Jeremiah

Darlene said:


> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
Click to expand...


A soft answer turneth  away wrath.  You are mistaken, Darlene. Jesus had plenty of hard words for people.  Look at what he has to say to the Pharisees and Saducees. 

Bottom line here: 

 Jesus said if we love Him we will keep his commandments.  We will keep them.  Not him.  He never said he'd keep them for us.  He told us to keep them.  Joining that interfaithism thing you are advertising in your broken cross sign is a big No!  Seriously.  There is one way.  Not many.  One way.  Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Jesus.  This kumbaya thing is for the birds.


----------



## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> I accept people of all races and religions. I prefer to be peaceful.


The problem is when your beliefs and actions are not reciprocated. Ball in your court. Submit or not?


----------



## Darlene

Mojo2 said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Also, its not just Christianity that believes in such peaceful mannerisms. There are others:
> Peaceful Religions
> 
> Buddhism vs Christianity - Difference and Comparison Diffen
> 
> Debate Argument Buddhism is better than Christianity Debate.org
> 
> Buddhism Is Better For You Than Christianity
> 
> I am not Buddhist but I thought these articles were pretty interesting.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Here's something for you, Darlene.
> 
> 
> 
> Spoiler: Islam is Incompatible With Democracy
> 
> 
> 
> Amir Taheri's remarks during the debate on " Islam Is Incompatible With Democracy"
> 
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
> 
> I am glad that this debate takes place in English.
> 
> Because, were it to be conducted in any of the languages of our part of the world, we would not have possessed the vocabulary needed.
> 
> To understand a civilisation it is important to understand its vocabulary.
> 
> If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was not on their minds either.
> 
> There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.
> 
> Democracy as the proverbial schoolboy would know is based on one fundamental principle: equality.
> 
> The Greek word for equal isos is used in more than 200 compound nouns; including isoteos (equality) and Isologia (equal or free speech) and isonomia (equal treatment).
> 
> But again we find no equivalent in any of the Muslim languages. The words we have such as barabari in Persian and sawiyah in Arabic mean juxtaposition or levelling.
> 
> Nor do we have a word for politics.
> 
> The word siassah, now used as a synonym for politics, initially meant whipping stray camels into line.( Sa'es al-kheil is a person who brings back lost camels to the caravan. )The closest translation may be: regimentation.
> 
> Nor is there mention of such words as government and the state in the Koran.
> 
> It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963.
> 
> Lest us return to the issue of equality.
> 
> The idea is unacceptable to Islam.
> 
> For the non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer.
> 
> Even among the believers only those who subscribe to the three so-called Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam ( Ahl el-Kitab) are regarded as fully human.
> 
> Here is the hierarchy of human worth in Islam:
> 
> At the summit are free male Muslims
> 
> Next come Muslim male slaves
> 
> Then come free Muslim women
> 
> Next come Muslim slave women.
> 
> Then come free Jewish and /or Christian men
> 
> Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian men
> 
> Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian women.
> 
> Each category has rights that must be respected.
> 
> The People of the Book have always been protected and relatively well-treated by Muslim rulers, but often in the context of a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude.
> 
> The status of the rest of humanity, those whose faiths are not recognised by Islam or who have no faith at all, has never been spelled out although wherever Muslim rulers faced such communities they often treated them with a certain measure of tolerance and respect ( As in the case of Hindus under the Muslim dynasties of India.)
> 
> Non-Muslims can, and have often been, treated with decency, but never as equals.
> 
> (There is a hierarchy even for animals and plants. Seven animals and seven plants will assuredly go to heaven while seven others of each will end up in Hell.)
> 
> Democracy means the rule of the demos, the common people, or what is now known as popular or national sovereignty.
> 
> In Islam, however, power belongs only to God: al-hukm l'illah. The man who exercises that power on earth is known as Khalifat al-Allah, the regent of God.
> 
> But even then the Khalifah or Caliph cannot act as legislator. The law has already been spelled out and fixed for ever by God.
> 
> The only task that remains is its discovery, interpretation and application.
> 
> That, of course, allows for a substantial space in which different styles of rule could develop.
> 
> But the bottom line is that no Islamic government can be democratic in the sense of allowing the common people equal shares in legislation.
> 
> Islam divides human activities into five categories from the permitted to the sinful, leaving little room for human interpretation, let alone ethical innovations.
> 
> What we must understand is that Islam has its own vision of the world and man's place in it.
> 
> To say that Islam is incompatible with democracy should not be seen as a disparagement of Islam.
> 
> _Continued at the link._
> 
> 
> 
> Amir Taheri Islam Is Incompatible With Democracy
Click to expand...

Here's one for you:
Why Democracy Will Never Work Utopian States Loves happy people 
Why democracy doesn 8217 t work 
10 Reasons Why Democracy Doesn t Work - Listverse 
When Democracy Failed The Warnings of History Common Dreams Breaking News Views for the Progressive Community 
DEMOCRACY HAS FAILED IN EUROPE AND AMERICA VERITAS PROJECT


----------



## Book of Jeremiah

Luddly Neddite said:


> Other people say this:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 90% of these are incorrect.
> 
> For example, Aristotle wrote in 300 bc that the world was round. Nearly a thousand years before Islam was created. Gallileo was not the western man credited with discovering the world was round... that was Copernicus.
> 
> Also many of the discoveries attributed to 'Islam' were actually attributed to Middle Easterners, but way before 600AD, which is before the Prophet Muhammed and the creation of Islam.
> 
> Henry the V's castle? Which one? Most of the castles of England (and indeed western Europe were built from 1000 to 1300AD, Britain's most famous castles were built by Edward I. The castle Sant Angelo in Rome was built by the Romans for Emperor Hadrian.
> 
> Also, some of Islam's most famous architecture was copied from the Byzantines, in the case of Hadj Sofia, stolen completely.
> 
> Irrigation was used by the ancient Egyptians 2000 years before the birth of Christ, so was paper, soap, perfumes, hospitals, music, cosmetics.. etc etc etc.... is this claim being made simply because Egypt is now a Muslim country? In which case this is a lie, because the ancient Egyptians had nothing in common with Islam.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> and
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Note: The religion Islam was established between 650AD-700AD
> 
> CHESS is invented before 6th century BC by indians...... not muslims
> 
> Irrigation is done in India from 9000BC ie, from indus valley civilisation..... so definitely not by muslims
> 
> Indian temples and Roman bridges, which show the excellent human engineering techniques were build before the berth of Jesus Chirst. So architecture is not invented by muslims
> 
> The first university inthe world is established by Indians at Takshashila during 700bc.... so university is not invented by muslims
> 
> The first plastic surgery was carried out by Sushrutha, an Indian....... not a muslim
> 
> Bathing is invented by muslims?? Are u kidding me? First human beings Adam and Eve also took bath. They are not muslims. So bathing is not invented by Muslims. Heard about the Great Bath in indus valley civilisation?
> 
> Rest of the inventions are done by Europeans who are Christians
> 
> Click to expand...
Click to expand...


And your point is what?  That you do not like Muslims and want to imagine a world without them?  Not quite understanding your message here.  What are you saying?


----------



## Darlene

Jeremiah said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> A soft answer turneth  away wrath.  You are mistaken, Darlene. Jesus had plenty of hard words for people.  Look at what he has to say to the Pharisees and Saducees.
> 
> Bottom line here:
> 
> Jesus said if we love Him we will keep his commandments.  We will keep them.  Not him.  He never said he'd keep them for us.  He told us to keep them.  Joining that interfaithism thing you are advertising in your broken cross sign is a big No!  Seriously.  There is one way.  Not many.  One way.  Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Jesus.  This kumbaya thing is for the birds.
Click to expand...

What you just stated aren't direct quotes from Jesus himself.


----------



## Mojo2

pismoe said:


> the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.



All of that is true, to my understanding.

But mankind has not yet determined a test to tell which Moderate Muslim will suddenly become radicalized. How this would come about. When does it happen? How can we tell who is and who isn't radicalized?

It's the same problem we'd have if we suddenly exported a thousand villagers from Ebola plagued West Africa.

Who has Ebola? Who doesn't have Ebola/

We can't tell at a glance.

So what to do?

With Muslims we KNOW that when their populations grow to a certain size terrorists and violence and civil unrest just magically happens.

The answer?

Limit the % of Muslims in America to no more than 2% of our total population to avoid the predictable problems that come from Muslims in a non-Muslim society.


----------



## pismoe

similar to ww2 and the Nazi's that were supposedly the Minority yet this socalled minority of Nazi's had the whole population of Germany dancing the Nazi tune MOJO . If they didn't dance correctly the Nazi's killed or imprisoned them .


----------



## Pogo

Mojo2 said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> All of that is true, to my understanding.
> 
> But mankind has not yet determined a test to tell which Moderate Muslim will suddenly become radicalized. How this would come about. When does it happen? How can we tell who is and who isn't radicalized?
> 
> It's the same problem we'd have if we suddenly exported a thousand villagers from Ebola plagued West Africa.
> 
> Who has Ebola? Who doesn't have Ebola/
> 
> We can't tell at a glance.
> 
> So what to do?
> 
> *With Muslims we KNOW that when their populations grow to a certain size terrorists and violence and civil unrest just magically happens.*
> 
> The answer?
> 
> Limit the % of Muslims in America to no more than 2% of our total population to avoid the predictable problems that come from Muslims in a non-Muslim society.
Click to expand...


Umm... no, we know no such thing.  We _do_ know that demagogues like yourself can pretend political radicals act on religious bases and then use that hopelessly broad brush as a pretext to go full Rambo-bigot.  As you just demonstrated.

Sorry, this is in the same bag with pretending female genital mutilation and 'honor killings' are sourced from Islam, even though they're not, just to create a bogeyman out of an entire religion and start the next "holy war".

This bullshit is old and tired, has been perpetrated for millennia  by those incapable of learning from history, and it never fails to feed more destruction.


----------



## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Luddly Neddite said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> The bible?
> 
> You mean the same bible that is full of murder, rape, incest and more?
> 
> THAT bible?
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Maybe THAT'S why your viewpoint is always so skewed to the weird.
> 
> You seem to be afflicted with short term memory.
> 
> Which means you were unable to recall my question.
> 
> I'll re-state it here.
> 
> *Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?*
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Just like the Qur'an, there are verses that promote peace and there are those that contradict each other. It's the Radicals in any religion that take things to the extreme and give that religion a bad name.
Click to expand...


I don't care.

All I care about is that there are 300,000,000 of those wrong thinking bastards who want to achieve a global caliphate and they are doing everything they can, both peaceful and violent, to conquer the USA and the World and make us all capitulate, convert to Islam or die.

The nice, loving, peaceful Muslims who want nothing more than to live their lives happily and peacefully with their families are doing nothing to stop the radicals. They are irrelevant to the evil being committed by their brethren. They are even being victimized by the radicals.

But we know that terrorists get encouragement and succor and are hidden when necessary, among fellow Muslims. Moderates all.

So, if terrorists live and get support and hide among moderates why not limit the % of ALL Muslims allowed to come here?

Is 1% or 2% a better figure to establish as the limit?


----------



## Pogo

How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?

Wait, hold on, this just in ..... breaking news:

*Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion*, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.​
Damn.  You're out of luck, Eugenicist.

Can I call you "Eugene"?


----------



## Darlene

Pogo said:


> How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?


Not to mention how they invade other countries because of their beliefs. Christian radicals should also be held responsible for the taste of bile left in millions of people's mouths.
Everyone is so quick to point fingers at Muslims, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong.
They're too much of a pussy (excuse my language) to look to see what their own people have done against mankind.


----------



## Mojo2

Pogo said:


> Mojo2 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> All of that is true, to my understanding.
> 
> But mankind has not yet determined a test to tell which Moderate Muslim will suddenly become radicalized. How this would come about. When does it happen? How can we tell who is and who isn't radicalized?
> 
> It's the same problem we'd have if we suddenly exported a thousand villagers from Ebola plagued West Africa.
> 
> Who has Ebola? Who doesn't have Ebola/
> 
> We can't tell at a glance.
> 
> So what to do?
> 
> *With Muslims we KNOW that when their populations grow to a certain size terrorists and violence and civil unrest just magically happens.*
> 
> The answer?
> 
> Limit the % of Muslims in America to no more than 2% of our total population to avoid the predictable problems that come from Muslims in a non-Muslim society.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Umm... no, we know no such thing.  We _do_ know that demagogues like yourself can pretend political radicals act on religious bases and then use that hopelessly broad brush as a pretext to go full Rambo-bigot.  As you just demonstrated.
> 
> Sorry, this is in the same bag with pretending female genital mutilation and 'honor killings' are sourced from Islam, even though they're not, just to create a bogeyman out of an entire religion and start the next "holy war".
> 
> This bullshit is old and tired, has been perpetrated for millennia  by those incapable of learning from history, and it never fails to feed more destruction.
Click to expand...


Keep Muslims away from the seats, halls and office of power in the country and we'll be alright.

Limit the % of Muslims in America to avoid the pitfalls of Islamic population growth beyond the 1% level. 

Other than preventing our becoming the victims of Jihadi planners attempts to conquer America, I don't care what your religion is or does.


----------



## SAYIT

pismoe said:


> the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.



I take it you are referring to "the religion of peace?"

More than a million people have fled the ISIS onslaught in recent weeks, Flavia Pansieri, the deputy high commissioner for human rights, told the council. She reported summary mass executions, _forced conversions_, abductions, slavery, sexual abuse, torture and the besieging of entire communities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/w...sis-abuses-in-iraq.html?rref=world/middleeast


----------



## pismoe

sorry MOJO . I mighta hit the wrong button , I agree with your reasoning in the post talking about percentages .


----------



## Darlene

SAYIT said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> the[so called]  fanatics run the show , the [so called] fanatics  have the power and the swords , knives , guns and the [so called] Moderates go along to get along so they aren't beheaded !!.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I take it you are referring to "the religion of peace?"
> 
> More than a million people have fled the ISIS onslaught in recent weeks, Flavia Pansieri, the deputy high commissioner for human rights, told the council. She reported summary mass executions, _forced conversions_, abductions, slavery, sexual abuse, torture and the besieging of entire communities.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/w...sis-abuses-in-iraq.html?rref=world/middleeast
Click to expand...

Those, my dear, are the radicals.


----------



## Pogo

Darlene said:


> Pogo said:
> 
> 
> 
> How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?
> 
> 
> 
> Not to mention how they invade other countries because of their beliefs. Christian radicals should also be held responsible for the taste of bile left in millions of people's mouths.
> Everyone is so quick to point fingers at Muslims, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong.
> They're too much of a pussy (excuse my language) to look to see what their own people have done against mankind.
Click to expand...



Or to see through the bigoted bullshit that clowns like Eugene here fling like so much poo.


----------



## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> Pogo said:
> 
> 
> 
> How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?
> 
> 
> 
> Not to mention how they invade other countries because of their beliefs. Christian radicals should also be held responsible for the taste of bile left in millions of people's mouths.
> Everyone is so quick to point fingers at Muslims, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong.
> They're too much of a pussy (excuse my language) to look to see what their own people have done against mankind.
Click to expand...



On her way to work one morning
Down the path along side the lake
A tender hearted woman saw a poor half frozen snake
His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew
"Oh well," she cried, "I'll take you in and I'll take care of you"
"Take me in oh tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk
And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk
Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived
She found that pretty snake she'd taking in had been revived
"Take me in, oh tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake

Now she clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful," she cried
"But if I hadn't brought you in by now you might have died"
Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight
But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite
"Take me in, oh tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake

"I saved you," cried that woman
"And you've bit me even, why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"
"Oh shut up, silly woman," said the reptile with a grin
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in
"Take me in, oh tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the snake


----------



## pismoe

but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??


----------



## Pogo

Wanna see how completely off-the-rails insane, bigoted and mostly anti-American you are, Eugene?

Watch this.

*With Christians we KNOW that when their populations grow to a certain size terrorists and violence and civil unrest just magically happens.*

The answer?

Limit the % of Christians in America to no more than 2% of our total population to avoid the predictable problems that come from Christians in a society. 

 Limit the % of Christians in America to avoid the pitfalls of Christianic population growth beyond the 1% level. 

Other than preventing our becoming the victims of bible-thumping planners attempts to conquer America, I don't care what your religion is or does.


See what I did there?  More importantly, see what_ you_ did there?


----------



## Pogo

pismoe said:


> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??



Why not?
Ever hear of the "First Amendment"?

How's the nightlife in downtown Pyonyang?


----------



## Darlene

There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
*Definition of bigot (n)*
Bing Dictionary

*big·ot*
[ bíggət ]

intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views


----------



## Darlene

All people of European decent should not be allowed in America anymore! The European settlers invaded this beautiful country, terrorized the Native peoples, destroyed and polluted the land, and then decided they are the ones who make the rules in this (once great) country!

How's that for an opinion?


----------



## SAYIT

Darlene said:


> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views


I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.


----------



## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?
> 
> Wait, hold on, this just in ..... breaking news:
> 
> *Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion*, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.​
> Damn.  You're out of luck, Eugenicist.
> 
> Can I call you "Eugene"?



Eugenics being a Lefty affair I'm not sure why you're bringing that up to slag Mojo with:

What is even less well known is that the American eugenics movement not only flourished during the Progressive Era, but was especially influential “under reformist state administrations,” including in the state of Wisconsin, the very beacon of progressive reform.[6] “_t is evident,” as historian Rudolph J. Vecoli concludes in a study of the origins of Wisconsin’s sterilization law,

that sterilization was a Progressive measure. . . . it was taken up and agitated by reform groups and organizations, it was advocated by Progressive leaders and publications; and it was enacted by a Progressive legislature and administration.[7]​
The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.[11]

For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,

but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle . . . each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.​
“n general,” as the German-trained progressive economist Richard T. Ely likewise affirms, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”[12] The first step toward bold, experimental reform was to untie the hands of government.

But the Progressives did not advocate an indiscriminate exercise of power; rather, in their view, the ultimate aim of “the State,” the “good” or objective whose pursuit determined the need for government action, was a particular conception of human excellence or “perfection.” The guiding object of ethics, and hence the State, Ely explains, is the “ethical ideal,” the idea, that is, that individuals are entitled to the “most perfect development of all human faculties [physical, mental, moral, aesthetic, etc.] . . . which can be attained[.]“ In short, the guiding principle of the Progressives’ domestic reforms, the aim that guided their assessment of existing social conditions, was a felt obligation to improve the relative level of physical, mental and moral development in America._​


----------



## Pogo

Darlene said:


> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views



At least two anyway...


----------



## Darlene

SAYIT said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.
Click to expand...

I've been saying that the radical Muslims are the ones we should focus on, not the whole Muslim faith. What makes me think there are religious bigots within this thread are comments similar to "get rid of all the Muslims". That is raw bigotry.


----------



## pismoe

Hey POGO , don't know what anything I've said has to do with the 1st Amendment as I say let muslims worship and speak freely .   All I asked is that if you could limit muslim immigration to 1 or 2 percent why not just disallow ALL muslim immigration ??


----------



## Rikurzhen

pismoe said:


> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??



Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.


----------



## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> All people of European decent should not be allowed in America anymore! The European settlers invaded this beautiful country, terrorized the Native peoples, destroyed and polluted the land, and then decided they are the ones who make the rules in this (once great) country!
> 
> How's that for an opinion?



Unlike native Americans, we didn't completely genocide those who were here when we arrived.


----------



## Pogo

pismoe said:


> Hey POGO , don't know what anything I've said has to do with the 1st Amendment as let muslims worship and speak freely .   All I asked is that if you could limit muslim immigration to 1 or 2 percent why not just disallow ALL muslim immigration ??



Some posts carry their own suicide gene. ^^  

Btw "Pogo" is not an acronym.


----------



## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> Pogo said:
> 
> 
> 
> How 'bout we do the same for Christians then?  I mean since they start so many wars and bomb so many abortion clinics and federal buildings and all ....... right?
> 
> Wait, hold on, this just in ..... breaking news:
> 
> *Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion*, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.​
> Damn.  You're out of luck, Eugenicist.
> 
> Can I call you "Eugene"?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Eugenics being a Lefty affair I'm not sure why you're bringing that up to slag Mojo with:
Click to expand...


Eugenics was a product of its _time_, had nothing to do with "left" or "right".  H.W. was all into it so there ya go.
A time, one might add, of our most racist era ever.

I called him that because he's frothing at the mouth about population control.


----------



## Rikurzhen

Darlene said:


> SAYIT said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I've been saying that the radical Muslims are the ones we should focus on, not the whole Muslim faith. What makes me think there are religious bigots within this thread are comments similar to "get rid of all the Muslims". That is raw bigotry.
Click to expand...


Similarly, it was wrong of the US Army to launch a denazification program in post-war Germany instead of just dealing with the radical who had committed war crimes. The peaceful Nazis weren't a problem, so their beliefs and institutions should have been off-limits to American efforts to wipe them from the face of the Earth.  The good Nazis were persecuted by Americans who disapproved of their beliefs. What do beliefs matter, it's only the actions of the evil Nazis which gave a bad name to Nazism.


----------



## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> All people of European decent should not be allowed in America anymore! The European settlers invaded this beautiful country, terrorized the Native peoples, destroyed and polluted the land, and then decided they are the ones who make the rules in this (once great) country!
> 
> How's that for an opinion?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Unlike native Americans, we didn't completely genocide those who were here when we arrived.
Click to expand...


It sure wasn't for lack of trying, Jeffrey.


----------



## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.
Click to expand...


See Eugene?   This is exactly what I told you would happen.  "When they came for the Muslims I said nothing....."

Be proud.


----------



## Mojo2

pismoe said:


> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??



If it were legally possible to limit the total population to 2% or less we could be assured they'd always be the way you want to believe they are.

Are you familiar with the Five Stages of Islam? Google it.

Then you'll begin to see why 2% or less.

I like Muslims...the way they are now.

Only faintly untrustworthy and problematic.

Raise the % and the shit begins to overflow.

Let's avoid that if we can, eh?

Learn from Europe and England's mistakes.


----------



## pismoe

as I said , muslims in the USA can speak and worship freely POGO .


----------



## pismoe

thing is that the USA can or should be able to limit or stop any immigration of any group that it likes to POGO !!


----------



## pismoe

and in fact I think that the USA did limit immigration to certain groups before LBJ POGO !!


----------



## Pogo

pismoe said:


> as I said , muslims in the USA can speak and worship freely POGO .



Apparently not.  Not the way you envision certainly.

You emigrate to Anywhereistan.  They let you in.  Then you send for your family.  "Sorry, your religion is over quota".  Read that again -- your _RELIGION_ is over quota.




pismoe said:


> thing is that the USA can or should be able to limit or stop any immigration of any group that it likes to POGO !!



What exactly is it you think Pogo stands for?  I just told you it's not an acronym.  Are you insane?


----------



## pismoe

oh yeah , family reunification , not everyone agrees with family reunification POGO !!


----------



## Pogo

pismoe said:


> and in fact I think that the USA did limit immigration to certain groups before LBJ POGO !!



Think so huh?
When did this country ever restrict immigration on the basis of _religion?_

That's exactly the kind of shit we were founded to get away _from_, dumbass.


----------



## Mojo2

Darlene said:


> SAYIT said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I've been saying that the radical Muslims are the ones we should focus on, not the whole Muslim faith. What makes me think there are religious bigots within this thread are comments similar to "get rid of all the Muslims". That is raw bigotry.
Click to expand...


Darlene, there is no way  on Earth yet devised to detect a radical Muslim. But we know they usually congregate with other Muslims.

So, larger Muslim enclaves are where typically Islamic problems will emanate. 

One of those problems?

Moderate Muslims hiding, harboring, supporting, aiding and abetting terrorists.

So, how do we limit the terrorists and terrorism and typical Muslim baggage that large Muslim populations will create?

Limit the % of Muslims in America to a % we KNOW is not a problem.

Like now.

The % of Muslims as a % of our total population is less than 2%.

If things stayed like this, I could live with it.

More than that?

Just look at the Five Stages of Islam and you'll see what the problems are you'll be inviting into our communities and in our streets with a Muslim population above 2%


----------



## pismoe

and like I say , I think that the USA limited immigration of certain groups before LBJ .   Some people would not mind seeing a return to that kind of limitation of certain groups in 2014 POGO .


----------



## Pogo

Mojo2 said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> SAYIT said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I've been saying that the radical Muslims are the ones we should focus on, not the whole Muslim faith. What makes me think there are religious bigots within this thread are comments similar to "get rid of all the Muslims". That is raw bigotry.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Darlene, there is no way  on Earth yet devised to detect a radical Muslim.
Click to expand...



That's because you keep on making the same reasoning gaffe over and over and over expecting different results, even though it's been pointed out to you at least as long as you've been on this forum.  And that is trying to pretend that _political_ acts are religious acts.  That's why you're not going to find an answer; you're looking in the wrong _place_.

DUH.


----------



## Noomi

Darlene said:


> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.



Would the world be a better place? Probably.


----------



## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See Eugene?   This is exactly what I told you would happen.  "When they came for the Muslims I said nothing....."
> 
> Be proud.
Click to expand...


You're right. Germany today is a much worse place due to the De-Nazification process which followed WWII. Why didn't America just let peaceful Nazis live and practice their faith unmolested? Why oh why did they purge them from society?


----------



## Pogo

Rikurzhen said:


> Pogo said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See Eugene?   This is exactly what I told you would happen.  "When they came for the Muslims I said nothing....."
> 
> Be proud.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> You're right. Germany today is a much worse place due to the De-Nazification process which followed WWII. Why didn't America just let peaceful Nazis live and practice their faith unmolested? Why oh why did they purge them from society?
Click to expand...


How did you escape? 

Naziism was not a religion, stupid.


----------



## Mojo2

Rikurzhen said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.
Click to expand...


That's essentially what Lee Harris says here in his renowned essay.



Spoiler: Al Qaeda' Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris



Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology
War without Clausewitz

by Lee Harris
Policy Review
August-September 2002
Print    Send    RSS  
Share Share


"Know your enemy” is a well-known maxim, but one that is difficult to observe in practice. Nor is the reason for this hard to fathom: If you are my enemy, it is unlikely that I will go very much out of my way to learn to see things from your point of view. And if this is true even in those cases where the conflict is between groups that share a common culture, how much more true will it be when there is a profound cultural and psychological chasm between the antagonists?

Yet, paradoxically, this failure to understand the enemy can arise not only from a lack of sympathy with his position, but also from a kind of misplaced sympathy: When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy, our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us — terms that make sense to us in light of our own fund of experience. We assume that if our enemy is doing x, it must be for reasons that are comprehensible in terms of our universe.

Just how unfortunate — indeed, fatal — this approach can be was demonstrated during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. When Montezuma learned of Cortés’s arrival, he was at a loss to know what to make of the event. Who were these white-skinned alien beings? What had they come for? What were their intentions?

These were clearly not questions that Montezuma was in a position to answer. Nothing in his world could possibly provide him with a key to deciphering correctly the motives of a man as cunning, resourceful, and determined as Cortés. And this meant that Montezuma, who, after all, had to do something, was forced to deploy categories drawn from the fund of experience that was ready-to-hand in the Aztec world.

By a fatal coincidence, this fund of experience chanced to contain a remarkable prefiguring of Cortés — the myth of the white-skinned god, Quetzalcoatl. And, indeed, the parallels were uncanny. But, of course, as Montezuma eventually learned, Cortés was not Quetzalcoatl, and he had not appeared on the coast of Mexico in order to bring blessings.

We should not be too harsh on Montezuma. He was, after all, acting exactly as we all act under similar circumstances. We all want to make sense of our world, and at no time more urgently than when our world is suddenly behaving strangely. But in order to make sense of such strangeness, we must be able to reduce it to something that is not strange — something that is already known to us, something we know our way around.

Yet this entirely human response, as Montezuma learned to his regret, can sometimes be very dangerous.

An act of war?

On september 11, 2001, Americans were confronted by an enigma similar to that presented to the Aztecs — an enigma so baffling that even elementary questions of nomenclature posed a problem: What words or phrase should we use merely to refer to the events of that day? Was it a disaster? Or perhaps a tragedy? Was it a criminal act, or was it an act of war? Indeed, one awkward tv anchorman, in groping for the proper handle, fecklessly called it an accident. But eventually the collective and unconscious wisdom that governs such matters prevailed. Words failed, then fell away completely, and all that was left behind was the bleak but monumentally poignant set of numbers, 9-11.

But this did not answer the great question: What did it all mean? In the early days, there were many who were convinced that they knew the answer to this question. A few held that we had got what we had coming: It was just desserts for Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty or the predictable product of the U.S. decision to snub the Durban conference on racism. Others held, with perhaps a greater semblance of plausibility, that the explanation of 9-11 was to be sought in what was called, through an invariable horticultural metaphor, the “root cause” of terrorism. Eliminate poverty, or economic imperialism, or global warming, and such acts of terrorism would cease.

Opposed to this kind of analysis were those who saw 9-11 as an unprovoked act of war, and the standard comparison here was with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. To this school of thought — ably represented by, among others, the distinguished classicist Victor Davis Hanson — it is irrelevant what grievances our enemy may believe it has against us; what matters is that we have been viciously attacked and that, for the sake of our survival, we must fight back.

Those who hold this view are in the overwhelming majority among Americans. And yet there is one point on which this position does not differ from the position adopted by those, such as Noam Chomsky, who place the blame for the attack on American policy: Both points of view agree in interpreting 9-11 as an act of war, disagreeing only on the question of whether or not it was justifiable.

This common identification of 9-11 as an act of war arises from a deeper unquestioned assumption — an assumption made both by Chomsky and his followers on one hand and Hanson and National Review on the other — and, indeed, by almost everyone in between. The assumption is this: An act of violence on the magnitude of 9-11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective. What this political objective might be, or whether it is worthwhile — these are all secondary considerations; but surely people do not commit such acts unless they are trying to achieve some kind of recognizably political purpose.

Behind this shared assumption stands the figure of Clausewitz and his famous definition of war as politics carried out by other means. The whole point of war, on this reading, is to get other people to do what we want them to do: It is an effort to make others adopt our policies and/or to further our interests. Clausewitzian war, in short, is rational and instrumental. It is the attempt to bring about a new state of affairs through the artful combination of violence and the promise to cease violence if certain political objectives are met.

Of course, this does not mean that wars may not backfire on those who undertake them, or that a particular application of military force may not prove to be counterproductive to one’s particular political purpose. But this does not change the fact that the final criterion of military success is always pragmatic: Does it work? Does it in fact bring us closer to realizing our political objectives?

But is this the right model for understanding 9-11? Or have we, like Montezuma, imposed our own inadequate categories on an event that simply does not fit them? Yet, if 9-11 was not an act of war, then what was it? In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.”

Despite the repellent nihilism that is at the base of Stockhausen’s ghoulish aesthetic judgment, it contains an important insight and comes closer to a genuine assessment of 9-11 than the competing interpretation of it in terms of Clausewitzian war. For Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy — not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

A personal recollection

My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy — and that of many young intellectuals at that time — were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.

For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.

But before tackling this subject outright, let us approach it through a few observations about the normal role of fantasy in human conduct.

The nature of fantasy ideology

It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge, and it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. But normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world stays relatively hidden. Indeed, a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control.

Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent, resulting in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God — or his neighbor’s dog — commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.

What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props — there is no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own. The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance, or his intellect, or his bank account, cares nothing for us as individuals — for he has already cast us in the role that he wishes us to play: We are there to be impressed by him. Indeed, it is an error even to suggest that he is trying to impress us, for this would assume that he is willing to learn enough about us to discover how best we might be impressed. But nothing of the kind occurs. And why should it? After all, the fantasist has already projected onto us the role that we are to play in his fantasy; no matter what we may be thinking of his recital, it never crosses his mind that we may be utterly failing to play the part expected of us — indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of us in order to bring our profound lack of interest to the fantasist’s attention.

To an outside observer, the fantasist is clearly attempting to compensate by means of his fantasy for the shortcomings of his own present reality — and thus it is tempting to think of the fantasist as a kind of Don Quixote impotently tilting at windmills. But this is an illusion. Make no mistake about it: The fantasist often exercises great and terrible power precisely by virtue of his fantasy. The father who demands his son grow up and become a professional football player will clearly exercise much more control over his son’s life than a father who is content to permit his child to pursue his own goals in life.

This power of the fantasist is entirely traceable to the fact that, for him, the other is always an object and never a subject. A subject, after all, has a will of his own, his own desires and his own agenda; he might rather play the flute instead of football. And anyone who is aware of this fact is automatically put at a disadvantage in comparison with the fantasist — the disadvantage of knowing that other people have minds of their own and are not merely props to be pushed around.

For the moment I stop thinking about you as a prop in my fantasy, you become problematic. If you aren’t what I have cast you to be, then who are you, and what do you want? And, in order to answer these questions, I find that I must step out of the fantasy realm and enter the real world. If I am your father, I may still wish you to play football, but I can no longer blithely assume that this is obviously what you have always wanted; hence, I will need to start paying attention to you as a genuine other, and no longer merely as a ready-made prop. Your role will change from “born football player” to — x, the unknown. The very immensity of the required mental adjustment goes a long way toward explaining why it is so seldom made and why it is so often tragically impossible to wean a fantasist even from the most destructive fantasy.

Fortunately, the fantasizing individual is normally surrounded by other individuals who are not fantasizing or, at the very least, who are not fantasizing in the same way, and this fact puts some limit on how far most of us allow our fantasy world to intrude on the precinct of reality.

But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history. The various chiliastic movements, such as those studied in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (Harper & Row, 1961), are splendid examples of collective fantasy; and there is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion.

But this changed with the French Revolution. From this event onward, there would be eruptions of a new kind of collective fantasy, one in which political ideology replaced religious mythology as the source of fantasy’s symbols and rituals. In this way it provided a new, and quite dangerous, outlet for the fantasy needs of large groups of men and women — a full-fledged fantasy ideology. For such a fantasy makes no sense outside of the ideological corpus in terms of which the fantasy has been constructed. It is from the ideology that the roles, the setting, the props are drawn, just as for the earlier pursuers of millennium, the relevant roles, setting, and props arose out of the biblical corpus of symbolism.

But the symbols by themselves do not create the fantasy. There must first be a preexisting collective need for this fantasy; this need comes from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other — a conflict in which a lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy. History is replete with groups that seem to lack the capability of seeing themselves as others see them, differing in this respect much as individuals do.

A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.

This theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies, for it suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the domain of those groups that history has passed by or rejected — groups that feel that they are under attack from forces which, while more powerful perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue. Such a fantasy ideology was current in the South before the Civil War and explained much of the conduct of the Confederacy. Instead of seeing themselves as an anachronism attempting to prolong the existence of a doomed institution, Southerners chose to see themselves as the bearer of true civilization. Imperial Germany had similar fantasies before and during the Great War. They are well expressed in Thomas Mann’s Notes of an Unpolitical Man: Germans possess true inwardness and culture, unlike the French and English — let alone those barbarous Americans. Indeed, Hitler’s even more extravagant fantasy ideology is incomprehensible unless one puts it in the context of this preexisting fantasy ideology.

In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.

But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us — I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief — the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as “The Power of Positive Thinking,” or even the little engine that thought it could. To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at this conclusion. Rather, what is meant by this is that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.

The allusion to William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe” is not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the two thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in particular and fantasy ideology in general — Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. All three men begin with the same assumption: If human beings are limited to acting only on those beliefs that can be logically and scientifically demonstrated, they could not survive, simply because this degree of certainty is restricted only to mathematics and the hard sciences — which, by themselves, are not remotely sufficient to guide us through the world as it exists. Hence, human beings must have a large set of beliefs that cannot be demonstrated logically and scientifically — beliefs that are therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences.

Yet the fact that such beliefs cannot be justified by science does not mean that they may not be useful or beneficial to the individual or to the society that holds them. For James, this meant primarily the religious beliefs of individuals: Did a man’s religious beliefs improve the quality of his personal life? For Pareto, however, the same argument was extended to all beliefs: religious, cultural, and political.

Both James and Pareto viewed non-rational belief from the perspective of an outside observer: They took up the beliefs that they found already circulating in the societies in which they lived and examined them in light of whether they were beneficial or detrimental to the individuals and the societies that entertained them. As a botanist examines the flora of a particular region — he is not interested in creating new flowers, but simply in cataloguing those that already exist — so, too, James and Pareto were exclusively interested in already existing beliefs, and certainly not in producing new ones.

But this was not enough for Sorel. Combining Nietzsche with William James, Sorel discovered the secret of Nietzsche’s will to power in James’s will to believe. James, like Pareto, had shown that certain spontaneously occurring beliefs enabled those who held these beliefs to thrive and to prosper, both as individuals and societies. But if this were true of spontaneously occurring beliefs, could it not also be true of beliefs that were deliberately and consciously manufactured?

This was a radical innovation. For just as naturally existing beliefs could be judged properly only in terms of the benefits such beliefs brought about in the lives of those who believed in them, the same standard could now be applied to beliefs that were deliberately created in order to have a desired effect on those who came to believe in them. What would be important about such “artificially inseminated” beliefs — which Sorel calls myths — was the transformative effect such myths would have on those who placed their faith in them and the extent to which such ideological make-believe altered the character and conduct of those who held them — and certainly not whether they were true.

Sorel’s candidate for such a myth — the general strike — never quite caught on. But his underlying insight was taken up by Mussolini and Italian fascism, and with vastly greater sensitivity to what is involved in creating such galvanizing and transformative myths in the minds of large numbers of men and women. After all, it is obvious that not just any belief will do and that, furthermore, each particular group of people will have a disposition, based on history and character, to entertain one set of beliefs more readily than another. Mussolini assembled his Sorelian myth out of elements clearly designed to catch the imagination of his time and place — a strange blend of Imperial Roman themes and futurist images.

Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations — and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy — a fantasy with which the “audience” could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus twentieth century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father’s ghost.

Once again, it is a mistake to see in all of this merely a ploy — a cynical device to delude the masses. In all fantasy ideologies, there is a point at which the make-believe becomes an end in itself. This fact is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.

Any attempt to see this adventure in Clausewitzian terms is doomed to fail: There was no political or economic advantage whatsoever to be gained from the invasion of Ethiopia. Indeed, the diplomatic disadvantages to Italy in consequence of this action were tremendous, and they were in no way to be compensated for by anything that Italy could hope to gain from possessing Ethiopia as a colony.

Why invade, then? The answer is quite simple. Ethiopia was a prop — a prop in the fantasy pageant of the new Italian Empire — that and nothing else. And the war waged in order to win Ethiopia as a colony was not a war in the Clausewitzian sense — that is to say, it was not an instrument of political policy designed to induce concessions from Ethiopia, or to get Ethiopia to alter its policies, or even to get Ethiopia to surrender. Ethiopia had to be conquered not because it was worth conquering, but because the fascist fantasy ideology required Italy to conquer something — and Ethiopia fit the bill. The conquest was not the means to an end, as in Clausewitzian war; it was an end in itself. Or, more correctly, its true purpose was to bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome.

America as a prop

To be a prop in someone else’s fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you, but that was the position of Ethiopia in the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism. And it is the position Americans have been placed in by the quite different fantasy ideology of radical Islam.

The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?

As the purpose of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was to prove to the Italians themselves that they were conquerors, so the purpose of 9-11 was not to create terror in the minds of the American people but to prove to the Arabs that Islamic purity, as interpreted by radical Islam, could triumph. The terror, which to us seems the central fact, is in the eyes of al Qaeda a by-product. Likewise, what al Qaeda and its followers see as central to the holy pageant of 9-11 — namely, the heroic martyrdom of the 19 hijackers — is interpreted by us quite differently. For us the hijackings, like the Palestinian “suicide” bombings, are viewed merely as a modus operandi, a technique that is incidental to a larger strategic purpose, a makeshift device, a low-tech stopgap. In short, Clausewitzian war carried out by other means — in this case by suicide.

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom — martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.

In short, it is a mistake to try to fit such behavior into the mold created by our own categories and expectations. Nowhere is this more tellingly illustrated than on the videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the attack. The tape makes clear that the final collapse of the World Trade Center was not part of the original terrorist scheme, which apparently assumed that the twin towers would not lose their structural integrity. But this fact gave to the event — in terms of al Qaeda’s fantasy ideology — an even greater poignancy: Precisely because it had not been part of the original calculation, it was therefore to be understood as a manifestation of divine intervention. The 19 hijackers did not bring down the towers — God did.

9-11 as symbolic drama

Most of our misunderstandings of al Qaeda’s goals have come about for one fundamental reason: In the first weeks after 9-11, it was impossible to determine whether or not al Qaeda had embarked on a systematic and calculated Clausewitzian strategy of terror simply because at that date we did not know, and could not know, what was coming next.

In the days and weeks following 9-11 there was a universal sense that it would happen again at any moment — something shocking and terrifying, something that would again rivet us to our tv screen. And, indeed, the anthrax scare seemed, at first, to be designed precisely to fit this bill. It even had something that 9-11 lacked, namely, the ability to frighten people who sat quietly in their living rooms in little towns across America, to make ordinary people feel alarmed undertaking ordinary daily activities, such as opening the mail. But, leaving aside the question of whether al Qaeda was in fact directly or indirectly responsible for the anthrax letters, what was most striking about this episode was the fact that it showed dramatically that if al Qaeda had elected to launch a Clausewitzian war of terror against the United States, even acts of terror on a vastly smaller scale than 9-11 would still be assured of receiving enormous media coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Indeed, even if another agent was behind the scare, it is still hard to understand how al Qaeda could fail to profit by the lesson the scare taught — that the American media, by nature, could be trusted to amplify even the least act of terrorism into a continuing saga of national nightmare.

But, leaving aside the anthrax episode, there was in fact no such act committed by al Qaeda in the months following 9-11. Nor does the possibility that one might still occur change the fact that during this critical initial period, one did not. This in itself is a remarkably telling fact.

Acts of terror, as noted earlier, can be used to pursue genuine Clausewitzian objectives in precisely the same way that normal military operations are used, as was demonstrated during the Algerian war of independence. But this requires that the acts of terror be deployed with the same kind of strategic logic that applies to normal military operations. If you attack your enemy with an act of terror — especially one on the scale of 9-11 — you must be prepared to follow up on it immediately. The analogy here to time-honored military strategy is obvious: If you have vanquished your enemy on the field of battle, you must vigorously pursue him while he is in retreat, i.e., while he is still in a state of panic and confusion. You must not let him regroup psychologically, but must continue to pummel him while he is still reeling from the first blow.

This al Qaeda failed to do. And the question is: Why?

Of course, given our limited knowledge, it is possible that al Qaeda did plan follow-up acts of terror but was simply unable to carry them out due to our heightened state of awareness as well as our military efforts to cripple al Qaeda in its base of operations in Afghanistan. But it is hard to believe that these factors could have precluded smaller-scale acts of terror — of the kind employed in Algeria and, more recently, by the Palestinian suicide bombers. What was to keep al Qaeda operatives from blowing themselves up at a Wal-Mart in Arkansas or a McDonald’s in New Hampshire? Very little. And while it is true that such acts would lack the grandiose effect of 9-11, they would have brought terrorism home to the average American in a way that even 9-11 had not done and, as evidenced by the anthrax episode, would have multiplied enormously the already enormous impact on the American psyche of al Qaeda’s original act of terror.

This was the reason why I, like millions of other Americans, spent the first few weeks after 9-11 either watching tv constantly or turning it on every 15 minutes: We were prepared to be devastated again. Our nerves were in a state of such anxious expectation that a carefully concerted and orchestrated campaign of smaller-scale, guerrilla-style terror, undertaken in out-of-the-way locales, could well have had a catastrophically destabilizing effect on the American economy and even on our political system.

But such Clausewitzian terror is quite remote from the symbolic drama enacted by al Qaeda on 9-11 — a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people, but to the Arab world. A campaign of smaller-scale acts of terror would have no glamour in it, and it was glamour — and grandiosity — that al Qaeda was seeking in its targets. The pure Islamic David required a Goliath. After all, if David had merely killed someone his own size, where would be the evidence of God’s favor toward him?

Are we at war?

If this interpretation is correct, then it is time that we reconsider some of our basic policy in the war on terror. First of all, it should be obvious that if our enemy is motivated purely by a fantasy ideology, it is absurd for us to look for the so-called “root” causes of terrorism in poverty, lack of education, a lack of democracy, etc. Such factors play absolutely no role in the creation of a fantasy ideology. On the contrary, fantasy ideologies have historically been the product of members of the intelligentsia, middle-class at the very least and vastly better educated than average. Furthermore, to hope that democratic reform would discourage radical Islam ignores the fact that previous fantasy ideologies have historically arisen in a democratic context; as the student of European fascism, Ernst Nolte, has observed, parliamentary democracy was an essential precondition for the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler.

Equally absurd, on this interpretation, is the notion that we must review our own policies toward the Arab world — or the state of Israel — in order to find ways to make our enemies hate us less. If the Ethiopians had tried to make themselves more likable to the Italians in the hope that this would make Mussolini rethink his plans of conquest, it would have had the same effect. There is no political policy we could take that would change the attitude of our enemies — short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam.

The second consequence to follow from the adoption of this model for understanding our enemy is that we need to reconsider the term “war” as it is currently deployed in this case. When the Japanese started the Pacific war by bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it was not because Pearl Harbor was a symbol of American power: It was because it was a large naval base and the Japanese had the quite rational strategic goal of crippling the American Pacific fleet in the first hours of the war. Furthermore, the act itself would not have taken place if the Japanese had believed themselves otherwise capable of securing their political goals — i.e., American acceptance of Japanese hegemony in Asia and the Pacific. And the war would have immediately ceased if the United States, in the days following the attack, had promptly asked for a negotiated settlement of the conflict on terms acceptable to the Japanese.

In the case of the war begun at Pearl Harbor, all the parties knew exactly what was at issue, and there was no need for media experts to argue over the “real” objective behind the attack. Everyone knew that the Japanese attack was the result of a strategic decision to go to war with America rather than accept the American ultimatum to evacuate Manchuria. In each of these cases, war was entered into by both sides despite the fact that a political solution was available to the various contending parties. The decision to go to war, therefore, was made in a purely Clausewitzian manner: The employment of military force was selected in preference to what all sides saw as an unacceptable political settlement.

This was not remotely the case in the aftermath of 9-11. The issue facing the U.S. was not whether to accept or to reject al Qaeda’s political demands, which were nebulous in the extreme. Indeed, al Qaeda did not even claim to have made the attack in the first place! The U.S. and its allies were placed in the bizarre position of first having to prove who their enemy was — a difficulty that, by definition, does not occur in Clausewitzian war, where it is essential that the identity of the conflicting parties be known to each other, since otherwise the conflict would be pointless.

The fact that we are involved with an enemy who is not engaged in Clausewitzian warfare has serious repercussions on our policy. For we are fighting an enemy who has no strategic purpose in anything he does — whose actions have significance only in terms of his own fantasy ideology. It means, in a strange sense, that while we are at war with them, they are not at war with us — and, indeed, it would be an enormous improvement if they were. If they were at war with us, they would be compelled to start thinking realistically, in terms of objective factors such as overall strategic goals, war aims, and so forth. They would have to make a realistic, and not a fantasy-induced, assessment of the relative strength of us versus them. But because they are operating in terms of their fantasy ideology, such a realistic assessment is impossible for them. It matters not how much stronger or more powerful we are than they — what matters is that God will bring them victory.

This must be emphasized, for if the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism was a form of political make-believe, the fantasy ideology of radical Islam goes even one step further: It is, in a sense, more akin to a form of magical thinking. While the Sorelian myth does aim, finally, at transforming the real world, it is almost as if the “real” world no longer matters in terms of the fantasy ideology of radical Islam. Our “real” world, after all, is utterly secular, a concatenation of an endless series of cause and effect, with all events occurring on a single ontological plane. But the “real” world of radical Islam is different — its fantasy ideology reflects the same philosophical occasionalism that pervades so much of Islamic theology: That is to say, event b does not happen because it is caused by a previous event a. Instead, event a is simply the occasion for God to cause event b, so that the genuine cause of all events occurring on our ontological plane of existence is nothing else but God. But if this is so, then the “real” world that we take for granted simply vanishes, and all becomes determined by the will of God; and in this manner the line between realist and magical thinking dissolves. This is why the mere fact that there is no “realistic” hope of al Qaeda destroying the United States — and indeed the West as a whole — is not of the slightest consequence. After all, if God is willing, the United States and the West could collapse at any moment.

This element of magical thinking does not make al Qaeda any less dangerous, however. For it is likely that in al Qaeda’s collective fantasy there may exist the notion of an ultimate terror act, a magic bullet capable of bringing down the United States at a single stroke — and, paradoxically, nothing comes closer to fulfilling this magical role than the detonation of a very unmagical nuclear device. That this would not destroy our society in one fell swoop is obvious to us; but it is not to our enemies, in whose eyes an act of this nature assumes a fantasy significance in addition to its sufficiently terrifying reality — the fantasy significance of providing al Qaeda with a vision of ultimate and decisive victory over the West.

Fighting an ideological epidemic

In the initial aftermath of 9-11, President Bush continually spoke of al Qaeda not as terrorists, but as “evildoers” — a term for which he was widely derided by those who found it offensively simple-minded and childish. Evildoers, after all, are characters out of fairy tales, not real life. Who really sets out for the deliberate purpose of doing evil, except the wicked dwarves and trolls of our childhood fantasies?

Bush’s critics — who seem unfortunately to have won the semantic battle — were both right and wrong. They were right in observing the fairy-tale provenance of the phrase “evildoer,” but they were wrong in denouncing Bush’s use of it. For, whether by instinct or by cunning, Bush struck exactly the right note. The evildoer of the fairy tale, after all, is not motivated in his conduct by his wish to change the way other people act: His objectives are not to persuade or cajole or threaten others into doing as he wishes them to do. Instead, other people exist in his eyes only as an opportunity to do evil: He doesn’t want to manipulate them for his selfish purpose; rather, his one and only purpose is to inflict evil on them — evil and nothing more.

Rather than interpreting 9-11 as if it were a Clausewitzian act of war, Bush instinctively saw it for what it was: the acting out of demented fantasy. When confronted with the enigma of 9-11 he was able to avoid the temptation of trying to interpret it in terms of our own familiar categories and traditions. Instead of looking for an utterly mythical root cause for 9-11, or seeing it as a purposeful political act on the Clausewitzian model, he grasped its essential nature in one powerful metaphor, offering, in a sense, a kind of counter-fantasy to the American people, one that allowed them to grasp the horror of 9-11 without being misled by false analogies and misplaced metaphors. How much wiser Montezuma would have been if he had said, “I do not know who these white-skinned strangers may be, or where they come from, or what they want. But that they are here to do evil I have no doubt. So let us act accordingly.”

But, Bush’s critics argued, the term “evildoers” dehumanizes our enemy. And again, the critics are both right and wrong. Yes, the term does dehumanize our enemy. But this is only because our enemy has already dehumanized himself. A characteristic of fantasy ideology is that those in the throes of it begin by dehumanizing their enemies by seeing in them only objects to act upon. It is impossible to treat others in this way without dehumanizing oneself in the process. The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted — both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.

There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.

So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will.

The same thing is happening today — and that is our true enemy. The poison of the radical Islamic fantasy ideology is being spread all over the Muslim world through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street. In fact, there is no better way to grasp the full horror of the poison than to listen as a Palestinian mother offers her four-year-old son up to be yet another victim of this ghastly fantasy.

Once we understand this, many of our current perplexities will find themselves resolved. Pseudo-issues such as debates over the legitimacy of “racial profiling” would disappear: Does anyone in his right mind object to screening someone entering his country for signs of plague? Or quarantining those who have contracted it? Or closely monitoring precisely those populations within his country that are most at risk?

Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible.



Al Qaeda s Fantasy Ideology War without Clausewitz Lee Harris

This reiterates Rik's rationale:



> Rather than interpreting 9-11 as if it were a Clausewitzian act of war, Bush instinctively saw it for what it was: the acting out of demented fantasy. When confronted with the enigma of 9-11 he was able to avoid the temptation of trying to interpret it in terms of our own familiar categories and traditions. Instead of looking for an utterly mythical root cause for 9-11, or seeing it as a purposeful political act on the Clausewitzian model, he grasped its essential nature in one powerful metaphor, offering, in a sense, a kind of counter-fantasy to the American people, one that allowed them to grasp the horror of 9-11 without being misled by false analogies and misplaced metaphors. How much wiser Montezuma would have been if he had said, “I do not know who these white-skinned strangers may be, or where they come from, or what they want. But that they are here to do evil I have no doubt. So let us act accordingly.”
> 
> But, Bush’s critics argued, the term “evildoers” dehumanizes our enemy. And again, the critics are both right and wrong. Yes, the term does dehumanize our enemy. But this is only because our enemy has already dehumanized himself. A characteristic of fantasy ideology is that those in the throes of it begin by dehumanizing their enemies by seeing in them only objects to act upon. It is impossible to treat others in this way without dehumanizing oneself in the process. The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted — both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.
> 
> There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.
> 
> So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will.
> 
> The same thing is happening today — and that is our true enemy. The poison of the radical Islamic fantasy ideology is being spread all over the Muslim world through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street. In fact, there is no better way to grasp the full horror of the poison than to listen as a Palestinian mother offers her four-year-old son up to be yet another victim of this ghastly fantasy.
> 
> Once we understand this, many of our current perplexities will find themselves resolved. Pseudo-issues such as debates over the legitimacy of “racial profiling” would disappear: Does anyone in his right mind object to screening someone entering his country for signs of plague? Or quarantining those who have contracted it? Or closely monitoring precisely those populations within his country that are most at risk?
> 
> Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible.


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## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> and in fact I think that the USA did limit immigration to certain groups before LBJ POGO !!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Think so huh?
> When did this country ever restrict immigration on the basis of _religion?_
> 
> That's exactly the kind of shit we were founded to get away _from_, dumbass.
Click to expand...


The adherents of the religions of Communism and Anarchy were barred:

After a decade of relative tranquility in immigration law,[22] the outbreak of World War I fueled anti-alien sentiments yet again; this time, German immigrants were targeted.[23] Pushed by the anti-alien fervor, Congress even more restrictive immigrations statutes in 1917 and 1920;* these statutes barred even more groups on the basis of ideology*. "Sabotage and destruction of property were added to the list of forbidden beliefs, deportation, unbounded by any statute of limitations, had been introduced as a means, separate and distinct from exclusion, *of controlling alien radicalism*;* teaching and advising had joined belief and advocacy as grounds for exclusion or deportation*; membership in, or affiliation with, [forbidden] organizations ... *had become grounds for exclusion and deportation; [and] writing, publishing, circulating, distributing, printing, ... displaying [or possessing for the purpose of distribution] written materials advocating forbidden doctrines had become grounds for exclusion or deportation*...."[24]

The 1920 Act was passed at the tail end of the First Red Scare.[25] In the following years of relative political calm, public demands for the removal of foreign radicals waned, and fewer radicals were in fact deported.[25] As the US sank into the Great Depression in the early 1930s, however, alien radicals—now *communists rather than anarchists—were again targeted.*[25] Various proposals were introduced in Congress* to ban communist immigrants.[*26] World War II intensified anti-alien sentiment, and the Smith Act passed Congress in 1940.[26] It banned present and former belief, advocacy, and membership as well as present.[27] In 1941, Congress additionally authorized consular officers to deny visas to any person the officers had reason to believe would "engag[e] in activities which will endanger the public safety" and granted the president the power to deport or bar entry to aliens when required by the "interests of the United States."[28] As the Cold War began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, intolerance of foreigners increased further.[29]

In 1950, amidst hysteria and fear of communists, the Internal Security Act was passed into law. It *expressly excluded communists, totalitarians, and fascists from the US for the first time*.[30] Unlike the 1903 Immigration Act, which excluded only a few dozen anarchists, the Internal Security Act barred thousands foreigners from entering the US, at least on a temporary basis.[30] When immigration laws were overhauled in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, these exclusions—along with all prior exclusions, such as those for anarchists—were recodified.​


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## Rikurzhen

Pogo said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
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> Pogo said:
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> 
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> Rikurzhen said:
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> pismoe said:
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> 
> 
> but would like to ask , why limit to 1 or 2 percent , why allow any percentage at all .    Thing is if you were able by law to limit to 1 or 2 percent all there will be is crying about racism and discrimination so why not go whole hog and say that ZERO percent sounds good ??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly. When you're faced with a cancer, best take the hard measures and rid yourself of it, so that you can recuperate and live a healthy life afterwards.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See Eugene?   This is exactly what I told you would happen.  "When they came for the Muslims I said nothing....."
> 
> Be proud.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> You're right. Germany today is a much worse place due to the De-Nazification process which followed WWII. Why didn't America just let peaceful Nazis live and practice their faith unmolested? Why oh why did they purge them from society?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> How did you escape?
> 
> Naziism was not a religion, stupid.
Click to expand...


Take the beliefs of Nazism, slap a "God told me so" on them and you have a religion. Religion is simply one form of ideology.


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## Mojo2

Pogo said:


> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> as I said , muslims in the USA can speak and worship freely POGO .
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Apparently not.  Not the way you envision certainly.
> 
> You emigrate to Anywhereistan.  They let you in.  Then you send for your family.  "Sorry, your religion is over quota".  Read that again -- your _RELIGION_ is over quota.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pismoe said:
> 
> 
> 
> thing is that the USA can or should be able to limit or stop any immigration of any group that it likes to POGO !!
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What exactly is it you think Pogo stands for?  I just told you it's not an acronym.  Are you insane?
Click to expand...




Pogo said:


> Mojo2 said:
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> Darlene said:
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> SAYIT said:
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> 
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> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> There are a lot of Christian bigots in this thread.
> *Definition of bigot (n)*
> Bing Dictionary
> 
> *big·ot*
> [ bíggət ]
> 
> intolerant person: somebody with strong opinions, especially on politics, religion, or ethnicity, who refuses to accept different views
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen little in the way of Christian bigots in this thread but I see many who may be Christians whose eyes are wide open about the threat of radical Islamism and a couple who are wallowing in denial.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> I've been saying that the radical Muslims are the ones we should focus on, not the whole Muslim faith. What makes me think there are religious bigots within this thread are comments similar to "get rid of all the Muslims". That is raw bigotry.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Darlene, there is no way  on Earth yet devised to detect a radical Muslim.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> That's because you keep on making the same reasoning gaffe over and over and over expecting different results, even though it's been pointed out to you at least as long as you've been on this forum.  And that is trying to pretend that _political_ acts are religious acts.  That's why you're not going to find an answer; you're looking in the wrong _place_.
> 
> DUH.
Click to expand...


You sound as though you are speaking to someone with whom you've exchanged repeated posts on this matter.

I'm not that person.

Are you losing your faculties?


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## GHook93

Darlene said:


> True Islamic beliefs are anti-violence in nature, based on what I've read in my research.
> Its the Radicals who give Muslims a bad name.



Lol I hope that wasn't for a term paper! 

True Muslims are the radicals that seek sharia law and death to the infidels! That is why we have to destroy the death cult!


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## Freewill

Darlene said:


> Mojo2 said:
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> Luddly Neddite said:
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> Darlene said:
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> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
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> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So is the issue the past or the present? Do you judge the Christian world of today by the events of the past or the present and same with the Muslim world?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Present day christians are raping children and lying to hide the rapists.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Are you saying that the Bible endorses such behavior?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> The Bible doesn't endorse any behavior that causes harm to our fellow humans. Jesus walked among sinners and people who believed in many different things. Never did he say an unkind word or treat them badly.
> 
> A kind word turns away wrath.
Click to expand...


"Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

12And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. 13And He said to them, "It is written, 'MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED A HOUSE OF PRAYER'; but you are making it a ROBBERS' DEN."…


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## Freewill

Darlene said:


> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
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> 
> 
> 
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> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Such as the Westboro Baptist Church.
> Here's a big list of the victims of Christians: Christian Atrocities Victims of Christianity Catholic Church Inquisition Crusades
Click to expand...


See this type of stuff is what I was talking about, nothing productive.

Any way, what ATROCITY did the Westboro Baptist Church commit?  Yeah, I don't like what they do but does it rise to an atrocity such as 9/11 or beheading a journalist?

Lots of things happened hundreds of years ago that we have a hard time understanding how they were committed by the RCC or any Christian sect.  But I think it fair to keep the discussion in the here and now.


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## SAYIT

bodecea said:


> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> No...the Enlightenment was built despite Christianity....in fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers had to tread lightly in fear of religious repercussions.
Click to expand...

You mean despite the Church and most of those who contributed to the Enlightenment were - drum roll, please - CHRISTIANS!


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## pismoe

hey Freewill , good thinking and example where you ask and note that people may not like westboro Baptist church but what is the atrocity that they have actually  committed ??


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## Katzndogz

pismoe said:


> hey Freewill , good thinking and example where you ask and note that people may not like westboro Baptist church but what is the atrocity that they have actually  committed ??


They hurt people's feelings.  Liberals on the other hand, infiltrate funerals and steal what they can.

Cars Lined Up For Funeral Procession Broken Into Robbed www.wsbtv.com#-


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## C_Clayton_Jones

_Imagine a world without Muslims_

Imagine a world without Muslim haters, and their bizarre, unfounded, unwarranted, delusional, paranoid fear of Islam, where they see 'jihadists_' _behind every tree and hiding under every bed.


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## pismoe

think that correct Katzn , westboro hurts some peoples feeling but otherwise they are pretty benign .


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## Pogo

C_Clayton_Jones said:


> _Imagine a world without Muslims_
> 
> Imagine a world without Muslim haters, and their bizarre, unfounded, unwarranted, delusional, paranoid fear of Islam, where they see 'jihadists_' _behind every tree and hiding under every bed.



IOW imagine a world without paranoiacs and the snake oil salesmen that take advantage of their gullibility selling it to them in the form of social bigotry, exclusive religious doctrine and exclusive media myth memes.


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## Pogo

SAYIT said:


> bodecea said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> No...the Enlightenment was built despite Christianity....in fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers had to tread lightly in fear of religious repercussions.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> You mean despite the Church and most of those who contributed to the Enlightenment were - drum roll, please - CHRISTIANS!
Click to expand...


- by force.
And they broke free once they could.


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## Pogo

Freewill said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Such as the Westboro Baptist Church.
> Here's a big list of the victims of Christians: Christian Atrocities Victims of Christianity Catholic Church Inquisition Crusades
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See this type of stuff is what I was talking about, nothing productive.
> 
> Any way, what ATROCITY did the Westboro Baptist Church commit?  Yeah, I don't like what they do but does it rise to an atrocity such as 9/11 or beheading a journalist?
> 
> Lots of things happened hundreds of years ago that we have a hard time understanding how they were committed by the RCC or any Christian sect.  But I think it fair to keep the discussion in the here and now.
Click to expand...


Pretty hard to do that when you have bigots trying to justify themselves by crowing "hey, read the Quran!"  I don't think that was published last Spring.

And _your own previous post_ refers to a book even older...

Having it both ways: Priceless.


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## Freewill

Pogo said:


> Freewill said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dont Taz Me Bro said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rikurzhen said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> Imagine a world without Christians or any other religious belief system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your life would very likely be measurably more brutal and harsh if that had happened. The Enlightenment is built on a Christian foundation.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Christians over the past millenium have been guilty of their fair share of atrocities.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> Such as the Westboro Baptist Church.
> Here's a big list of the victims of Christians: Christian Atrocities Victims of Christianity Catholic Church Inquisition Crusades
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> See this type of stuff is what I was talking about, nothing productive.
> 
> Any way, what ATROCITY did the Westboro Baptist Church commit?  Yeah, I don't like what they do but does it rise to an atrocity such as 9/11 or beheading a journalist?
> 
> Lots of things happened hundreds of years ago that we have a hard time understanding how they were committed by the RCC or any Christian sect.  But I think it fair to keep the discussion in the here and now.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Pretty hard to do that when you have bigots trying to justify themselves by crowing "hey, read the Quran!"  I don't think that was published last Spring.
> 
> And _your own previous post_ refers to a book even older...
> 
> Having it both ways: Priceless.
Click to expand...


What the hell are we talking about?  Your fourth grade reading assignment or how people are acting today?


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## Darlene

The United States needs to stop acting like the world police in general. Sever ties with the UN and just live as one country. Why do you think so many countries dislike the United States?


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## Indofred

I'd rather like to imagine a world without Israel and America.
These two have caused more death and misery since 1945 than anyone else in world history, including Hitler.


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## Freewill

C_Clayton_Jones said:


> _Imagine a world without Muslims_
> 
> Imagine a world without Muslim haters, and their bizarre, unfounded, unwarranted, delusional, paranoid fear of Islam, where they see 'jihadists_' _behind every tree and hiding under every bed.



You mean a world where everyone thinks like a whack job liberal?


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## Pogo

Freewill said:


> C_Clayton_Jones said:
> 
> 
> 
> _Imagine a world without Muslims_
> 
> Imagine a world without Muslim haters, and their bizarre, unfounded, unwarranted, delusional, paranoid fear of Islam, where they see 'jihadists_' _behind every tree and hiding under every bed.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You mean a world where everyone thinks like a whack job liberal?
Click to expand...


You mean the wackjob Liberals who wrote this?





​Yeah.  Imagine that.


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## Freewill

Darlene said:


> The United States needs to stop acting like the world police in general. Sever ties with the UN and just live as one country. Why do you think so many countries dislike the United States?



In other words, it would be the entire world against the US?


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## Freewill

Pogo said:


> Freewill said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> C_Clayton_Jones said:
> 
> 
> 
> _Imagine a world without Muslims_
> 
> Imagine a world without Muslim haters, and their bizarre, unfounded, unwarranted, delusional, paranoid fear of Islam, where they see 'jihadists_' _behind every tree and hiding under every bed.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You mean a world where everyone thinks like a whack job liberal?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> You mean the wackjob Liberals who wrote this?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ​Yeah.  Imagine that.
Click to expand...


Wrong twice, not liberals and not whack jobs.


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## Darlene

Freewill said:


> Darlene said:
> 
> 
> 
> The United States needs to stop acting like the world police in general. Sever ties with the UN and just live as one country. Why do you think so many countries dislike the United States?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In other words, it would be the entire world against the US?
Click to expand...

I'm not saying that.
The more we act like the world police, the more enemies we make.


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## Mindful

> Why don't you form your own opinion by reading the Qur'an and the Hadith.



Tried it, but got bored stupid.


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