What causes muslims to be violent

[Immanuel Can]

Terrorists are by definition not highly educated.

the 12 men in the 9-11 attacks were all college educated.

I have rebutted this objection before . An educated man is not a terrorist, cannot be a terrorist, because an educated man is self aware regarding his own feelings and motivations, the feelings and rights of all other men, and the historicity of ideas.

I see what you're doing. You're just defining "educated" as "educated in the way Belinda expects." And you're right...under that definition, practically nobody but Belinda is "educated.

But on a normal definition, the 9-11 terrorists were certainly educated. And that's the only point worth making here.

[Immanuel Can]

No my best case is Vietnam...

That's no better.

Where, in the claims of Christ, do you find allowance for Vietnam?

You might ask that of the priests that accompanied all American troops whilst the napalmed the fuck out of little children.

Oh. Now, I thought the LRC example was funny, but this is a whole new level of hilarity.

"Priests," you say? So plausibly Catholics, or maybe high Anglicans? I can see them now...pushing through the Tet Offensive, clad in burlap and sandals, their tonsures gleaming in the sun, rounding up helpless Vietnamese children and strangling them with their rosary beads....or maybe hovering over maps of the Vietnamese north, plotting the extermination of whole villages, while helpless Western secular generals stand by and wring their hands, and the Atheist Communist hordes tremble in their underground bunkers.

The Catholics are coming!

Sculpy, you are the funniest...honestly. A person can't make up a theory that bad. You have to be trying really, really hard to say anything that bizarre.

[Sculptor]

That's no better.

Where, in the claims of Christ, do you find allowance for Vietnam?

You might ask that of the priests that accompanied all American troops whilst the napalmed the fuck out of little children.

The Catholics are coming!

And god help the choir boys' but holes!

[Immanuel Can]

Even just a century ago Schrodinger ran into trouble with his Christian publisher for suggesting we are all God.

He probably should perhaps have run into trouble with his logician instead.

I notice the 'wink' but must comment that I see no reason to doubt his logic. It seems spot on to me.

You're convinced you're the Supreme Being? I find that...hard to digest.

And, of course, there's a second problem: that in order to include other "paths," the inclusivist has to deny that when those paths say exclusive things, that they can be right. So when, say, a inclusivists claims his religion gets the truth about Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. right, and the exclusivists in those religions get their own religion wrong, then he's excluding their religion.

Think of 'path' as meaning 'method' and perhaps the issue is clearer. There are good methods and bad, effective and ineffective, personally suitable and unsuitable. A Zenist may argue there is no path. The issue is linguistic.

No, it's not linguistic. It's a different value judgment.

Either exclusivist religions are all wrong, and are not on the "paths" at all, or they are alternate "paths." It's a very straightforward choice, really.

So again, it's not actually inclusive: it's imperialistic, instead. It denies and reconstructs other religions, in order to absorb them into its own meta-narrative. It does not at all accept Judaism as Conservative or Hassidic Judaism, or Islam as Radical Islam, or Christianity's claim that Jesus is THE Way, THE Truth and THE Life." All those sorts of religion, the inclusivist actually rejects.

I can't follow you at all an this point.

It's not very hard.

It means that pretending "inclusivists" are not really inclusive at all. They exclude all those religions that are exclusive in their truth claims.

It further means that even those the inclusiviists purport to include in their idea of universal religion are not really the religions they claim to include. They're an artificial, watered down, inclusivity-flavoured version of the real religion.

If you include everyone than you are an imperialist, if that's how you want to look at it.

Right. But if you exclude anyone, then you're not a religious universalist anymore.

That means, essentially, that religious universalism is fake.

I agree.

But you shouldn't. Not if you really believe in Sufism, that is.

Why not? I've tried to explain this and am not quite sure what the issue is.

Well, don't you believe that Sufism is in some sense "better" than other religions?

Don't you think, for example, that an Ultraconservative Muslim would be better to be a Sufi? Or don't you think a Nazi Occultist would be? And do you think that those who follow the Jewish or Christian paths are better or worse than if they left those paths for the path of universal Sufism?

Or do you simply say, "Sufism is for me alone: nobody is ever better for choosing Sufism"?

Why would you believe in a variation of a religion that you don't think is in some way "better" than the alternatives? That would make no sense.

I don't believe in any religion. Some teachers are more knowledgeable/helpful than others, some methods are more effective, some paths more suitable, etc, depending on where we are starting from, our temperament etc. We learn the laws of motion by reference to Newton. Later we learn that things are not so simple, but Newton is still a good 'path'.

But isn't Einstein a "better" one? And wouldn't you happily tell a Newtonian that his physics are outdated, and should be set aside for better theories?

Even more importantly, what criteria do you use when you call a teacher "knowledgeable/helpful/effective/suitable"? You must have in mind some meta-system of belief that provides you with those criteria -- otherwise you would be powerless to recognize them when they appeared, if they did.

So the start is fixed by where a person begins. The finish is fixed. But for some reason, we are to think the middle can be infinitely variable? I think you'd need to explain how that works. A line tethered at two ends has very little flexibility in the middle, without simply being off-course.

Imagine a fly trying to find the exact centre of a large sphere starting from a point on the surface. It might wander about forever or go straight there.

But "wandering forever" would be bad, no? So some fly-paths are better than others. Some, in fact, think they never lead to the exact centre, are not "paths" to it at all. They're just endless meanderings.

It is only necessary to go in search of this deep truth.

This is highly imperialistic.

If this is the case, then no Muslim, no Jew, no Christian, no animist, no Atheist, and nobody of any either ideological or religious orientation actually knows what they are doing. They've all missed this "deep truth" that only the Buddhist can tell them about.

Or is there some sense in which you still propose to accept their actual claims...like the claims of those many Muslims who insist, as per the shahadah or confession of 'faith,' that Mohammed is the final 'prophet,' or those Christians who accept Jesus's claims that He is the exclusive way to God? Do you simply dismiss all such claims, or what do you make from them?

We'd have to deal with one claim at a time. There's no blanket answer.

Well, pick one of those two, and say what you make of it. Are the Muslims lying? Are the Christians all wrong?

Well, let's simplify: how do you avoid excluding exclusivists? And what do you do with the exclusive claims of some religions? Let those be the next questions.

Can I suggest that you post this question as a separate post.

It's actually a pretty simple question. What do you do? You can speak personally.

...there is no important difference between Christianity and Taoism,

I would definitely say that's not true. I can list significant differences. So could any knowledgeable Taoist, I'm sure. And he might well be quite insulted if I told him, "Your Taoism has nothing to offer that all other religions don't also offer." And why shouldn't he be insulted? I'd essentially have said to him, "Your religion is nothing special."

I did not say Taosim has nothing to offer that all religions have to offer, and it is exactly the opposite of my view. I said 'significant difference', meaning that there is no difference in the reality that is described by Taoism and Christianity.

Well, most Christians would disagree. So would I.

Wouldn't I actually be more respectful to say to him, "Your religion is different from mine. I see that. It has different values, precepts, ethics and purposes. And I see the difference. I am not going to try to pretend you are just another variety of Christian,' but rather note the differences and say that I hope you change your mind"? For in that case, I might be telling him, "I don't believe in your way," but at least I'm not telling him, "Your way is nothing special." That seems ultimately insulting.

What I would say would depend on which religion we're talking about and the person's existing view of it. I don't have a religion so the question is moot.

Just use the term you prefer: "ideology"? "belief"? "path"? I'll take any of them.

I've read the Tao te Ching and the Dhammapada. I confess I find that they are nothing like Christianity. At least, they are like no kind of Christianity that most Christians would ever call "Christian." I find them quite different, quite distinct. And I could point to many specifics that show they are, I would say.

Yes, this is true, But the view I'm endorsing is not the view of most Christians.

Well, I agree. It's not the view of Christians generally.

But then, what you're talking about is not an inclusive, permissive, accepting kind of view at all, is it? It rejects Christianity as most Christians understand it, you say. And I suspect it also rejects most religions entirely. What it claims to include (even when, as in the poem, it uses the right labels) it actually excludes -- namely all religions that claim to have any reference to a special, exclusive and unique core of truth.

All this to say: are you sure your "view" is anywhere near so generous, so accepting, so inclusive as you have perhaps been led to think it is? It seems to me very imperious. For while I, in my admittedly less inclusive view, would quite plainly say that other "religions" have missed the right the path, I would never be so arrogant as to try to tell them that the whole lot of them don't know what they're really doing, and should apply to me for the "deep truth" of what their own religion really means.

So there seems a real problem here.

[Immanuel Can]

And god help the choir boys' but holes!

That is a Catholic issue, for sure. Most Christians do not have priests, and only the Catholics compel "celibacy," which is the source of this sort of trouble.

[Sculptor]

And god help the choir boys' but holes!

That is a Catholic issue, for sure. Most Christians do not have priests, and only the Catholics compel "celibacy," which is the source of this sort of trouble.

Christians of all persuasions are the cause of all the world's greatest wars.
The catalogue of violence is beyond anything Islam has done in the last 200 years.

[Immanuel Can]

Christians of all persuasions are the cause of all the world's greatest wars.
The catalogue of violence is beyond anything Islam has done in the last 200 years.

There could not possibly be a "statistic" that is more wrong. Really, it would be hard to imagine one. And in responding, I'll refer only to secular, academic sources...unlike your made up stuff.

Source: The Encyclopedia of War...three volumes.

In the last century alone, secular and Atheist regimes killed, by mild estimates, over 140 million human beings...more than all the human beings killed in all wars of any kind in all the centuries before...combined!

Statistically, there is a 52% chance that the Atheist head of a regime will kill at least 200,000 of his own people.

Now, here are the real statistics on religious wars.

All religious wars combined, throughout all of human history, judged by the most generous interpretation of "religion" (meaning that anything that even potentially could be counted as a religious war was included) make up not more than 8% of history's wars.

That's 7 point some percent...around 7.8, actually.

Of that 7. some percent, half the deaths were in Islamic conquests and wars. That means that all the rest combined...Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, the whole bunch...were, at most, responsible for less than 4% of the deaths.

By any fair measure...any..."religion" is a very minor cause of wars. And without any doubt at all, by far and away, the most homicidal creed in history is...Atheism.

There's the truth, Sport.

[Averroes]

No my best case is Vietnam...

That's no better.

Where, in the claims of Christ, do you find allowance for Vietnam?

You might ask that of the priests that accompanied all American troops whilst the napalmed the fuck out of little children.

You are right when you said that some Christians, or rather those who claimed themselves to be Christians, have been and still are producing the most violence. You already presented the facts and these also known to everyone. Many intelligent people who were once Christians, when they learned about the history of Christianity, they left it immediately! So much they were disgusted by the historical violence of the Christians. Of course in the West, you won't hear of those because as you pertinently pointed out, when Christians do atrocious things then either, sometimes, they are suddenly not Christians anymore or, most often it's then conveniently for them not considered violence!

Nietzsche, among many others, did not buy into this nonsensical double standards. As you may know, Nietzsche started his studies to become a Christian minister. But about a year into his studies he left Christianity and became the most virulent critic of Christianity! Why you might ask? Well, he learned about the history of Christianity! There is an interesting passage of Nietzsche that I think you will be interested to read. In one of his books, the Anti-Christ, he wrote the following, which sheds some light about his disgust for his former religion:

• "Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (—I do not say by what sort of feet—) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin—because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!… The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust—a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.”—What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich…. Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be won…. The German noble, always the “Swiss guard” of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church—but well paid…. Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious…. Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption…. Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not…. “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t make out how a German could ever feel Christian….”

As he stated in the above quote, Nietzsche rightly considered Christianity to be one of the two greatest means of corruption.
But to Islam, he gave peace and friendship. He was no doubt an intelligent man. By the way, Nietzsche was from the Protestant branch of Christianity. And he despised his former religion as much as the other main branch. Both were great means of corruptions for him. He did not fall into the trap of choosing between the lesser of the two great corruptions. He just intelligently outright rejected both. And with great eloquence delighting us with the above quoted passage. Genius move in my humble opinion.

But anyway, this is not the reason I am interjecting!
The reason I am posting is in relation to the interesting question you were asked. You were presented with the following question:

Where, in the claims of Christ, do you find allowance for Vietnam?

Your answer was good but did not address the question head on. Please, allow me to give you a decisive reply which cannot be questioned or even objected by a Christian without rejecting Christianity!

May be next time you are asked this question by a Christian, you could then just quote the Bible as the following Biblical verses (among many many others) and be done with it. But now, I doubt you will be asked this question again!

It is reported by an unknown writter in the Bible that biblical Jesus said the following:

• But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them--bring them here and kill them in front of me.'(Luke 19:27)

Biblical Jesus is also alleged by the same unknown writter to have been litterally a universal hate preacher:

• “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.(Luke 14:26)

And there are a lot more of this in their Bible and that explains their hatred and violence against not only other innocent human beings among them many women and children, but also against themselves. Now whenever I witness Christians spreading and preaching hate, I am not even shocked anymore, as I know where it's coming from. It is their religion and their way of life to spread hate and corruption. This is what their book commands them to do. Vietnam, Irak and so many others that you already mentioned; all this is all according to their scriptures. In their propaganda they spin this into Christian "love" and "salvation"! And don't anyone dare call that violence! Fortunately, this doesn't work anymore. That's why Christianity is on the decline. Some are still fighting this lost battle to keep it afloat by drawing attention away from themselves. But it doesn't work anymore. Churches are closing and some are being converted into nightclubs. Some others are being converted into mosques delighting an ever increasing number of converts to Islam from Christianity. People are more informed in general nowadays.

[Sculptor]

Christians of all persuasions are the cause of all the world's greatest wars.
The catalogue of violence is beyond anything Islam has done in the last 200 years.

There could not possibly be a "statistic" that is more wrong. Really, it would be hard to imagine one. And in responding, I'll refer only to secular, academic sources...unlike your made up stuff.

Source: The Encyclopedia of War...three volumes.

In the last century alone, secular and Atheist regimes killed, by mild estimates, over 140 million human beings...more than all the human beings killed in all wars of any kind in all the centuries before...combined!

Statistically, there is a 52% chance that the Atheist head of a regime will kill at least 200,000 of his own people.

Now, here are the real statistics on religious wars.

All religious wars combined, throughout all of human history, judged by the most generous interpretation of "religion" (meaning that anything that even potentially could be counted as a religious war was included) make up not more than 8% of history's wars.

That's 7 point some percent...around 7.8, actually.

Of that 7. some percent, half the deaths were in Islamic conquests and wars. That means that all the rest combined...Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, the whole bunch...were, at most, responsible for less than 4% of the deaths.

By any fair measure...any..."religion" is a very minor cause of wars. And without any doubt at all, by far and away, the most homicidal creed in history is...Atheism.

There's the truth, Sport.

What a poor thinker you are.
Here we are comparing Christians and Muslims and for some reason you muddy the waters with what you are characterising as "atheist" regimes, what ever that is supposed to be.
Really.
You need to get a grip on yourself mate.

[Immanuel Can]

You are right when you said that some Christians, or rather those who claimed themselves to be Christians, have been and still are producing the most violence.

Ummm...no. Not even close to historically true.

[Immanuel Can]

Here we are comparing Christians and Muslims and for some reason you muddy the waters with what you are characterising as "atheist" regimes, what ever that is supposed to be.

You were the one who wanted to talk about ideologies that cause wars. I just told you the truth. Atheism's number 1 by far.

And I'm not "characterizing" them as Atheist...they identified themselves that way.

Don't you know any 20th Century history at all?

[Sculptor]

Here we are comparing Christians and Muslims and for some reason you muddy the waters with what you are characterising as "atheist" regimes, what ever that is supposed to be.

You were the one who wanted to talk about ideologies that cause wars. I just told you the truth. Atheism's number 1 by far.

And I'm not "characterizing" them as Atheist...they identified themselves that way.

Don't you know any 20th Century history at all?

False there has never been a war fought for, or in the interests of promoting atheism.

Not that is relevant in a discussion about how violent Muslims are supposed to be.
If it were the case then that would only make my position stronger.

[Sculptor]

Some years ago Tony Blair and George Bush got on their knees to the CHRISTIAN GOD.
They asked for guidance concerning the proposed invasion or Iraq and they got their answer.

Having lied, and cheated and falsified information they were now equipped to follow God's plan.

What followed was a conflict whose repercussions are still being felt by the people of Iraq and several nations that bordered it.

As a direct result of their Holy War, or Crusade as Bush called it, more than 400,000 (conservative estimate) deaths occurred. With many more lives ruined. Many estimates more than double that number
US military deaths was in excess of 4000, with 32000 wounding.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

[quote="Immanuel Can" post_id=471842 time=1600375579 user_id=9431]
[quote=Sculptor post_id=471836 time=1600374871 user_id=17400]
Here we are comparing Christians and Muslims and for some reason you muddy the waters with what you are characterising as "atheist" regimes, what ever that is supposed to be.[/quote]
You were the one who wanted to talk about ideologies that cause wars. I just told you the truth. Atheism's number 1 by far.

And I'm not "characterizing" them as Atheist...they identified [i]themselves [/i]that way.

Don't you know any 20th Century history at all?
[/quote]

The only reason Stalin's totalitarian regime promoted atheism was because he hated and coveted the power that the Church had. It was a political manoeuvre. It doesn't even mean that he and the top brass were necessarily 'atheist'. I wouldn't have thought that a so-called 'atheist' would study for the priesthood.
But you are stuck in your religio views and it's like trying to knock sense into a brick. You keep saying the same thing over and over again like a stuck record.

Some people are just a-superstitious. They have other interests and are simply not interested in religion and worshipping sky daddies.

[Averroes]

You are right when you said that some Christians, or rather those who claimed themselves to be Christians, have been and still are producing the most violence.

Ummm...no. Not even close to historically true.

We are using different history books and logical systems, that's why we disagree. If you agree, I propose that we synchronize ourselves to get a shared common ground of meaning for any further purposeful discussion. For a start, I am not into mysticism. According to the standard English dictionary, mysticism comes from the verb to mystify which means: to make somebody confused because they do not understand something. And stay far from nonsense. For example, may I ask you whether you believe if Jesus is God or not? Many Christians believe Jesus is God, but nowhere in the Bible available nowadays did biblical Jesus said that he was God. In fact, in many verses in the Bible, biblical Jesus made clear distinctions between him and God. So even though, I am reading the same book as the Christians, yet we are having radically different understanding from reading the book! If you don't want to discuss that, it's okay I would understand.