dorothea wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2017 9:11 amI'm surprised you defend 7th century child marriage.
Oh! I didn't expect you to retort with that.
Of course I am not defending anything, only telling you what you already know, child marriage was normative in times past. As I recall Dante was writing on his beloved Beatrice while she was yet but 11. Even today apparently one in five girls in Indonesia are wed by 11,
link.
But this brings up an important point already touched on this discussion, criticizing Islam from a position of great ignorance or from greater awareness.
I would put these as the top problems I have with Muslim, and I expect they are not well known even to many who are criticizing Islam:
- megaphones on mosques blaring on every block all day and night long so you can never get any peace and quiet even in your own home.
- circumcision of children, boys and girls.
- mass animal sacrifice.
God's law
What the heck is that? Are you some kind of Khawarij?
By contrast, the moral judgements of Jesus seem as universal and absolute now as they were then - possibly more enlightened than Christian morality has been until recently. (In John8 he refuses to condemn an adulteress who was about to be stoned. The present Pope has angered his cardinals by refusing to condemn a homosexual). Should not a prophet - in the sense of one who claims to open our eyes to God, not a fortune teller - be better behaved than Mohammed was?
I can honestly say I don't care much one way or the other about foreign Semitic religions either Islam or Christianity except insofar as they contain the underlying ancient spiritual traditions of the White race. I'm wanting to know more about Indo-European paganism, animism, or Western Aryan traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen; I'll look at Bede's
Ecclesiastical history of the English people, but not for what it's saying about Christianity but rather about pre-Christian spirituality. The Annunciation, the Trinity, and Jesus as the son of God are obviously pagan ideas, hence the Monophysite schism and ultimate rejection of European Christianity in favor of Islam by the Semites.
He started out trying to convert his fellow Jews and seems to have lost his temper, having failed, and got violent.
He was a gangster. Muslims were caravan raiders and pirates. Not a civilization that values productivity.
Eleven wives at any one time plus slaves. I would like to think he would have been dismayed by Islamic States similar behaviour, but I can't quite believe he would. Rape is hardly a crime in Saud, Pakistan and other such places.
If you rape another man's wife in Islam you're gonna be in big trouble.
Your other points - 5000 years of colonisation. The Jews have been there for maybe 3500 years and Islam for only the past 1300.
Jews got out for 2000 years and got a breath of fresh air.
As you know Islam was intolerant for much of that time -
Pact of Umar and so on, yes.
and provoked the crusades by stopping others from visiting ancient sites,
Yes.
though I believe the crusades were so shambolic and ineffectual they don't figure at all in local history.
It was not the first back-migration of Europeans into the Levant. We now know the Philistines were proto-Greeks coming down from the Aegean and Cyprus. This scene was probably the best of the whole film:
link. More recently Allenby entering Jerusalem in 1917. Or Bush trying to recover Iraq and Afghanistan for the West.
Can you really blame the past - even the distant past - for the present. Is it not that Islam, as Christianity once was is supremacist and sectarian: most Muslims die or are oppressed by fellow Muslims. Don't we all have a moral responsibility for our own actions? ('Our faults lie not in our stars but in ourselves' as Brutus, obviously an existentialist, put it.)
No, I have no moral responsibility for foreign peoples. Live and let live I expect is the magnanimous position to hold. As Trump said in his speech in Saudi Arabia, "our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship."
As to your suggestion that we get meaning from beliefs that may be true or not. If I've understood you right that is certainly a big philosophical question taking us way out of the realm of religion. Thanks again.
Yes, it doesn't really matter if Jesus was really crucified, or if he was swapped out with Simon of Cyrenica as Muslims later came to misinterpret sura 4:157. It's the meaning for us of the story.
No, this happens every now and then when some other forum collapses or expels members.