purplenose
Well-Known Member
Do you have a problem with freedom of speech?
Sri Lanka Easter Sunday Bomb Blasts
- Thread starter SWP's back
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Do you have a problem with freedom of speech?
SWP's back
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There isn’t freedom of speech on Bluemoon.
purplenose
Well-Known Member
Which despite you mostly disagreeing with my posts I am sure you would agree does the forum no favours at times with of course the greatest of respect to the BM powers that be.
Machiavelli
Well-Known Member
Not at all.
That’s why I don’t moan about passages in the Quran.
W
W
worsleyweb
Guest
You can’t debate terrorism and immigration issues in this country anymore. Anyone wanting to limit immigration or raising concerns about crime associated with immigration or indeed about terror issues is labelled a racist and a nutter.
Armchair Supporter
Well-Known Member
You dont even need to raise concerns to be labelled a Nazi by these loons. Guilt by association is good enough
purplenose
Well-Known Member
I am really not sure what the Quran has to do with it. Though I am assured by muslims who do that it does not instruct its readers to travel the globe blowing innocents up. Are you saying I have moaned about passages in the Quran? If so I think you are a touch confused.
Perhaps you just find it difficult to accept people have different views to yourself but are only able to respond to them by being dismissive, which of course tends to be a trait of many left leaning folk. In your case dispatching barbed borderline insults.
che_don_john
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I never said there was...
The question posed was: "What other religions use suicide bombers?" My response was that, whilst not bombers per se, the Japanese used kamakaze and other forms of suicide attacks in the name of their own religious doctrine. I thought it was an interesting question that warranted an attempt to answer it.
Nothing about innocents was mentioned in the original question or in my answer, as it was a discussion about divinely-inspired suicide attacks, not about who the victims of those attacks were. I thought that was pretty clear, but if it wasn't before then it should be now.
purplenose
Well-Known Member
Would the Japanese motivation to carry out these things be considered religion based? I would hesitate to describe it as such, more along the lines of extreme nationalism though of course their views on the emperor could be viewed as almost religious. likewise I guess the Viet cong with Ho Chi Minh and of course the ongoing dedication to Great leader Kim in North Korea who could no doubt find numerous willing suicide bombers.
ZenHalfTimeCrock
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At the moment, I am reading Ali Rizvi's The Atheist Muslim: a Journey from Religion to Reason.
Rizvi aligns himself with New Atheist authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and comedians like Bill Maher who is sharply and amusingly critical of faith in general.
My reason for making this post is because some of Rizvi's thinking is at least indirectly relevant to comments made in this thread.
For example, he takes the line that there is a difference between legitimate criticism of the beliefs that go to make up the faith (like any other ideological system they should be subjected to that process) and criticisms of Muslims themselves that amount to nothing more than 'anti-Muslim bigotry' e.g. all Muslims are closet terrorist sympathizers, moderate Muslims are just extremists in disguise.
From page 135 (the original statements are also italicized):
It is more important now than ever to challenge and criticize the doctrine of Islam.
And it is more important now than ever to protect and defend the rights of Muslims.
From page 137:
'Again, it is crucial to emphasize the difference between criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry. The first targets an ideology. The second targets human beings. This is an obvious, significant distinction, yet both are frequently lumped together under the unfortunate, reductive umbrella term' Islamaphobia'.
Rizvi is also critical of what he calls the 'Regressive Left' 'who have conflated protecting the rights of Muslims to believe what they want with protecting the beliefs themselves. This, in turn, empowers Islamists and despots who wish to perpetuate the beliefs that need to be criticized. They can continue to operate by labelling their critics as Islamaphobes.
One thing that I didn't know is that New Atheist literature is popular in Muslim countries. Unofficial translations of The God Delusion (and presumably God is not Great) get circulated under the radar and are appreciated because if their readers spoke out like Dawkins and Hitchens they might end of getting arrested or even murdered.
In the section that I have just started to read, Rizvi is attacking Dustin Hoffman lookalike and former brain munching US celebrity Muslim Reza Aslan's claim that, 'People don't derive their their values from their religion - they bring their values to their religion...Two individuals can look at the exact same text and come away with radically different interpretations. Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text.'
Full interview here:
https://www.thecut.com/2014/10/reza-aslan-on-what-the-new-atheists-get-wrong.html
And this explains the manner in which I introduced him.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4296404/CNN-presenter-Reza-Aslan-eats-HUMAN-BRAIN.html
Rizvi sees Aslan as an 'apologist' and thinks that he is being disingenuous to claim that actions like stoning adulterers, killing apostates, making sex slaves out of Yazidi women, and perpetrating utterly horrendous acts like the Sri Lanka bombings have nothing to do with the text itself.
Even though Rizvi's claim resonated with me right away, I am still mulling this over. My concern is that Rizvi might be too quick to dismiss Muslims who read contentious passages more liberally as apologists, as we saw with Aslan above. I am unhappy with that approach when it comes to well-known academics like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Asma Afsaruddin, and Tariq Ramadan. You guys may not have heard of them but they are - from what I can tell - trying to drag Islam into the 21st Century, and I suspect that this project might be more successful than that of Dawkins and Hitchens' aim of producing a religion-free world.
Of course, maybe what those Muslim academics are doing what the Islamists do: they have decided in advance what their attitudes are and seek to make the text conform to those preconceptions, which is actually what I understand Aslan to be claiming (though I haven't read the full interview yet).
One last thing: to define a faith primarily in terms of its sacred writings as Rizvi wants to is also possibly an error, one that the cover of this book seems to be drawing attention to:
That's two taboos challenged right there (the one about the representation of human figures and the one about drinking alcohol). This is not well-known but alcohol was and still is widely drunk in Islamic societies in spite of the Qur'an prohibiting this practice. The well-known 'wine poetry' of Abu Nuwas (who was a Muslim hellraiser not unlike Shane Macgowan and also famously bisexual) provides some evidence for this.
Anyway, apologies for going on a bit.
Rizvi aligns himself with New Atheist authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and comedians like Bill Maher who is sharply and amusingly critical of faith in general.
My reason for making this post is because some of Rizvi's thinking is at least indirectly relevant to comments made in this thread.
For example, he takes the line that there is a difference between legitimate criticism of the beliefs that go to make up the faith (like any other ideological system they should be subjected to that process) and criticisms of Muslims themselves that amount to nothing more than 'anti-Muslim bigotry' e.g. all Muslims are closet terrorist sympathizers, moderate Muslims are just extremists in disguise.
From page 135 (the original statements are also italicized):
It is more important now than ever to challenge and criticize the doctrine of Islam.
And it is more important now than ever to protect and defend the rights of Muslims.
From page 137:
'Again, it is crucial to emphasize the difference between criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry. The first targets an ideology. The second targets human beings. This is an obvious, significant distinction, yet both are frequently lumped together under the unfortunate, reductive umbrella term' Islamaphobia'.
Rizvi is also critical of what he calls the 'Regressive Left' 'who have conflated protecting the rights of Muslims to believe what they want with protecting the beliefs themselves. This, in turn, empowers Islamists and despots who wish to perpetuate the beliefs that need to be criticized. They can continue to operate by labelling their critics as Islamaphobes.
One thing that I didn't know is that New Atheist literature is popular in Muslim countries. Unofficial translations of The God Delusion (and presumably God is not Great) get circulated under the radar and are appreciated because if their readers spoke out like Dawkins and Hitchens they might end of getting arrested or even murdered.
In the section that I have just started to read, Rizvi is attacking Dustin Hoffman lookalike and former brain munching US celebrity Muslim Reza Aslan's claim that, 'People don't derive their their values from their religion - they bring their values to their religion...Two individuals can look at the exact same text and come away with radically different interpretations. Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text.'
Full interview here:
https://www.thecut.com/2014/10/reza-aslan-on-what-the-new-atheists-get-wrong.html
And this explains the manner in which I introduced him.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4296404/CNN-presenter-Reza-Aslan-eats-HUMAN-BRAIN.html
Rizvi sees Aslan as an 'apologist' and thinks that he is being disingenuous to claim that actions like stoning adulterers, killing apostates, making sex slaves out of Yazidi women, and perpetrating utterly horrendous acts like the Sri Lanka bombings have nothing to do with the text itself.
Even though Rizvi's claim resonated with me right away, I am still mulling this over. My concern is that Rizvi might be too quick to dismiss Muslims who read contentious passages more liberally as apologists, as we saw with Aslan above. I am unhappy with that approach when it comes to well-known academics like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Asma Afsaruddin, and Tariq Ramadan. You guys may not have heard of them but they are - from what I can tell - trying to drag Islam into the 21st Century, and I suspect that this project might be more successful than that of Dawkins and Hitchens' aim of producing a religion-free world.
Of course, maybe what those Muslim academics are doing what the Islamists do: they have decided in advance what their attitudes are and seek to make the text conform to those preconceptions, which is actually what I understand Aslan to be claiming (though I haven't read the full interview yet).
One last thing: to define a faith primarily in terms of its sacred writings as Rizvi wants to is also possibly an error, one that the cover of this book seems to be drawing attention to:
That's two taboos challenged right there (the one about the representation of human figures and the one about drinking alcohol). This is not well-known but alcohol was and still is widely drunk in Islamic societies in spite of the Qur'an prohibiting this practice. The well-known 'wine poetry' of Abu Nuwas (who was a Muslim hellraiser not unlike Shane Macgowan and also famously bisexual) provides some evidence for this.
Anyway, apologies for going on a bit.
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