<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="/link.php?id=14449" target="_blank">Speakout: Muslims must both denounce, renounce their violent hadiths</a> (click to view)

<strong>Category:</strong> <a href="/modules.php?name=News_Links&file=category&catid=16" target="_blank">Misc World</a>
<strong>Posted By: </strong> <a href="/modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=userinfo&username=USCAdad" target="_blank">USCAdad</a>
<strong>Date: </strong> 2006-10-07 11:48:48

   

"Americans should consider Muslims to be moderates, and Islam a peaceful faith, only if, in English and in Arabic, Muslims clearly denounce their violent hadiths and strike them from the books that educate their next generation."

And yet Jews and Christians still have in their religious texts, for example, that if a clergyman's daughter sleeps around, she should be burned to death (Leviticus 21:9). In Judaism, burning at the stake was later ruled out as too disfiguring, so the method was changed to pouring molten lead down the throat of the condemned woman (Sanhedrin 52a).

Of course nobody does that, but the author, who apparently supports himself by giving anti-Islam lectures, does not pursue that line of reasoning, and blames the books.

So -- shall we ban the Old Testament and the Talmud also?

   

The way I was raised (Baptist), there's a break between the Old and the New Testaments, represented by the tearing of the Veil of the Temple. I'm not sure how the Jews deal with it. It does seem obvious that both religions have found some way to reinterperate their more disturbing texts. I think the call for Muslims to do the same is reasonable. I don't require them to edit their prophet, to strike the words from record, but some change in understanding is required for Islam to integrate into 21st Century society.

My fear, is that it's just not that easy. Like liberating Russia, just because a people have been freed from an oppressive system, doesn't mean they inately understand traditions and freedoms, that we in the West, perceive as fundamental.

   

You know, you look an AWFUL lot like Johnny Depp....has anyone told you that?

I agree with the title of this thread but certainly not the altering or manipulating of ones religous text. Thats not right. But I will certainly agree with them denouncing these acts of hate. And not taking things as literal as they appear in thier religious text. Like in the bible and like MOST christians.

   

I think a better word might be "ignore," although it can be pretty selective at times. The Old Testament says that it's an abomination for a man to cut the hair around his temples, or for someone to eat shellfish, which is exactly what it says about male homosexuality. Yet you never hear of people calling for condemnation of those with haircuts, or those who like seafood. It's all very selective, people arbitrarily ignore whatever they feel like ignoring.

Moderate Christians ignore virtually all of the Old Testament as anything other than historical background, moderate Jews ignore parts of the Torah, and moderate Muslims ignore parts of the Koran. And it's been that way for centuries. I remember reading that Thomas Jefferson went so far as to go through his Bible, blacking out the parts he considered to be hogwash. Even extreme fundamentalists tend to do that to some extent.


Well, yes, it would be great if they would all ignore the sucky parts of their religious texts. It would be great if Christians, Jews, and others would uniformly do that, too. But all you can do is to try to encourage the attitudes, unless you censor religious texts, it can never be enforced. That's why, in places like Morocco, they are fighting terrorism by working against illiteracy and the most extreme poverty -- those with educations, futures, and a grip on secular reality don't seem very inclined to blow themselves up.

   

Maybe that should be the slogan we should use:

"Smart people dont blow themselves up!"

Kinda sounds funny, but it seems the more intelligent society gets the further they stray from religion. It was almost like a fallback of our lack of knowledge. The smarter we get, the less we rely on the unknown. So I suspect it stands to reason that the more we know the less we would want to kill ourselves in the name of something that is "beyond comprehension".

   

How can you educate against hatred? I haven't seen many Christians slapping bombs on their children, or Jews for that matter. Comparing today's Jews and Christians is mute they are nothing like Extreme Islam. Nothing. We need laws put in place that disallows Religions to force there Beliefs and Ethos into our Governments, and while they are enacting those laws how about banning Lobbiest and special interest groups from forcing their Ethos on the rest of society. I want a government of the people for the people, not just the "Chosen' few who scream the loudest.

   

Easy, we do it all the time. Parents teach it to their kids, and kindergarten teachers teach it to their students. It's absolutely routine.

Nor have I heard of Muslims having a "Children's Crusade," styles vary.

It all depends on where you are. In Lebanon, the Christian militias were every bit as bloodthirsty and genocidal as the Shia, Sunnis or Druze -- at times, arguably more so. Most Jews and Christians live in societies where we've spent centuries working our way from susperstition and barbarism into -- hmm -- less obvious superstition and barbarism. But you average Afghan is an illiterate who tries to survive on a few hundred dollars a year. We've provided a medieval society with 20th and 21st century weapons, and taught a tiny elite from those places how to make their own. Unfortunately, we forgot to teach them how to build a just and rational society. Woops.

Agreed! Government should ignore religion!

I basically agree, although it gets sticky when it runs into the concept of freedom of expression. We need to find a good balance where corruption is low but freedom of speech is still high.

Or the "chosen" many, for that matter. Giving majorities as much freedom as possible without letting them trample on the rights of minorities is a constant challenge. Fortunately, many Canadians are good-hearted enough to do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

   

I believe that before we can expect Muslims themselves to seriously speak out against the violence perpetrated by some in their religious community, we must first insist that the liberals of the western democracies join in condemning islamofascism for what it is and stop citing the policies of Israel and the USA as justification for the actions of these muslim extremists.

   

Yes, of course. We in the West bear no responsibility for creating the conditions that encourage extremism in the Muslim world. We would never interfere in the way Muslims would choose to govern themselves. We would never support murderous thugs, like Reza Pahlavi or Saddam Hussein, to further our own interests, nor would we ally ourselves with despots and tyrants who victimize and exploit their citizens to strengthen their illegitimate powers. Nor would we topple governments to install new leaders who would do our bidding. Nor would we allow our religious and political leaders to call for the assassination of foreign leaders or the destruction of their countries, when those countries do not threaten us.

And of course, the policies of Israel and the U.S. have nothing to do with fomenting anti-Western sentiments in the Middle East.

[hr]

It must be nice to live in dreamworld where no-one is responsible for their actions because actions have no consequence.

   

Are you sure you meant the Talmud, and not the Torah? The Talmud is a commentary and interpretation of Hebrew law, but it is not the law. And most non-Jews would be shocked at how the Talmud "instructs" that goi should be treated, or that those instructions are an essential part of Rabbinical training. Unfortunately, the contents of that book more than qualify as "promotion of hatred", but, fortunately "anti-hate" laws only apply when the crime is committed against Jews.

   

Your view Gun Plumber (I can’t believe you were ever in the military with you’re anti-western views).

My take is that we supported some despots in the Cold War, that much is true.
Just like we were allied with the Soviets to fight the Nazi’s.

We supported, and still do, Israel. Home to the remnants of a minority who were murdered in the millions and now have the only free and democratic country in the Middle East, surrounded by despots whose only unifying factor is wanting to kill the jews, just like the Nazi’s did before them.

We did not fly airliners into our buildings or blow up busses and trains full of innocents.

We do not force our women to walk behind us, deny them education or the right to drive a vehicle.

We do not outlaw same sex marriage or measure beard lengths to denote piety.

We have experienced our renaissance, age of enlightenment, responsible government and we have social justice for all, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual preference, while the Muslim world has no democracy and is socially still in the middle ages.

We have democratically elected governments that listen to at least a portion of our societies and if they don’t, we vote in another government.

We have millions of Muslims leaving their countries of birth and clamouring to move to the west they so despise, and we now have those same immigrants wishing to impose their stone-age laws of the sharia on our society.

We have free speech.

We have freedom.


And we will fight these facists you support. We will fight and we will win.

   

[B] Amen brother, I couldn't of said it better. Carpe diem.

   

No, I meant the Talmud. While Reform Jews don't take the Talmud much more seriously than, say, your average Unitarian takes the Old Testament, Orthodox Jews do take it very seriously, and faithfully follow the Daf Yomi program of reading the Talmud from beginning to end, one page a day. Conservative Jews take a middle course, and rabbinical students of all three branches study the Talmud.

The story is that God transmitted the law to Moses, and that the core ideas were written down, but that the understanding of the law was passed on orally, from rabbi to rabbi, until the Talmud was put into written form some centuries later. Some Jewish rabbis have taken the position that the Talmud (which is also referred to as the "Oral Torah") was given to Moses in its entirety, others that God gave Moses the guidelines by which the Talmud was to be developed. A little bit like if you considered the Torah to be the constitution, and the Talmud all of the court rulings which interpreted the law and made sense of it -- an important thing when one considers how often religious texts seem to contradict themselves.

And if I said "the Old Testament and the Torah," that would be redundant, since they consist mainly of the same texts.

And yes, you're quite right, the Talmud is full of hate for other religions, including very specific attacks on Christianity. Some of them are so vile that I wouldn't be willing to post them, but one might read Abodah Zarah for general statements and Gittin 57 to see how God punishes Christians. There are certainly many conciliatory statements in both the Torah and the Talmud, and some of the more brutal attacks on Christianity have been blunted by changing the terminology to make things vague, e.g., changing 'minuth' (Christianity) to some other word.

But most religions do that, don't they? Regard the heathen as merely inferior, but the heretic as completely deserving of hatred? Of the three religions which worship Jehovah -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- they have all said much fouler things against each other than against any non-Semitic religions.