As a non-Christian and non-Muslim, I am often the target of offensive religious bigotry. In my journey away from Christianity I was mildly interested in Islam, given the visibility of the Nation Of Islam and my admiration of Malcolm X. However; my studies soon revealed that going from Christianity to Islam was no better ideologically from staying with Christianity. Today I stumbled across a blog post from one John Oberle who is self described as: " A practitioner of old school Okinawan martial arts in the Shorin Ryu Shorinkan. A lieutenant in the US Air Force. A staunch patriot. A solid conservative. A Catholic. All of these define me, but I'm a blogger too. I am apparently part of the vast right-wing blog echo chamber. chamber. chamber. chamber." Political and military leanings aside and constant focus on Christianity and apparent blind support of Israel, his report is very instructive on some of my issues with Islam (and please do not post comments about Islam means peace...)
Quote:
3. There are two kinds of jihad, one is defense and one is combatting the self. Defeating the Self is greater.
[Mohammed certainly doesn't think so. As far as defensive war goes, it was Muslims who conquered 2/3 of the known Christian World before the Crusades even started...
"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush"
This comes from Koran 9.5 which a great many Islamic scholars state abrogates and replaces the peaceful verses...either way, there are a great many more violent verses. The accepted principle of abrogation in Islam essentially goes like this: If Mohammed forgot something, he was divinely inspired to forget. If someone reminded him, he was divinely inspired to do so. If he remembered, he was divinely inspired. Or, he could get a new revelation that simply replaced the old one. In this case, the later verses abrogate the earlier...and the Verse of the Sword, as it is called, abrogates at least 124 peaceful verses...
9. When asked about peace and the myth of religiously inspired violence, he said that he wished we could just start over and erase the past, starting with the Crusades and through the Spanish Inquisition.
[Oh, so does that mean he wishes to keep the violent expansion of jihad before the Crusades which took over 2/3 of the Christian world with 3 choices: convert, submit to jizya and dhimmi status, or die? For the record, the Koran says that non-converts must be brought low to a state of submission and humiliation. So, keeping the aforementioned violence and persecution in Jerusalem, the 4 1/2 centuries of continual warfare against the Christian world, the crippling of the Byzantine Empire, the invasion of Spain and encroachments in the rest of Europe, the massacre of thousands of Christians during the Muslim invasion of Syria in 630s, the entire wiping out of villages and plundering of monasteries all across the Fertile Crescent and Asia Minor, the slaughter and enslavement of Christian North Africa, and the outright unprovoked armed spread of Islam? Seems like an awfully strange way of wiping the slate clean.]
Nuf Posted.
Link:
http://bujutsublogger.blogspot.com/2006/01/interfaith-dialogue-report.html
(17 years of informed commentary)
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