the great religious debate

i’m moving a conversation that was happening in this thread ([url]Is this possible ?]) to here, because it was getting horribly off topic

yeah, they probably did. that doesn’t mean that’s WHY they did it, that’s only the justification to sanctify their motives. please pay attention to what you’re rebutting against

give me a passage from the koran that says that, i can give you one from the bible that says all non-christians are going to hell. everybody thinks their religion is the best, what’s your point ???

if i told somebody that if they killed another i would give them ice cream, should we say that ice cream is the cause of murder ??? no, the person pulling the strings is to blame, it’s the puppetmaster whose motives we should be looking at. look at the emperor of japan, what drove him, not the people he brainwashed to achieve his ends, that’s far too simplistic

i have yet to see you make a valid argument for that

islam is the most violent religion ??? !!! on what are you basing that outrageous claim ??? islam is NOT the only religion whose adherents have forcibly converted others to their way. but maybe you’re right… i’m sure if i did a search on google right now, i would be hard pressed to find a factual account of say a christian committing any such atrocities… oh waitaminute… what’s this?

https://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h17-emp.html

read a book :roll:

Great example oneiromancer! Christianity has done so much more atrocities towards non-believers than any other religion (read about the Inquisition for instance). Religion is not poison, but it can be misused by people as an excuse to gain power or to justify their actions. Islamic fundamentalism for example.
But what’s the cause of this extreme behaviour? I think it has to do with the way Western culture and its ideas govern large parts of the world. Western governments tend to express their ideas as the most valuable ones, superior to non-Western cultures. The Islam world needs to listen to Western culture, and not the other way round. This seems to be the general tendency, and I think this forms the main breeding ground for resistance, which may ultimately grow into fundamentalism. Western culture has taken the role of a crusader, thereby influencing non-Western cultures on a very subtle level, in order to integrate our way of living in non-Western societies. Ofcourse not everyone is accepting this… and when they react with terrorist attacks, then we’re utterly shocked…
Instead of going to war against these terrorists, we should better remove the breeding ground of fundamentalism by stepping down of our throne and cooperate at a much deeper level with non-Western cultures, in every possible way. Imo :smile:

There is no doubt that Christianity has had it’s share of initiating violence including the Jewish religion. But I was referring to todays age when it appears to me that the Islamics are bent on violence and forcing their religion on people whether or not they want it. For example: look at the facts-Isn’t it true that the Islams are fighting the Jews in the Mideast, fighting the Hindus in India , fighting the Russians in Chechnya, fighting the Chinese in China, fighting with the americans and even different Islamic sects fighting each other and I haven’t mentioned all the areas around the world they’re fighting in. This is because the Islamic founder called Mohammed himself was a warrior as for example when he led an army into Medina to capture the city. Look around the world. Is there any country or religion the Islams approve of other than their own?

You’re seeing it too much black-white. 99% of the Muslims around the world are innocent followers of the Islam. And they do it with passion and dedication. Anything wrong with that? :smile: Too often people become biased by this way of active religious practice… The true Islamic fundamentalists have a distorted vision of Islam and the Quran, and they’re only a very small minority within the Islamic society. Unfortunately people tend to extrapolate the actions of these small splinter groups to the whole Islam.
You might be right in a sense, but whatever Islam has done the past fifty years, it’s still very little if you compare it with the outrageous behaviour of the christian church during the last 2000 years.
And isn’t it true that America is going to war partially because of the megalomanic ideas of an ultra neo-conservative group of fundamental christians surrounding Bush? Their share in the beginning of every war America has led the last fifty years has been documented very well. Fundamentalism isn’t restricted to Islam, but is also rooted in the highest governmental levels of that same country which fights its war against terror, and the underlying fundamentalism. If that ain’t hypocritical…

Funny enough it’s the same people that say your not a XX your going to a bad place that only follow their own chosen religion when it suits them. Like religious debates. But most of the time they are breaking their own religious rules. :confused:

I’ve heard alot of violence from Christian based religions, as well as pretty much every religion you could name. People only seem to remember the most recent ones, or the ones that fit into their false idea-ology of other religions.

Simple fact is no religion is perfect in a whole and if you believe it is then you are deluding yourself, your family - it’s these deluded people that start the religious violence.

All religions have their dirty/violent past, every religion has it’s few bad cells within it. If i wanted to be picky i could say a few atrocities that seems to exsist mainly in the catholic church (appear that way at least because of media coverage) that to many people is worse than violence. I’m sure you can guess what i am refering to if your not i ain’t going to tell you as i don’t want to upset anyone.

As some one who doesn’t follow any religion i can look at all with an open, biased mind. Rather than “my religion is right and perfect and yourse is wrong” mentality.

here here !!!

i’m not gonna argue every one of those situations because i don’t know enough about them (except the israel situation) to make an informed argument… all i’m going to say is: it takes two to tango

i remember in a class on hinduism i took, i watched a video where a group of hindu extremists razed a mosque, who was the agressor there ??? in that particular situation, i’m inclined to say that the hindus were the aggressors, but that isn’t a fair statement to make at all. the hindus might have been responding to some muslim aggression that was retaliation for some hindu aggression ad infinitum

if we are going to look at the facts, then let’s look at the facts indeed. two groups are fighting, in the examples you stated one of them happened to be islamic. does that mean all muslims are violent people ??? no, that’s not a fair statement to make, it just means those particular muslims were involved in violence

this is the claim you just made: muslim people are violent because the founder of their religion displayed violent behavior

my counterexample to disprove your claim: jesus was a peaceful man, but not all christians are peaceful, look at george bush

again, it’s not fair to make statements like that

i’m going to save my fingers a little bit of typing and not even explain why that statement is false, for the sake of argument i’m going to just assume it true:

look at yourself, you can’t bring yourself to approve of islam, yet you are admonishing muslims for not approving of others… awfully hypocritical i’d say

very true, these are only the actions of the minority

i’d like to add on to that statement. let’s take iraq, why are we in iraq ??? it’s not because saddam was a dictator. i assure you there are plenty of cruel dictators in the world and america has no plans to “liberate” those places. iraq has oil, america wants oil, but going to war for oil would bring bad PR, so we instead say that we are going to war out of selfless reasons to liberate the iraqi people so people can put “god bless america” stickers on their gas-guzzling SUVs and feel good that there country is killing thousands of people simply to keep their tanks full

this is an example of pointing to an official motive that looks good in newspapers to cover up the real motive. it works the other way too… we can say “oh those muslims suicide bombers killed and wounded jewish people, they believe doing so will earn a blessing” which isn’t WHY they are suicide bombing. think how desperate you would have to be to strap a bomb to yourself and go blow someone up. you don’t do that for a blessing, you do that for a cause, whether that cause is just or unjust, i couldn’t say. but i can say that i would have some animosity for jewish people if i were a palestinian who got displaced off the land that my ancestors had lived on for millennia (it DID used to be called palestine you recall) religion doesn’t kill people, people kill people, and religion is just the tool that makes people feel better about doing it, just how that suicide bomber may have believed he would be blessed, just how the american soldier in iraq who killed some people out in the field that day can still look himself in the mirror

i think it’s also important to note that i can’t recall reading many news stories of how so and so converted so and so to islam and the latter person changed their life. just because all that the media is telling you about the muslims is the violence they’re involved in, doesn’t mean that that’s a reflection of the muslim community as a whole, it doesn’t even mean it’s a reflection of the majority of the muslim community