It's filmed in both Syria, Iraq and the boarder.Originally Posted by Galant
A much as Obama does not want to admit it, IS is effectively a country in itself. West Iraq and east Syria are lost, no amount of air strikes can stop that now, without full scale war, IS will continue to grow.
IS is here to stay from what I can see.
One thing I find incredible is that there are journalists covering those stories, knowing that the people they are interviewing are parts of the group who have decapitated journalists before. I don't think that I could be paid enough for that, they not exactly getting footballers salaries. At the same time, I also have the impression that the IS operates far more openly to, say, Al Qaeda.
It will also be their downfall. They aren't playing by guerrilla warfare rules but by the rules of a medieval kingdom. Lots of them in one place makes a very easy target for carpet bombing them into oblivion IF we're prepared to accept the <euphemism> human collateral damage </euphemism>.
Ah, so you are saying that the context is important? There's a video for that one!
This idea that only one interpretation of the bible is true and all others aren't christian just doesn't make sense. If you disagree with Catholics on Birth Control due to a different interpretation, does that mean they aren't christian?
Every self-identified christian uses the bible to support their claims, from Westboro Baptist Church to the Lords Resistance Army. Just because your interpretation is different, doesn't make their claims any less valid. The Christian Right in the US has been on the wrong side of every civil rights argument, and continues to be so, based on their interpretation of the bible. You can say their interpretation is wrong, but the vast majority of US christians would disagree with you.
You still want to persist in suggesting the LRA are Christians? Is that just because they have the word "Lord's" in their name, or perhaps some of them self-identify as Christians? If so, are you telling me that just because someone claims to be something that we must all therefore accept them as such and cannot question any aspect of it? Surely you must see that there's a difference between differences in more minor areas of understanding and central tenets of the faith and that we do not have to accept what someone says just because they say and even if they feel sincere in their statement?
The general notion of 'free interpretation' is often misused/abused to suggest that anything goes. That's simply not the case. There are established and firm principles and rules for the proper interpretation of any ancient literature and also the Bible itself. Whilst it's true that anyone can make up their own mind about anything, it does not necessarily follow that what they think or believe is true, nor even that it's reasonable. One can even demonstrate firmly that what that person asserts is patently false and even contradictory. Of course, they can still believe it, but that doesn't make it true or even valid and it certainly doesn't make them representative of whatever they claim to be. I would have thought it was a matter of common sense that not all definitions of things are true or equally valid. If we begin to suggest that anyone who claims anything about anything must be listened to uncritically then I think we begin to wade deep into serious and problematic territory.
There is a specific definition as to what a Christian is, just as there is a specific definition as to what a Muslim is, or a Stoic, a Hedonist, a Capitalist, a Communist or anything else. There might be room for differences of opinion within the basic definition/framework but there will always be some basic foundations required in order to be considered within the valid definition. People can disagree and try to re-define things, it happens, but we're not required to acknowledge such just as no-one who is being serious and who has the least bit of knowledge acknowledges that the LRA are Christians. They might think they are, but just like the man who thinks he's a boiled egg, they're not. West Borough Baptist might not be either but I don't know enough about them to make that sort of judgement call.
Of course, you might be saying that the real evil here is the the Bible, the book, exists, and that rightly or wrongly individuals or groups can take it and run with it in all sorts of directions. You'd be quite right. They can and they have. That, however, is no condemnation of the book or the ideas within it. Anyone could take any book or speech or article or movie etc. and based on their own perceptions react in all sorts of ways. However, neither the book, the author, or society in general need have themselves be taken hostage by such a person or group. We can, as individuals, as an author, as society, and even the book's contents itself, evaluate the reaction, the action, the opinion, and accept or reject it as valid, consistent, reasonable, logical on according to a number of other criteria. The point is, you seem to be suggesting that all things exist in a vacuum, so to speak, and nothing can or should be evaluated or considered, and most importantly, that all writings or people can be justly held responsible for any abuses or crimes committed in their name. That's clearly not the case, I dare say you don't believe it, no more than you'd believe or hold valid the excuse and interpretation of a man who stole or murdered and said that a President's speech made him do it. Words don't have to be accepted when they're taken hostage.
Just because "every self-identified christian uses the bible to support their claims" doesn't mean that anyone need accept their claims, the accuracy of their interpretation or even their identification as valid. That's the point. 'Christian' means something. It's a limited word with limited meaning, it does not and cannot mean anything and everything anyone says it means, and especially, it does not mean 'anything claimed by anyone as being taught by the Bible'.
So it is that whilst we cannot engage with everyone's opinion of the Koran and Islam, or the Bible and Christianity, we can at least engage with and evaluate the writings and teachings and ideas themselves.
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No you can't. Because as soon as you do, you get some cobblers about being a fallable human misunderstanding the infallible divine pop-tart. Or killed.
Erm, yes you can. What you're describing is the first part - engaging everyone's opinion. The ideas are free to be engaged. If you're away from a totalitarian state then it's less likely you face risk in doing so. The challenge with engaging ideas is that they must be engaged on their own terms. Therefore, saying Islam is evil because IS are killing people isn't necessarily a fair engagement of the ideas or theology etc present in the Koran/Islam. One would have to assume that I.S. are faithful exponents of Islam/Koranic teaching. To confirm that you'd have to see if their behaviour matches up with what Islam/the Koran teaches. Here's where interpretation kicks in, and so the simplest way to begin is to take a look at what the various large Islamic groups present, and then after that why. If it turns out that I.S. are a fringe group with some whacked out beliefs and also their method at arriving at such beliefs is bonkers, you can safely dismiss them as having nothing really to do with Islam. If however they are found to be acting in accordance with a good majority opinion at present and/or historically, if the way they arrive at their beliefs makes sense, if, in general, it seems like they really are speaking for a good amount of the Islamic world and can be seen to coincide with Koranic teaching, then one might have to consider that this is a problem with the tenets and teachings of Islam itself.
What you can't do is just take things for granted and not consider them.
Last edited by Galant; 29-08-2014 at 02:06 PM.
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That's far too involved. What I find is better is if you just give a knee-jerk, populist, I’ll researched Richard Littlejohn esq one or two liner to make your point. Then, for the coup de grace, end it with something suitably sensationalist like, ‘or killed’. (out of interest, out of all the people that have questioned, or even criticised Islam, how many ended up killed? Salman Rushdie had a bloody Fatwa on his head, and he’s still alive. Sorry, forgot. Don’t let actual facts get in the way)
That tactic then allows you to complain about not being allowed to engage, whilst not actually having to bother to do any engaging (and research or study for that matter) on the topic at hand. Follow it up with a ‘Bomb the lot of them’, and you have the perfect ingredients to appeal to the most base instincts of your average Daily Mail reader. Sublime.
I can understand where you are coming from, Galant, but I tend to disagree due to my family, let me explain... (Please note this is a direct response to Galant's post, I read the other replies in the thread but would prefer not to delve into specifics of other statements.)
My family have gone through lots of hard times over the years, I won't bore you with the details but the past 100+ years has not been kind to my immediate ancestors. They are, quite understandably, very idealised Christiaans and despite me acting and behaving like a model Christiaan I actively dislike being called a Christiaan and insisted on filling out my own census in 2011 because I didn't want it to state I was Christiaan. As TeePee's video depicts the one part of the Bible is depicted as background and not necessarily what the true interpretation of the Christiaan God is but the other, which was also written by people (hundreds of years after Christs death), is unquestionable and should be understood almost verbatim because it is the correct context and interpretation protected by the Church's authority. No book can be read without context but what that context is should not be dictated by the authority that draws its power from the very book it is making claims about. The best context to understand things by, I have found, is historical. Not just what happened back in those days but what information was available for people to make good and sound judgements on things and how culture was structured.
I don't like tradition, it stems from me separating myself from my Christiaan upbringing by self identifying as Agnostic. Old is often understood to be better due to the structure of our society, authority is often reserved for the older more "wise" members of society, and it quite simply is a false assertion to make; something being old does not somehow mean that it is better or more authoritative, to me it means the opposite. In history if we go back hundreds of years you fail to understand what gravity is or that electromagnetism exists and we look back at those times admiring the ingenuity people had to overcome their ignorance while understanding that they were not completely correct. As early as 100 years ago nuclear bombs were laughed at as an idea, as well as lasers, things that are common place today; information is not restricted by our minds or opinions, no matter how much we wish it to be so. Human fallibility is a central theme throughout history, no-one is exempt from it but we somehow exempt Jesus from it as well as the people who wrote the Bible because we attribute their correctness to an outside agency, one yet to show itself in our Universe (maybe God is dark matter and energy, those things frighten me enough). I respect and live by Jesus's teachings because I was brought up with them and find them still relevant to lots of situations today, but I do not accept his divinity and reject the notion of him being the only son of the Christian notion of God. We are all equal, no man that has ever existed is exempt from that statement and as such being human we are fallible.
Going back to my family, they are all Christiaan in the official sense of the term yet some of them understand that the world is less than 6000 years old and others, in the same family, understand that the world is far older than we imagined, yet they all believe their view is correct and never tell the other family members that they are wrong. The conversation just doesn't happen for fear of alienating a family member or questioning their religion and causing them to stop being a Christian. I don't tell them I dislike their views because they stem from a religious book that is not as relevant today as it was when it first created but I do make sure to point out that they are wrong when they try to assert parts of the book as factual and other parts as inconsequential because that is the correct way of interpreting it. I find that the Bible holds dominion over my families thinking to the point where they reject information from outside sources, even if a family member within the group says it; it is this authority that religion has over information that repels me from all religion; psychology, history, biology and general human behaviour keeps bringing the topic up when I am learning new things though so I can't escape thinking about it.
I couldn't help but respond to your post because it is a good one, one I can respect, but it is a sentiment that I disagree with. You can't talk about the idea's in an ancient book without understanding the information people at the time of writing had available to them, the culture that they were apart of, how the interpretations of that same book have changed over time and the fact that humans are fallible no matter who gives them information. Classic books revolve around central themes that they illustrate very well; the Bible illustrates lots of central themes very well, but the specifics of what it has to say about those themes are not always relevant today depending on which parts of the book you quote and how you use that quote. Having an understanding that one part of a book is less meaningful in direct quotation than another due to age helps illustrate my view that an old book telling you what your morals should be through stories is just as useful as reading a new book, say The Fault in Our Stars - John Green, and using the morals you can derive from that as being just as useful if not more because it incorporates more relevant specific details that relate to people's lives today. I guess I have outlined why I am not religious but I hope I have done it in a way that illustrates that religion, for lots of people, is an unnecessary mental burden to carry around with you. I use the word burden specifically because of my family experience; lots of people still ignore scientific evidence that contradicts their views simply because their views come from an old, authoritative, book that takes preference over new information no matter how well justified that new information is. It saddens me to see it in my family when I care for them enough to be worried that they will act in a way that is bad for them when something serious occurs in their life. It is actually occurring at this moment with two family members that have delved so deep into religion that they don't even recognise how pious they are becoming by actively disliking others for things I do on a regular basis, but I'm different because I'm family. it is a mental sickness to allow that cognitive dissonence grow in ones mind and I feel, very strongly, that religion is a hindrance to good thinking when it is allowed to hold authority over new information.
This is a subject close to me due to my family history and how I identify myself. I kept only your last sentence in the quote because my view, and I think TeePee's, is that you can't separate people's opinion about an ancient book from what the idea's are in the book. They are part of the same equation and separating one from the other is to ignore the human influence on the book and the inherent fallibility all human texts and idea's share. Our thoughts, opinions and "truths" are subject to change since all we can confidently say about this world that we live in is that it is highly unlikely to be different from the prevailing view right now but prove it wrong and history will be on your side. I liked the video TeePee posted because it highlights the duality of thought lots of Christians hold and that thought is the reason I stopped identifying myself as a Christian and later found my position on the fence to be far more comfortable having watched many debates between scientists outspoken against religion and religious spokesmen and/or non-religious leaders that twist science for their own benefit (Deepak Chopra for example, a woo-ologist as Michael Shermer likes to say). Extra-ordinary claims require proof of a similar stature and, for me, religion makes too many extra-ordinary claims that have no evidence of them being true for me to take any notice of them anymore.
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This is some background information that informs this post directly, I'm not going to trawl through everything that informs my dislike for religion so I hope this is enough to justify what I have said:
Religiosity is seeing a decline in Europe that correlates nicely with how well connected people are with each other through the internet (some information found on the subject: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5). To me it is no surprise that being able to experience and confront new and opposing views to your own has lead to people questioning the source of their views more. The more we question the better our information becomes because questions allow new information to inform our opinions on matters that are still being struggled with today.
The thing that makes me optimistic about religious decline and the rise of Atheism is our culture's history of improving over time, in all aspects of society, even though we often get things wrong. Our nature is to improve and enhance our environment and each time we do we enable a better part of our nature to naturally surface. Steven Pinker explains it better:
Yes, I think the LRA are christian, because they declare themselves to be. How else would you determine who a christian is? Your interpretation of the bible and theirs might be different, but the vast majority of self-identified christians have different interpretations.
Really think the holy books are so different?
http://bibleorqurangame.blogspot.com/
By analysing whether their actions are in accordance with Christianity, I would have thought. Declaring yourself a Christian does not make it so, any more than me saying, for example, I’m a ‘Tory’ makes that true. If I told you I was a Tory, but you then got hold of my voting record and saw that I’d never once voted Tory, and had in fact always voted Labour, would you determine I must be a Tory because I said I was? And what if I told you then that I thought being a Tory involved more than simply voting for them? You’d laugh me out the place.
The principle is exactly the same with religion – Despite the understandable complexity of interpreting a book written that long ago can cause, the core tenants and instructions are fairly easy to understand. That Christian extremists often refer to the same, specific paragraphs, usually from the Old Testament, to justify their extremism is evidence of how little attention to whatever their specific gripe within society (homosexuality, for example) is paid in the entirety of the book. Furthermore, they also ignore that it is usually, numerously, superseded anyway. Of course, they are entitled to their view, and their interpretations, but them saying so doesn’t actually make them right.
He has been in hiding since he published the Satanic Verses. and what about Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, Lee Rigby, 191 on the Madrid Train, 54 in London.
Whether it's Islam or not, it's done in the name of Islam and the scale is probably kept in check by the security forces.
When Monty Python did life of Brian they got some nut jobs calling them out and some death threats. But they didn't have the leader of a country calling for Palin or Cleese etc.. to be killed / beheaded?
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View this BBC debate and then read this bloggers point of view.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/douglas...ngs-and-islam/
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UK terror threat raised from substantial to severe. ( DEFCON 1)
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...-raised-severe
Last edited by j1979; 29-08-2014 at 04:10 PM.
No he hasn't. He was in hiding for 9 years after the book was published.
So, even using your extremly crude examples, and including the Madrid and London bombings which presumably were not targetting specific individuals and so are therefore not an example of what I asked, I add that up to 248 since 2005. To put that in context, in 2013 alone over 1700 people were killed on our roads. Shall we deduct from that that we should get rid of cars?
And of your list, I’m aware of only 2 of them being killed as a result of them criticising Islam. So your answer to my question of ‘out of interest, out of all the people that have questioned, or even criticised Islam, how many ended up killed?’, your answer is 2.
That was probably because of the specific reference and depiction in the book of the leader of that country, as opposed to the actual inference to Islam. Otherwise, how do you explain Iran being the only country to issue it?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/reli...is-mentor.html - And following on from your logic, does this mean Christianity is to blame for the Iraq war?
What am I supposed to be seeing or reading here? Is it that of the 1.5 Billion Muslims that there estimated to be in the world, we to gather from that article that most of them support the beheading of random people that have done nothing other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or that it’s a tiny minority who carry out these acts in the name of Islam?
If only they spent as much time and effort on road safety. That way they might help prevent something that is far more likely to kill you than a terrorist attack.UK terror threat raised from substantial to severe. ( DEFCON 1
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...-raised-severe
Please try not to dissect so much. as you have been told before it makes the thread unreadable.
Salman Rushdie:
His address is not in the public domain.
On the deaths under the banner of Islam:
Why do you call them crude examples?
Are you suggesting 1700 people killed on our roads were deliberate. What about the estimated 1 million that die of natural causes? Or are you suggesting that because more died as a result of road accidents it's more important? So to quote you from another thread.
I don't mean this as an insult but as a statement of fact. You are a hypocrite. and your argument about road deaths is so unbelievable, if you said that in a live debate you would have been laughed out of the room.
The difference is these people were killed on purpose with intent, premeditated killings of other humans under the banner of Islam.
How many have died in within the area controlled by IS? I am guessing every single one that has critsised Islam openly is dead already.
This does not happen in the west because they can't get away with it, and they will hopefully be brought to justice if they are willing to try it. But as we have seen, non murderers become murderers when they think they can get away with it.
The video and link i posted. You are not supposed to be reading any particular thing there. I just posted a link, and debate video. there was a divider. see below.
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because i have been told to not post two posts in a row.
as per your comments on road safety, luckily we are in the top 10 best in the world on road safety, so we have already cracked that nut.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ted_death_rate
And finally there are no statistics on how many have been killed for criticising Islam, I expect the figure in India / Pakistan to be quite high, read Rushdie's other book "midnights Children".
Last edited by j1979; 29-08-2014 at 06:47 PM.
They would claim they are acting in accordance with being christian. Their interpretation of what that means is different from yours. I am not in a position to determine which claimant is correct. You're both wrong. It's like asking you if Shia or Sunni Islam is the correct interpretation. Both groups claim theirs is right, and both claim they are acting in accordance with the Koran.
It doesn't matter what they, or anyone else for that matter claim, it doesn't necessarily make them right, or Christian. The core tenants and instructions of Christianity are accepted by the overwhelming majority of Christians and that's borne out by virtue of, despite the many difference sects that exist within, the consistency in the practises of those different sects. In fact, given that Christianity is pretty explicit in what is considered important, it would be pretty easy to determine whether a group like LRA are acting in accordance within Christian values, or just using a perverted interpretation of Christianity to further their own agenda. Of course, conflating the 2 provides ammunition for a round of religion bashing, but it doesn't address the issue of whether LRA are Christians or not.
As for the Shia & Sunni differences, I don't know enough about what they are, or indeed an in depth knowledge of Islam, to form an opinion, but that doesn't mean that there is not a right answer to the question.
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