Karnal wrote on Jul 11
th, 2015 at 12:45pm:
polite_gandalf wrote on Jul 10
th, 2015 at 6:48pm:
Soren wrote on Jul 10
th, 2015 at 6:04pm:
Gandy,
None of these discussions are about honey or sex slaves - these are just the angles of the much more important question - was Mohammed a good man or a bad man.
Are his 'revelations' believable or are they nonsense.
If only.
All of you think Muhammad was evil incarnate, and that his revelation is nonsense - especially Baron. If it was just left at that then there would be no issue. But this is just yet another chapter in the long book of "tell the muslim what he believes". Baron's entire raisen d'etre here is to prove that muslims are compelled by the very tenets of Islam to be murderous bastards; and therefore the only true and honest muslims are the murderous bastards, and the rest of us are false muslims. Thats what I object to - to be continually labelled a liar and arrogantly throwing my efforts to stand up for a peaceful and tolerant Islam back in my face. Especially when it is based on blatant lies - as it is here.
Humour me S - go back through Baron's posts and even in a debate about what you clearly dismiss as complete nonsense - you couldn't possibly fail to notice the logical fallacies and downright absurdities he resorts to to prop up a completely untenable position. And when you appreciate the blatant dishonesty of his argument, you'll understand how I find it a bit rich when you jump in and assert that the discussion is not even about those dishonest arguments! Of course its about the dishonesty - and every time you and other slightly more sane people implicitly apologise for such dishonesty, we lose the opportunity for an honest and rational discussion.
Your argument here is just another version of your 'the ends (smearing Islam) justifies the means (telling porky pies).
I have to make a confession here, G. I never would have become a Muslim.apologist if it wasn’t for all the knucklehead porkies. I’m not a Muslim. I’m not even remotely persuaded by Islam. I am, however, quite partial to the old boy’s stated values - the Enlightenment, Western liberalism, the rule of law, human rights, etc, etc, etc. I’m also a fan of that rather old-fashioned empiricist notion of reality.
There's the point, the rest is waffle.
Islam and the West look differently at the same reality. The difference is called civilisation, culture. And in this literate, free age, you CAN put civilisations and cultures side by side and make an assessment. And to go even further, you can make an assessment of the grounds on which you will decide between ideologies. People convert in and out of all sorts of convictions.
So what is at the heart of all such discussions is: what are the grounds on which we all stand, as humans, and decide on the merits of competing civilisations? Looking at the teachings of Islam and the Enlightenment, we have no shared ground, no shared and recognised authority that both Muslims and Western secularists accept as an arbiter in their disputes. This is the basis of the incompatibility of Islam and the West.
So when Muslism act as if they were enlightened and reasonable, they come across as phoney because there is nothing in the rest of Islam that is enlightened or reasonable. Allah is an unfarthomable tyrant. Mohammed is a semi-literate, vindictive and self-serving pussy-hound demanding respect. And what he offers is attractive to a lot of other semi-literate, vindictive and self-serving pussy-hounds demanding submission and respect.
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