polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 7^th, 2021 at 11:37am:


I'm pretty sure the commands to kill people would far outweigh the commands not to kill people. In any case, you should offer your excuses for the numbers after the numbers come in, not before. You could even count them separately.

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I don't recall you ever making this argument. I have seen this argument for the term jihad, but all the references to fighting that I have seen are clear and unambiguous references to slaughtering the infidel.

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Don't care. You tried to argue that the 5 pillars can somehow replace the Quran or serve as a proxy because they reflect how much attention is given to them in the Quran. This is just another example of you attempting to misrepresent Islam to non-Muslims. Stop changing your "key point" every time your previous key point is shown to be bogus.

So, are you conceding that the Quran does instruct Muslims to fight, kill, die etc in the name of Islam more often than one of the five pillars, or are you pretending that all those instructions to slaughter the infidel might (if we don't read the Quran) actually be instructions not to kill people, or to make great slaughter in the land of our inner demons?

Or are you just telling us that understanding what Islam is really about is too complicated for you and you want us to do it for you?

polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 7^th, 2021 at 3:14pm:


Yet you attempt to discard it and replace it with the 5 pillars, apparently based on popularity rather than religious authority, and an obviously bogus link to the Quran.

freediver wrote on Jan 8^th, 2021 at 11:24am:


I'm obviously only talking about genuine believing muslims.

freediver wrote on Jan 8^th, 2021 at 11:24am:


No, really I don't.

Please explain.

freediver wrote on Jan 8^th, 2021 at 10:35am:


Thats because your entire knowledge of the Quran consists of chapter 9. Which is actually just one of 114. That and the misquotes that jihadwatch and moses spoonfeeds to you.

freediver wrote on Jan 8^th, 2021 at 10:35am:


The 5 pillars really only make sense in totality - as part of a system for expressing your spiritual commitment to submitting to the one God. Fasting is just one of those expressions. It was your idea to isolate it and give the misleading impression that when its taken on its own, its actually not that significant - not mine. Of course, fasting itself is important in Islam, and that importance is justified by sufficient weighting in the Quran. But it only makes sense in the context of the wider system of submission. For example, if you find yourself wavering and giving in to your earthly desires, fasting is one of the key ways of regaining your self control. And this helps you refocus on the importance of belief in the one God, concentrate more on prayer, dispensing with earthly possessions through charity, etc... Of course fasting just for the sake of fasting makes no sense.

freediver wrote on Jan 8^th, 2021 at 10:35am:


Not true.

The 5 pillars obviously means nothing if it is not an accurate reflection of what is contained in the Quran.

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Yes Gandalf. The genuinely believing ones believe. But do you have a point? Or was it lost in your hubris?

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None of this is a barrier to you giving a straight answer Gandalf. Does the Quran talk about fighting and killing more than it talks about pillar 4?

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You lie Gandalf. This is what you said:

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How is it possible to base them on what is most emphasised in the Quran, while ignoring how much each of them is emphasised? You are replacing what the Quran actually says with your own emphasis. You are using the 5 pillars to misrepresent the Quran to non-Muslims, starting with describing them as tenets.

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You lie again Gandalf. How many times is fasting mentioned in the Quran?

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That is exactly what I quoted you doing in the OP.

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By you just finished explaining why it does not have to be an accurate reflection of the Quran if you can BS your way through it instead.

Which is, of course, why you refuse to even consider how many times fasting is referred to in the Quran. You know without even looking that you are lying.

Ayn Marx wrote on Jan 7^th, 2021 at 7:58pm:


Nonsense. By the time of the Enlightenment Christianity already started its Reformation and it is ongoing.

"Depictions of Thomas Carlyle and David Hume in the Scottish Portrait Gallery will be altered to make it clear they were horrible racist bastards, apparently. All of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are under review, including Adam Smith, who thought that people living beyond Europe were largely savage.

I am not sure how they will alter the bust of Carlyle — perhaps chisel a swastika on his forehead? Carlyle was certainly rightish on many issues: you don’t get Friedrich Nietzsche in your fan club if you’re woke. But when I started reading the chap, back in the late 1970s, it was for the witty and sharp Sartor Resartus that I loved him, and his essays on heroes and hero worship. ‘All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.’

Perhaps, Tom, old chum — but not for long now. The Year Zero lunatics are busy ripping the pages out, possessed by an absolutist monomania that renders them inchoate with rage when they discover that people living 200 or 300 years ago somehow possessed opinions which differ from their own. James Watt had a few interests in slave plant-ations, so let us expunge the steam engine and thus the Industrial Revolution from history. This cancelling of history is, aside from being an expression of almost exquisite stupidity, a religiously inspired pogrom more damaging than anything we have done since the looting of the monasteries. Every figure from our past, every achievement, seen through one profoundly warped lens.

In the USA right now they’re getting Homer kicked off the curriculum and pulling Upton Sinclair and Nathaniel Hawthorne from the libraries. One might have hoped that Scotland, with its fierce and perhaps overweening national pride, would have been more protective of its astonishing history.
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Scotland’s brilliance, its Enlightenment, was occasioned by literacy rates which were better than anywhere on God’s Earth. That is why those great thinkers suddenly sprung forth with such fecundity from a population which in 1700 numbered only a million or so.

And the reason for the commitment to literacy, for ensuring every child had the chance of an education, was Protestantism. As soon as Martin Luther insisted that it was the right and duty of every worshipper to have a personal relationship with God and to be able to read the Bible, literacy flourished. Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia (during a time when the literacy rate in Roman Catholic Belgium actually reduced) — wherever Protestantism took hold, literacy very quickly followed and then, a generation later, untold affluence. In Scotland the first local school tax in the world was introduced in 1633 and strengthened in 1646. Protestantism may go some way to explaining why the outcomes for British children of an African heritage vary so wildly — why those who come from countries which, through Protestant missions, evolved a respect for education, such as Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, fare better in school than those in countries that were spared such ministrations, such as Somalia or the DRC. It certainly explains the differing success of the American colonies: Canada and the USA in the north, settled by Protestants, and now the most prosperous countries in the world — and that area below Brownsville, Texas, which was not settled by Protestants, the many lands of banditry, banana republics, dictators and hyper-inflation.

Aside from literacy, Protestantism engendered other beneficial concepts, now almost universally derided. Self-denial, diligence, hard work, obedience, quiescence in the face of authority and, more crucial even than these, patience. Abide a while, your reward will come later: a central tenet of Protestantism. Sociologists have devised a map (based upon worldwide employees of IBM) which charts the national proclivity for ‘patience’. At the top come the countries where Protestantism took hold. They are also, without exception, the world’s most successful countries. The most patient country in the world, according to this survey? Sweden."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-age-of-de-enlightenment#

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     I’m no longer surprised when claims such as yours are made, claims that attempt to whitewash whatever branch of christianity. To suggest protestantism’s rise was somehow accompanied by a separation of church and state is beyond delusional. Granted the reformation attacked the more venal aspects of Roman Catholicism, it’s corruption and power. In so many way’s you’re attepting to put the chicken before the egg. Quiescence in the face of authority?  The Oxford definition gives us :-

quiescence
Noun
inactivity or dormancy.

"this method has been shown to induce sleep-like quiescence in adult animals"

If the reformation had been anything like 'quiescent' the massive turmoil the it caused would not have had the far reaching effect it had on European politics. Europe became divided along confessional, as well as territorial lines. The religious turmoil led to warfare within most states and between many.
I'm not however unaware of the postive effects claimed for the reformation such as literacy being encouraged with the rejection of Latin as the only 'bible language' etc.
Self-denial, diligence, hard work, obedience, and patience may have been postive outcomes of the reformation but they have nothing to do with the separation of church and state.

freediver wrote on Jan 9^th, 2021 at 10:08am:

Thanks for the lesson in church history.
However, when you throw around the phrase 'Christine doctrine’ you’re throwing a rock at a wasp’s nest. Which particular doctrine? Such covers a multitude of sins many of them having little if anything to do with Christ’s teachings (as we have them).
I get tired of this but I need to repeat every branch of Christianity that’s yet to dump the Old Testament is mired in theological mud. Not that the Old Testament is all rubbish. Exodus Ch 23: V 7 should give some warning of what’s to come in later chapters but it’s seldom read that way.

freediver wrote on Jan 9^th, 2021 at 11:19am:

Are you serious? Maybe we have a different idea of what ‘mainstream’ is?.
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