One thing that wears me out is hearing people sling Koran quotes back and forth
I heard two Muslims on Hannity on the way home from work excitedly scolding one another over Koran interpretations. They were citing hadiths and suras, pronouncing it "Koor-Ahn," and over enunciating everything. It was enough to make my ears bleed. I angrily turned the channel, steamed that this discussion was even happening here in the United States of America.
I don't like it any more when Islam critics do it. Unless the people are scholars who can put it in context, I don’t want to hear it any more than I want to hear a Christian-hater playing Bible bingo and throwing quotes at me to prove I'm a superstitious moron for believing in Jesus.
Leonard Pitts is one of those columnists I rarely agree with, but he is always thought-provoking, especially when he is putting the shoe on the other foot.
He presents us four quotes and asks us to guess where each came from…
1) “. . . Wherever you encounter [non-believers], kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post . . .”
2) “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
3) “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”
4) “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
The first is from the Koran, the second is a quote from Jesus contained in the Gospels, and the third and fourth are from the Old Testament.
His point is well made: Anyone can take anything out of context. He calls such selective plucking a “cheap parlor trick,” and on that narrow point I agree with him.
My only criticism is that he fails to mention is that it’s not just Islam-bashers who do this. Murderous islamists themselves take Koran passages out of context, just as human stains like Fred Phelps and his band of America haters butcher The Holy Bible.
18 comments:
Most people that find amusement in critiquing the Holy Bible and then making up their own interpretation do it to insult, to ridicule or to mock believers. We may not want to hear it but it is shoved into our faces time and time again.
And if we retaliate we are hateful Christians because we stand up for what we believe in. Or we are hypocrites, etc.
Wow! I could write my own post on this subject. Very profound.
We know the truth and with the help and love of the Holy Ghost, God's Word comes alive for each of His children. Only a true believer in Jesus Christ will understand what I just said, the lost will not.
I just get a bit tired of seeing hundreds of different interpretations of the original 1611 bible or even as far as the Geneva bible.
Have a blessed weekend!
Context in the Koran can be difficult to come by. After all, the book isn't organized chronologically but rather by length of chapter.
The most recent verses -- Islam's new testament -- contain the most violence and actually abrogate the earlier peaceful verses.
Excellent post Silver. You've very succinctly summed up what I've been saying for a while now.
I'm glad to know that I'm not going crazy.
Honestly, I don’t give a tinker’s damn about Islam. I don’t care that people pursue the moon god any more than I care that people worship that fat bastard in Asia. I think everyone should be able to worship who or what they please. I think if people want to smoke buffalo shit on an Indian reservation or tease cobras, go for it.
What bothers me is that some morons take the inane dribble from the Qur’an and attempt to use that as justification for killing my fellow countrymen. I freely admit there have been some weird assholes who claim to be Christians, too … Jim Jones among them, although I suspect he was no more Christian than Pontius Pilot was.
Religion is an intensely private thing. I don’t want people of any faith pushing their ideas down my throat. Personal note for Jeremiah Wright … F U Strong Letter Follows.
I have no idea what this has to do with your post, but I feel better.
As long as it makes you feel better, Mustang.
I don't care how people worship either, I'm just tired of hearing people discuss the Koran.
Muslims have a lot to hash out, but they need to do it in their mosques and Islamic forums. Discussing and arguing in public just makes my ears bleed and robs time from productive issues.
Okay, you'ce got me completely stumped... what's the relationship between the picture and the article?
Cheers!
She's a Muslim woman I met in Aceh, Indonesia.
All I can add to the above comments is God created mankind and mankind created religion.
Like you I do not like see people attacking a religion out of ignorance. This is why I have read the Qur'ran and studied it myself. More people need to do this.
Many in the west think the Qur'ran is like the Bible and has contradictory peaceful and warlike passages. Actually the Qur'ran is not like the Bible. The Bible is a collect of several books from several authors. The Qur'ran makes the claim of being one book from one source.
In gives Surah 2:106 it says: “We do not abrogate a verse or let it be forgotten without bringing a better or similar one. Do you not know that Allah has power over all things?” Most Muslim scholars interpret this to mean that if two passages contradict each other the one given last is the one which should be followed.
Another thing to understand is that the Qur'ran is not arranged in chronological order. Which came first the peaceful or the war passages? I'll leave that up for you and your reader to discover yourselves.
Well, as a non-Muslim I would attribute the whole abrogation thing to the fact that it was a human author who wrote the damn thing. It might have been divinely inspired, but as for it being a direct dictation from God, I'm not so sure.
Why would God contradict himself? This is the same question we ask about the bible. If God directly dictated that stuff, then why would he contradict himself?
The answer is that God doesn't contradict himself: we screw up the message.
But none of those quotes are any better when put in context. Faith and force or corrolaries. Advocating giving up your mind (faith) always leads to bypassing the minds of your neighbors and using force on them.
I'm not going to expound upon my personal spiritual views, but i will not 3 things:
1) I think this post is brilliant, SF, and very healthy.
2) @Leticia: I'm not sure how an "original" Bible can be more than a millenium and a half older than the substantive material and not be in any of the original languages,
3) @Trestin - you're absolutely right. It reminds me of an absurd news "commentary" with Katie Couric and a couple of others where they bemoaned their ignorance about Islam as a result of the lack of Islamic study in public schools. First, I doubt any of them went to public schools, and second, why the failure of public schools would limit independent self-study, I have no idea.
Monotheism attempts to do just what it means: impose one religion on the world.
If there's one thing history teaches us is that people will tribalize, separate, and expand to tribalize and separate all the more, regardless of of the magnetism of religious belief.
That's because all religion is bullshit. Contrived, arbitrary, man-made bullshit. It has no real value in the real world - the REAL WORLD, where there are no angels or miracles or saviors, where we pay bills and go to work and tend to our families and our prosperity.
It's tough to hear, but that's the way things are. That's reality.
JMJ
The thing about the quotes from the bible and the koran is that it's not just the context. The quotes from the koran are the words of mohammed and also the actions of him.
You see Christ may have said things that can be taken out of context, but he was never a warlord, waging war, conquering and murdering like mohammed.
The thing about the koran is that it's not just words, but it is deeds that are being followed today and which are not being rejected and condemned by muslim scholars and religious institutions.
If some Christian blows up a bus screaming Jesus is King, you won't find any Church or Bishop etc saying it's fine, this is what Christ did. The same cannot be said of muslims and islam.
"That's because all religion is bullshit."
Christianity is not and if it weren't for Christianity, evil on an unimaginable scale would be unleashed upon the world.
I know it's tough to hear, but that's the way things are. That's reality.
Jersey your disdain for religion is makes as much sense blind man who hates colors. Just because your limited senses can't comprehend spiritual hatters, does not mean they have no value.
While I'm not a fan or Islam, I prefer it to your small minded atheism any day.
There's no God, everybody! Jersey said so. Case closed!
You're an "angry ape," Jersey, "most ignorant of what your most assured...
All those billions of worshipers that came before you, all Stupid! But Jersey is the smartest man in the history of the world because he's figured it out...
>Case closed!
Of course, the one thing that the anti-religionists can never do is erase the reality of lived experience. My actual interaction with God. My actual observation of and participation in miracles. My actual reception of a witness of divine truths that transcends in both depth and power any evidence that can be created by mortal man.
"That's because all religion is bullshit."
I'm an atheist and I don't agree with that. Clearly, since religions contradict one another, most of them (all but one) must be fabricated, but that doesn't make them bullshit. But the really successful mainstream religions, simply because they've stuck around for centuries, they must be either a) attractive, therefore interesting psychologically; b) an effective basis for society, therefore interesting politically; or c) actually true, which I'd be terrifically surprised by for any of them.
Furthermore, and there exist believers in each mainstream religion who are cleverer than any of us, so it's simply a failure of imagination to conclude that any of them are stupid.
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