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On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check -PART II DISCUSSION
57 thoughts on “On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check -PART II DISCUSSION”
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Discussion of the post On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check continues here.
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“(Anything un-Christian about that comment, Christopher?) ”
Nothing obvious that I can see đ Seriously though, sentences like:
“fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ create a moral duty to work for peace healing and reconciliation in the world. How else are we to interpret statements from the founder of our faith that, âBlessed are the peacemakersâ, âLove your enemiesâ, âTurn the other cheekâ, and âThose who live by the sword shall perish by the swordâ?”
&
“We have to make the effort for peace, we have to try.”
Seem to indicate a progressive outlook where intentions are all that matter. I am not sure “peace” and “reconciliation” mean what you think they mean. I know they do not mean oppression that appeasement with Islam always means. Like you say, we have to sometimes defend ourselves and our families. I think the point of disagreement here is how Islam is to be understood. In light of it’s self understanding (i.e. it’s theology) and history, the “progressive” view of Islam just does not add up. So, the following really does not add up:
“We are not there yet. If there are reasonable, moderate Muslims who want peace we have a duty to seek them out and help them. Throwing in the towel on peace and resigning ourselves to conflict, at this point, is an abdication of our moral duty as Christians.”
Our moral duty is to the truth, not some vain hope in “progressive” Islam. Now, as you point out Just war may not be correct now in many or most cases, but lets not full ourselves in thinking things are “peaceful”…
Christopher, efforts to make peace
Dean writes:
“We have to make an effort to make peace, we have to try.”
This is an dishonest ellision of all the posts that have been entered here. Most of the debate is about:
A) is there an “orthodox Islam” a set of beliefs held by virtually everyone who calls himself Muslim? Answer, yes. Despite various sects within Islam and various schools of theology, the core beliefs that concern the clash with the West are held by virtually everyone who calls himself Muslim.
B) is the content of this set of beliefs publicly available for study by all?Answer, yes. Regardless of the obfuscation campaign that everyone dealing with this topic must grapple with, Islam is a well-documented ideology. Saud Arabia spends millions translating the Koran for purposes of proselytization and those translations are considered sufficiently accurate and authentic to serve new converts who do not speak Arabic. Similarly, English translations of key Islamic documents are publicly available for those who choose to read them
C) Does Islam promote violence? Yes, in that Islam has always approved of the use of force against those who refuse the offer to convert to Islam. To suggest otherwise is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Osama Bin Laden invited America to adopt Islam before he declared war on us. This was to met his Islamic obligation.
D) Are all Muslims violent? Potentially yes. Violence arises in Islam in many instances, as noted below.
Jihad direct warfare against non-Muslims to subjugate them, their countries and their wealth
Death penalty for apostasy: There is the doctrine of violence against those who leave Islam, the death penalty for apostasy.
Death penalty for free speech: There is the policy of executing those who are considered to have mocked, insulted or criticized Islam.
Domestic violence and polygamy: There is the Koranic right of men to beat women. In practice, men may kill female members of their own family if the females displease the men in some way.
Stoning for adultery. Tariq Ramadan, beloved of the American Left, has affirmed that stoning for adultery is part of the permanent teaching of Islam, but has argued for exceptions in certain case. He has not renounced the fundamental teaching and refuses to do so.
So, yes, Islam is a violent religion in that it directs violence against non-Muslims who refuse to convert and it sponsors campaigns of military conquest in the name of Islam. Ask the Greeks, Serbs and anyone in the Balkans what living under Muslim rule is like. Ask the Hindus, the North Africans and the millions of whites and blacks who suffered under the Muslim slave system.
Dean has indirectly implied that those people who present this information about Islam are “selectively quoting” extremists for the purpose of distorting “true Islam” and for the purpose of making peace impossible.
Yet, Dean cites no Islamic sources for his position. By implication he knows what “true Islam” is and those who mention the negative are “slandering Islam.” He takes the position that he knows more about Islam than, actually Bernard Lewis, since my positions on the content of Islam are consistent with that reported by Bernard Lewis the “Dean” of American scholars of Islam.
So the question for Dean, is “peace on whose terms” Peace with dhimmitude? Peace with Copts living as second class citizens. Peace with Israel destroyed?
Peace with a renunciation of our freedom of thought? Peace on whose terms Dean?
As I have stated many times, we can have an acceptable and stable relationship with the Muslim world, BUT, only if negotiations are conducted in the light of the realty of Islam not what we wish it go be.
Who knows, maybe the WIFE of Dean’s Persian-American co-worker is hoping that some of her American neighbors will help her next time she gets beaten.
Missourian supplies another modern German Islamic source to support Note 51
Here is the voice of a German Muslim, a political scientist who has been a German citizen for decades. He describes the “Great Taboo.” The “Great Taboo” is that there is “misunderstanding between cultures” rather than direct conflict between cultures. By “conflict” I mean, first and foremost, the conflict of ideas, norms, rules of conduct and standards of morality.
Read the whole thing:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-440340,00.html
Dean’s plan to de-Muslimize Muslims fails as sharia law creeps ahead
Tolerance goes only one way in this multi-cultural world.
According to the license issued by the City of Minneapolis to cab drivers, every cab driver must accept a passenger who is “orderly and able to pay the fare.” This has been particularly important to black passengers. Contrary to this principle the Minneapolis airport authorities are considering allowing Muslim taxicab drivers to refuse passengers carrying alcohol without losing leaving their spot and going to the back of a long line of waiting cabs. Cabs could be marked with a special light to show which cabs are sharia compliant.
This is how it starts, this is how it continues. In the same community, the Minneapolis metropolitan community Muslim schoolchildren have been excused from art classes, athletic classes and emergency rooms have provided special accommodations for Muslim women who do not want to be seen by male doctors and who do not want to use the standard hospital robes. Step by step by step we surrender and fail to defend our culture and fail to require assimilation. Dean’s grand plan of de-Muslimizing the Muslims won’t work if we change to accommodate them. There are reports of Muslim cabdrivers refusing to carry seeing-eye dogs in the U.K. A Muslim policeman refused to guard the Israeli embassy in London. What if the the Minneapolis airport cabdrivers refuse open homosexuals? Unmarried couples? Jews? Women wearing shorts? The list is very, very long.
Imagine the outcry if a Christian cabdriver refused to carry a pair of openly gay men or women? The screams of discrimination would be heard round the world.
Apparently the “Establishment Clause” restrains only Judaeo-Christian religious practice not Muslim.
If you ask, what about pharmacists who don’t want to dispense abortifacients. The answer is easy. Physicians, nurses and pharmacists are concerned about a issue affecting life and death of a human being. The Hippocratic Oath in its classical form forbids doing harm or assisting in abortion. The Hippocratic Oath represents a moral position which was the foundation of Western medical ethics for over 2,000 years. The morality and legality of abortion and abortion pills is very much contested in America by a large number of people. The legality of abortion is a legal innovation created by a few judges in 1973 and hotly contested since then. Everyone recognizes that very serious ethcial issues arise in medicine and that there is not a consensus on many of them. The cabdrivers are issued a license to provide an ordinary service to the traveling public. The rights of an orderly passenger who is ready and willing to fare a fare should not be burdended or restricted by the views of the driver. People who cannot serve the public should not get a license.
Ref.: Missourian:
Herr ShĂ€uble is a hard nose, that is good; he has had a hard life. In Germany(Ihave lived here for 15 years) there is a growing distrust to dislike of the Muslim faith as well as the Turkish people as a whole. The government is against the Turkish intergration ito the EU. There is a growing mistrust and out-right dislike of Muslims across the board in Western Europe. In Western Europe this distrust is becoming mainline. Most peoples’ contact with the Muslim population is in the kauf/verkauf(buy/sell) situation which goes well on a personal basis. There is very little social intergration do to differing religion and custom acceptance. The multicutural approach has failed and now hard-lined intergration the growing mode for now.
The broad secularism in Europe has much to due with the broad sweep of their 2000 year history. You learn from history: Invasions and the interscein and religious wars, the Inquisition and Reformation and Counterreformation and profound cutural indentification that saved tribes and nations. In the 30 years War about one half of the German speaking populations were killed off; you are the heir to your history. That dosen’t even count the Renaisance and the Enlightenment and their aftermath. I live near the demarcation line between the Roman Lands and the German Lands; the Roman fort(Saalburg) was started in the year AD 1. The U S has nothing to compare in their historical perspective. In the Eastern lands of Europe the Orthodox churches were the only way to maintain their religiosity, ethnicity and personhood as opposition to the 500 year occupation by the Turks(Ottoman Empire).
The Pope’s latest address was spot on and has brought a rethink about Europe’s religiosity as its history and its souce of civilization. It will take some time for the reassimilation of these concepts. The churches, all, bear their responsibility for their past indiscretions and now for the unfolding of the Holy Spirit.
Sincerely,
J R Dittbrenner
Missourian writes: “This is how it starts, this is how it continues. In the same community, the Minneapolis metropolitan community Muslim schoolchildren have been excused from art classes, athletic classes and emergency rooms have provided special accommodations for Muslim women who do not want to be seen by male doctors and who do not want to use the standard hospital robes.”
Well, that kind of accomodation is afforded to all sorts of religious and cultural groups, especially in the case of religion. In that sense, the issue is not so much Islam, but the fact that religion has a privileged position in American society. In a way, that’s good. But in another sense, if you’re going to give religious people special accomodations, then it’s hard to justify giving those to one religious group and not to all. For example, if you’re going to excuse
conservative Baptist students from PE when everyone else is learning to dance, how do you not excuse others from PE? If you’re going to excuse conservative Christian students from sex education, how do you justify not excusing other students from other classes when there is a religious issue?
Missourian: “Step by step by step we surrender and fail to defend our culture and fail to require assimilation.”
But again, we carve out all sorts of exceptions for other religious groups and beliefs. If parents want to home-school a child in order to protect him from evolution and other “modernist” kinds of thinking, that’s fine. If you turn your kid into a flaming fundamentalist who believes in talking snakes and a 6,000 year old earth, no problem.
Misssourian: “If you ask, what about pharmacists who donât want to dispense abortifacients. The answer is easy. Physicians, nurses and pharmacists are concerned about a issue affecting life and death of a human being.”
The case of pharmacists is really the same as the Muslim taxi cab drivers. It’s the job of the pharmacist to dispense legitimate and medically-appropriate prescriptions. If a pharmacist is “concerned” about an issue, great, that’s his personal business and it has no place in the pharmacy. If he can’t do that then he needs to find a different line of work.
Missourian: “The Hippocratic Oath in its classical form forbids doing harm or assisting in abortion. The Hippocratic Oath represents a moral position which was the foundation of Western medical ethics for over 2,000 years.”
Yeah, but people don’t take the Hippocratic Oath. It would be interesting to see all these conservative Christian pharmacists swearing “by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses . . .”
Missourian: “The morality and legality of abortion and abortion pills is very much contested in America by a large number of people. The legality of abortion is a legal innovation created by a few judges in 1973 and hotly contested since then.”
Then the pharmacist in question should vote so as to install politicians who will stack the Supreme Court with people favorable to his position. If he’s lucky, at the same time maybe he’ll get a ban on birth control, and whatever other personal restrictions he would like to impose on everyone else.
Note 55, DJ, thanks for the note/James Madison and historical perspective
First, thanks for the very informative note.
Cannot resist my adding my two cents:
This is correct, of course, but, please note that the person considered most responsible for the U.S. Constitution is James Madison. He was recognized in his time as a bona fide genius and he was a profound scholar of the history of Western civilization from its Judaic roots, through the Greek Hellenistic period, and on to his present. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the various forms of government which were actually put in place at different time and places in the history of The Western civilization. He sought to fully understand why certain governments endured and others fell and which governments advanced the welfare of mankind.
The Framers expressly and explicity sought to learn from this past and it was constantly discussed while the Constitution was formed through reasoned debate of some of the most brilliant minds in history.
Take care of yourself. I have had the privilege of visiting Germany and it is a magnificent country. I have great respect for the genius of the German people which I pray will be allowed to flower under the guidance of God.