Quotes From A Peaceful Islam

[HoboFactory]

I never said that unjustified beliefs only come in religious form; far from it. faith comes in all forms, but I don't see how Stalin's government helps your argument because it's exactly the kind of thing I'm arguing against. it's political religion (dogmatic belief without evidence). and I'm sure you wouldn't argue that the allies shouldn't dealt with hitler because religious-like zeal is an inherent human quality, so I'm not sure if you're still defending your argument or not.

 

But to truly accomplish a world with religious inclination, be it spiritual, political, economic, or what have you... you'd have to apply the same oppression and control over people that religion has. One can't truly get rid of it, without becoming it.

 

The Nazi analogy doesn't really prove anything for a number of reasons. First off, fighting the Nazis as a global and military effort, that is, all they could do to get rid of it is to kill as many of them as possible. On top of that, it's not like the Allies fought the Nazis to save the Jews or something like that, after all, there were political, self-defense, and economic issues the played the biggest factor. If the plight of a certain ethnicity mattered to the global community, the Chinese probably wouldn't be holding Tibet today.

[heyrabbit]

just to clarify, i haven't read most of your posts to hobo (or his responses) etc. because its just too much reading.

 

I'm not the one claiming to know something that you don't know. it's the other way around. I want people to lose their beliefs. I'm not asking them to gain any new ones. there's a huge difference there.

I guess you ignored all the posts I've made trying to explain the connection between belief and action. Beliefs do hurt people. and I'm not preaching a belief, I'm denouncing beliefs. for the 6 billionth time, atheism is not a belief.

 

We can call atheism whatever we want. Does the "ism" suffix make atheism a belief? Doesn't matter right now. Whatever atheism is, you want people to change how they think. You believe your thinking is the truth, and their thinking is false. Now there's nothing wrong with thinking people are wrong & forming arguments against it. Thats healthy debate. But my point is that when you go to the point of saying things like "you should be forced to take a skill testing question before being allowed to give birth. "do you believe in god?". ", that is simply being intolerant.

 

it seems as though you're still under the impression that fundamentalists are the only problem relating to religion. I've written quite a bit recently in trying to expel this fallacy and I don't think you responded to any of it, so I won't get into much detail right now. I might go back and quote myself if you'd like. but yes, I do think that moderates support and apologize for terrorists. the obvious example would be those in afhanistan, iraq, and pakistan who've aided in hiding osama bin laden and the taliban. not every person who witnessed or helped osama was an extremist.

 

No not at all do i think fundamentalists are the only problem. Far from it!! Religion has caused many conflicts, wars, etc. throughout history. Moderates, fundamentalists, everything in-between. all i wanted to know before is why moderates are to blame & fundies not? They are both.

 

it's not only lying, it's child abuse! there is nothing objective about religious belief, it's completely subjective. there's a difference between teaching math and teaching god. Since it's what you believe, you should teach it in that way. the problem is that that's not the way it's approached. Kids are told that these claims are the truth, when there's not a shred of evidence that it is true, and they're too young to know the difference! When kids ask questions in sunday school I can assure you that they never get asnwers answers like, "there's no evidence to suggest that my god is any more real than zeus or thor, but it's my personal belief and you should investigate for yourself".

I'm a libertarian and if I ever have a child, I wouldn't label him/her a libertarian, nor would I send them to a school every sunday to indoctrinate them by teaching subjective belief as objective truth! it's a gross misuse of authority and a disgusting exploitation of a child's malleable mind.

 

hobofactory said that when children grow up they can "simply re-assess and adjust their beliefs". You said it all right there. kids shouldn't have any beliefs of that sort to begin with for the same reasons that a child shouldn't be in favor of communism. you can't indoctrinate a child during the most formative years of its development and then just expect that to account for nothing in the future. kids aren't just predisposed to faith in general, they are predisposed to accept the specific faith which they grow with. Children are genetically programmed to believe whatever their parents tell them, and when everyone they know tells them god is true for their whole lives, you expect that influence to disappear at some point in the future? It doesn't work that way. their minds have been molded to think a certain way. most people seem to go their whole lives without breaking free from the delusion their parents inflicted upon them.

 

This i pretty much agree with. I have a big problem with the way churches themselves do things. I was raised Roman Catholic, and the last sacrament is Confirmation, which we do in grade 6. Thats ridiculas. How can a child confirm his faith when he isn't of the age where he usually begins to question things his parents say. There should be a sacrament in the church when you are like 35 or something, when you are an adult & have gone through most of the phases of questioning your beliefs. Its so convienient that parents/church locks you into catholicism right before entering Jr. High School.

 

And yeah i agree mostly with the whole "parent brain wash thing". But i think it goes hand-in-hand with everything else parents teach kids. Parents pass all their beliefs & lessons to their children, its hard for religious beliefs (being so powerful) not to be included, but its still no excuse. Why not teach them about all other beliefs & let them decide. I still stand by what i said, that parents aren't LYING to their kids.

 

For me, i have thought about what school system i'd send my kids (if i have them). I went through the Roman Catholic school system & had very fun positive experience, and the religion really served me well growing up. But on the other hand, i reject much of what the church preaches & stands for now, so i'm hesitant to put my kid into that system.

 

call me whatever you like. you're just making it look as though ad hominem attacks are your only line of defense to my argument.

i hesitantly said that you might be, under definition, a bigot.

 

I'm not a diplomat and I never once claimed to be, but don't accuse me of attacking people. you know that I've maintained an open and respectful open dialog, but at the same time I'm the type of person to pretend things. I think believing in god is absolutely absurd. if that makes me appear arrogant then that's fine because that's really not something that should offend anyone.

You inferred that anyone who believes in God shouldn't be allowed to have babies. You called moderates "dangerous idiots". ad hominem.

 

After your above quote, you continue to say:

I think believing in god is absolutely absurd.QUOTE]

 

There, that statement is the type you should be making. But you've consistently been attacking the people who believe in God instead of just debating the belief itself.

 

Anyways, i'm done with this all. I'll read if you respond to this, but after that i won't reply because i think we've said our peace.

The "ism" in atheism makes it sound like a practice which is why so many people mistake it for that. it's no more of a practice than if you were to call yourself an amurdourist (someone who practices not killing people). I just made that up. anyway, I've talked about all that before.

 

I really don't think people need to drastically change the way they think. it's really more about being honest, and changing how people react to what they think. Most people know the logical fallacies and everything that doesn't make sense regarding religious belief, but their cognitive dissonance is what's preventing them from responding to it in a rational way. smoking is a good example to give you an idea of that. people know what's wrong about it but they do it anyway.

 

yes, extremists and moderates are both to blame. that's what I was saying from the start, but people were reluctant to agree. atheists can be blamed to some extent too.

 

my goal really isn't to offend everyone. I'm sorry I have, but I think my belligerent comments make me look foolish more than anything, so I didn't think I'd offend too many people. those comments you mentioned were just stupid invidious remarks made just for the sake of rattling sabers. I don't actually think moderates are idiots. so I agree that those comments are stupid, but they were also facetious. and they aren't the extent of my opiion; they aren't even my opinion at all. they're a tiny fraction of what I've written.

 

parents do lie. they not only abstain from teaching christianity objectively(because any attempt to do so would be viewed as blasphemous) they literally train kids to know god. this is lying because however delusional people are about god, most people will freely admit that it's a subjective truth. they train kids to 'know' god, not to 'believe' in god. believing is a result of it. and obviously people don't want to emphasize too much that it's a belief, because that assumes that there are other beliefs to be had. this is not like passing down every other belief, as you put it. it would be if parents took their kids to communist school every saturday to study why communist, say. but those sorts of things don't happen on the same scale as religious belief.

 

you're definitely not obligated to debate at all. that's okay. but it won't be the last thread I make on the subject

 

 

But to truly accomplish a world with religious inclination, be it spiritual, political, economic, or what have you... you'd have to apply the same oppression and control over people that religion has. One can't truly get rid of it, without becoming it.

 

The Nazi analogy doesn't really prove anything for a number of reasons. First off, fighting the Nazis as a global and military effort, that is, all they could do to get rid of it is to kill as many of them as possible. On top of that, it's not like the Allies fought the Nazis to save the Jews or something like that, after all, there were political, self-defense, and economic issues the played the biggest factor. If the plight of a certain ethnicity mattered to the global community, the Chinese probably wouldn't be holding Tibet today.

 

oppressing people would defeat the purpose entirely. and it wouldn't change beliefs, it would just suppress them. killing people would eliminate belief, but I'm not suggesting that either.

 

the nazi point just demonstrates that you do agree that it's not pointless to object to organized, oppressive delusion. the actual fighting and motives is almost irrelevant to the point. the point is that people objected to genocide of a nation and they did so because the nazi antisemitism was predicated on delusional beliefs about the biology of race and eugenics. even if the allies all hated the jews, they were doing which is perceived as being ethical and virtuous, not pointless.

[hum-an-ole]

Although there are two arguing against him, I think heyrabbit's points are stronger in this debate. I can't believe I just read this entire thread. Man you guys are long winded.

[HoboFactory]

But the fighting and motives are relevent because they're what made opposition to the Nazis feasible. Not only did the Nazis have a massively delusional and oppressive believe system, but they also had an actual nation, troops, a government... you fight and destroy a nation, kill its troops, and collapse its government but destroying a belief is a much more difficult affair. After all, Nazis do still exist.

[heyrabbit]

thanks christine, I think you're the only one who's read it LOL.

 

 

hobo, opposition doesn't require action. you're right in that it was an imperialistic necessity as well as a moral one. it was a moral necessity regardless, just as people are sympathetic to the goings-on in darfur despite the U.S. government's not giving a shit. generally beliefs of that nature will exist so long as there people susceptible to acquiring them, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that it was a huge moral victory with positive consequences. those beliefs were marginalized to the point where they now are almost non-existent.

 

that being said, antisemitism is probably more dangerous today, and maybe even more prevalent, than it ever has been in all of history. so it will be interesting to see what people do about it. right now the prevailing attitude in the west is that 'it's a complicated issue too difficult to understand' when really we should respond to religion in the exact same way that we responded to eugenics. the scary thing is that we don't oppose the delusion this time. can you imagine if people were walking around in the 1940's saying, 'why can't you respect my right to believe that jews are genetically inferior?'. That's how I view our current situation.

 

until everyone connects the dots, our collective response won't make any sense.we'll have stuff like, you know, "war on terror", "war on fighting". has anyone noticed that this doesn't make sense? it's religious-based conflict but nobody even considers religious belief as the problem (??!!)

[HoboFactory]

Antisemitism is a bit of a complicated term that I don't like having to use. When people use that term, they generally take it to mean anti-Jewish, and yet I believe Arabs are also a semitic people. It strikes me as odd when people accuse Arab Muslims of antisemitism. That's all somewhat beside the point, but it does sort of serve to illustrate that the problem is often not quite as simple as it may appear.

 

In any case, if you're saying Judeophobia is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, why? Judaism is a religion, one that also has some racist and violent teachings. Jews are taught to believe they, and they only, are God's chosen people and that everyone else, is a pagan, and could be treated pretty much as a dog. Of course I suspect the majority of Jewish people aren't that way, but let's not et sidetracked. Why would you, as an objective opponent of oppressive organized religion think one needs preservation, and the other needs destruction? Why is Judeophobia something that needs to be done away with, and anti-Islam is something that should be more widespread?

[heyrabbit]

antisemitism is a very clearly defined term. I've never once heard it used to mean anything other than anti-jewish. and let me tell you, nobody in the middle east is confused about what it means. as for 'judeophobia', I've never heard that term before in my life. If that means a fear of jewish people, then I agree that we should be to a certain extent.

 

antisemitism isn't equivalent to anti-Islam. 'anti-arab' is more equivalent to antisemetic, and anti-judaism would be like anti-Islam. this is all semantics, of course, and you have to be careful. to say that I'm anti-Islam would be true, but that term is misleading and it's not nearly sufficient enough to explain why that is. I'm against the belief system, not the islamic people. the term seems to just dignify islam and that's not what I want to do at all. by declaring yourself to be anti-islamic you are essentially saying htat you're in active opposition to the people. Islam, as a term, is more closely related to the people as a whole rather than Christianity, say, in north america. I'm not any more anti-Islam that I would be anti-belief-in-fairies-when-it-causes-the-death-of-thousands-potentially-millions. Islamists already view it as 'us vs them', and any instance wherein I profess that I'm anti-Islam will just serve to solidify the very views I want them to lose in the first place. they already view it as "dirty heathen christians, jews, and pagans vs us". What will they think if I say that I'm against them?! that won't help anything

 

just for the record, judaism deserves absolutely no special treatment in the critisism department. at the same time, everyone is completely justified in despising jews (if the bible is true. if not, then no). that's the problem. people are justified in disliking jews, (so long as they are muslim, christian, etc).

 

but if we are going to worry about something, islam is clearly the problem. there needs to be a way, way ,way waaaaay more widespread critisism of Islam as compared to every other religion. not only is there very little critisism of Islam, but there are currently something like 1.5 BILLION muslims and the population is growing at an astronomical rate too scary to even think about.

Edited March 11, 2007 by heyrabbit