e-monk

sure, now you say that, yeah

kbdullah

When people see this type of event, they think they are seeing the difference between Islam and other religions, but in reality the difference is between democracy and dictatorship. Many of these nations are non-secular and attempt to make religious law government law, resulting in a perception that every tragic event is the result of religious teaching. These acts aren't as prevalent in democratic, secular nations w/ Muslim majorities.

Hyperion

What secular Muslim country is tolerant? They are all violent underachieving nations. There are many Muslims who go on to get educated, but most do not. These are nations suffering from vast poverty, exploitation, and a refusal to improve their nation. How many Nobel Prize laureates have come from Muslim backgrounds? SIX peace prize medals (one to an actual terrorist Arafat), two literature medals and One chemistry and one physics medal. This is to a people numbering over 1 billion worldwide.

The fact is that the Muslim faith preaches intolerance and hatred towards others. One great example is how they treat dogs, which is kill them. They have to wash up before prayer and if a dog were to drink from the source of water, let's say a lake, then the lake is now forever unclean and they cannot wash up from there for prayer even though they use the lake as a toilet. This is not from me, this is from my friend who is from Iran.

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Standard

I love how savages hide behind religion... such nonsense..

e-monk

I kind of get the feeling that Islam doesnt really fit well with secular democracy, much the same way that old school Catholicism wouldnt have until Luther and the German merchant princes came along

E.H. Munro

lol, wut? Am I like the only person here with even a cursory knowledge of Italian history? The Lombard League? The Republics of Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence, etc.? Savonarola (only remembered for burning crap these days) was a political reformer who came to power in Florence because the people of Florence didn't think the republic was democratic enough, and helped put through many democratic reforms with the full support of the church. Until he began denouncing the political corruption in Rome, then the party was over.

That whole Divine Right of Kings nonsense was gifted us by a secular philosopher, not the Catholic Church. Truly, his name was Jean Bodin, a French critic of Papal authority (which had traditionally restrained the power of local monarchs), who was reading Roman (as in imperial) law and saw it as a way to assert the independence of the French king from Rome.

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Krstic All-Star

It depends on which kind of Islam we're talking about. Islamism of the Ibn Taymiyya school is antithetical for sure, while any leader who follows al-Farabi could easily find ways to reconcile religion and democracy on both spiritual and political levels.

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kbdullah

There aren't a lot of democratic secular Muslim nations, which is part of the problem, but one example is Turkey.

It doesn't preach hatred or intolerance towards others. The only truthful part of what you stated was that we have to wash up before prayer, and need to re-wash if a dog licks us. Not sure what that whole bit about killing dogs and urinating in lakes is about. I'm not going to throw the Shi'a sect under the bus, but its worth noting that Iran is mostly Shi'a, while the majority of Muslims are Sunni, so your broad-brushing of Muslims based on your Iranian source is a Dubya-esque "I thought they were all just Moslems" error.

e-monk

savonarola was excommunicated by the catholic church uneasy with his reformist ways. he was imprisoned and tortured. and then the medicis restored to power with the support and aid of that same papacy broke that republican moment with the pope's happy blessing

so yeah, old school catholicism not fitting well with democracy - 1, you and your pomposity 0

I mean we can talk on first principles, we can talk hierarchical structures, we can talk medieval catholicism's role/interference in period politics - but any body dictating orthodoxy, wielding the power of excommunication and inquisition, intentionally anti-vernacular in its core is by it's very nature anti-democratic regardless of all the LOLs and Wuts and childish emoticons you want to muster

Hyperion

I'd the dog licks the water, you can't use the water to cleanse yourself ever again, even if the water is a gross and stagnant body. while many of the muslim faith believe in tolerance and self restraint, the majority seeks to oppress and exploit. Sorry, maybe it's a third world thing, but I don't think it is.

__________________
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...."

"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly"

kbdullah

I don't believe that the water can never be used again, and not sure how killing the dog follows from that thinking.

The point I'm trying to make is that while perhaps a majority of Muslim countries oppress their citizens, these countries are dictatorships, and are therefore representative of their leaders, not their people. When you look at places where human rights violations are high, the common thread is dictatorship and non-democratic governance, not Islam. It only appears to be Islam because the intersection of non-secular and monarchic governments occurs in a region where Islam is prevalent.

Hyperion

And the leaders are religious clerics.

__________________
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...."

"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly"

kbdullah

Anyone can claim to be a religious cleric. Doesn't mean they preach or practice the religion as it was delivered. They reverse-engineer religious claims to justify political policies they want to make instead of following the religion.

Diable

Most of the things which we find most abhorrent about Islam are not actually in the Koran or the other book about Mohammed's day to day beliefs. Wahhabism is Islam mixed in tribal customs of the Bedouin, much of the things they teach have no actual basis in the teachings of Mohommed. The way the Saudi treat women has almost far less do with the teachings of their Prophet than it does with the tribal traditions of the Bedouin. The Taliban have mixed Wahhabism with their own Pashto customs, many of which are pretty strange to us and contradictory to a civil society. These people conflate Islam itself with their own cultural biases and that stuff runs both ways.

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E.H. Munro

Indeed, I mentioned as much. Unfortunately for you the reforms in question were the Church's business practises, not the democratic reforms in Florence, they were behind those. Had Savonarola not taken to denouncing the papacy from the pulpit nothing would have happened to him. If you read his history you would see that the first punishment the church assigned to him was to shut the **** up. But, he wouldn't let it go and Rodrigo Borjia was pissed. Combined with Savonarola's support of Charles of France in his struggle with Rome the decision was made by Rodrigo that Savaonarola had to go. Nothing to do with "discomfort over democracy" (because the reforms actually remained in place).

Indeed, it was their "opposition to democracy" that caused them to back the republics of the Lombard League that they were "so uncomfortable with" in the war with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Because Barbarossa was indeed a bulwark of unfettered democracy. (Hint, "old school catholicism" was very uncomfortable with powerful kings & emperors because those monarchs claimed for themselves powers that the papacy felt should be invested in itself, like the right to appoint church bishops and archbishops. Republics were far less troublesome on those sorts of issues concerning papal authority. This can also be seen in the struggle of of Henry II of England with Church authorities.)

__________________
If everyone loves you you're doing it wrong.

"Opium is the religion of the masses." Fred Reed

The Power of 99 Press

"He thinks it's going to be fun being governor. It's only fun being governor of New York if you have money to spend, and I spent it all." Nelson Rockefeller on his successor, Hugh Carey.