I Spoke With a Christian Terrorist Threatening Atheists in Tennessee

[Dill]

(06-25-2017, 06:05 PM)THE Bigzoman Wrote: The constant need for the uninformed to compare Christianity and Islam gets old. They're both fundamentally different with one having a higher propensity to violent ****** Guess which one?

The Bible is a vast book filled with contradictions. The Quran is much more streamlined and much more clear in its message.  You can't find a clear and concise message in the Bible to kill non believers and to kill in the name of Christianity, but you can in Quran several times over. Both religions revere their prophets and seek to live by their example, and jesus and Muhammad lead lead vastly different lives. Muhammad wasn't some hippie who got nailed to a cross whilst his followers got prosecuted when they tried to speard his word. He, along with his followers,were conquering warlords. His life is comparable to conquerors like Alexander the Great and genghis khan. The problem with christians are that they fail to lead by Jesus' example, but tons of muslims do a halfway decent job of following Muhammads

Shit, in the Bible you can find a rationale to ignore all the bad parts through the example of Jesus and the New Testament. There's nothing like that in the Quran and Hadith. Nothing.

And I haven't even mentioned how each religion handles detractors. My family still loves me after coming out an atheist. If you're in a devout Muslim family? Good luck with that.

Christians seem to manage ridicule towards them just fine in the media. Now,
Google Charlie Hebdo and tell me what happend after they poked fun at Islam.

It's a ******** comparison at best. At worst, it's a red herring to deflect any criticism (valid or invalid) of Islam.

Well it is good that we have someone in the forum who is informed about both the Qu'ran and Hadith as well as the Bible.

Seems to me like each religion-of-the-book handles detractors in a wide variety of ways. I know some Muslims who have become atheists and they are still tight with their families. Is it possible that some atheists who come from devout Christian families are no longer welcome in those families?

One thing that has always puzzled me about religions of the book is how their believers pick and choose among their religious texts. I see you have noticed this too. Christians who like authoritarian social regulation, like the above-mentioned Ms. Griffin, for example, often turn to the Old Testament for justification when the Sermon on the Mount blocks them from some desired oppression. They are fine with "the bad parts," even the ethnic cleansing; but there are definitely Christians who aren't fine with them. They are not even fine with "bad parts" of the New Testament.

On the other hand, I have to wonder why so many Muslims ignore the "bad parts" of the Qu'ran, given their role model was a "conquering warlord" as you put it, and there are so many concise messages urging them to kill non-believers.

Include the way these different religions have behaved over the last thousand years and you could get the impression that what religious texts say depends as much upon who reads them and how they are read as much as what is actually in them. In fact, just looking at the words of a text seems not a very good predictor of how people will interpret and act upon those words.  I find myself constantly looking to other social and historical factors to explain the wide range of variations.

I have raised this problem with fundamentalists of two of the three religions at various times, and they do the opposite. They just look at what the text says and assume they are reading without interpreting. Or they have fixed hermenutic method, which they don't seem to think is a method (e.g., Biblical typology). For them, the text is unchanged so the message is unchanged.  That is why whenever they argue, they are always citing lines and verses and scoffing at hermenuetic/linguistic/historical questions/problems.  Why do fundamentalists of all three religions so often disagree with their fellow fundamentalists then, one wonders, if they are all seeing what's just there on the page? I am not a fundamentalist, but if I were, I imagine I would solve the problem quickly by recognizing Satan's snare and affirming my deep and unchangeable belief in with the text says.