Christians, how would you react to a masgue opening near you?

Not one of my ARABIC, MUSLIM friends interprets that passage that way to me.

They either say that 'strike' is something light and harmless or that that is a thing that was acceptable when the Qur'an was written, but not for modern Muslims.

 

Catholicism and Judaism is also a set of laws that followers are expected to regard more highly than laws of the land.

Do we ban them too?

 

Oh Lord.

Replace Muslims with Christians and Qur'an with Bible, quadruple (at least) the number of people killed.......and compare

Yup, we Christians should be ashamed.

 

This is where I for that from: http://www.ruqaiyyah.karoo.net/articles/beating.htm

Also: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa,_34

There isn't an agreement on whether the term means "strike" or "leave". But it is and has been discussed.

سلام

 

I would draw the line between a mosque, which doesn't affect me, and one of those (*)(*)(*)(*) yodelling towers where they do their heathen "call to prayer" sounding like a dying African safari animal that needs to be removed from its misery. Waking up in the morning to hear that screeching racket would drive me nuts. Already many American cities have these towers. If they erected one of those in my city, I might just join up with an "extremist" group and bomb it into rubble.



Do I look like I'm joking?

 

Well, ok. I'm joking.

 

I chose #3. There are a multitude of mosques in Lebanon, and as an atheist, I haven't ever been intimidated by them, Lol. The calls to prayer are quite soothing.

 

Really? 270 million sounds crazy enough. Quadruple that or more and that figure alone would make you wonder how there are any Europeans left.

Please tell me. What do I as a Catholic have to be ashamed of?

 

How about burning Protestants at the stake, causing my ancestors to flee here, which is now becoming a police state?

I should be in Europe right now, if not for your ancestors.

BLOODY MARY killed more people than AQ can even dream about.

 

I can only be ashamed for wrongdoings I have committed. Which is why I asked. You don't know anything about you and neither do I. Which is also why I'm unsure what you're talking about when you reference "here.". Where's "here?"

King Henry 8 killed far more people than the so called "Bloody Mary."

 

Thank you.

Muslim people can only be ashamed for wrongdoings they have committed as well, I am sure you would agree.

King Henry the 8th was also a Catholic.

 

If a masque opened near me, I'd wonder how I got into a sixteenth century courtly entertainment!

 

That's interesting, because I am Scotch-Irish, both sides of the same issue.

Somehow though, I should be mutually ashamed of what my ancestors from both sides did?

 

I think the point is to study them, learn what went wrong, and then apply the lessons to ensure the same mistakes are not made again.

The point is certainly not to look at something, put blinders on to similar events, and the castigate people for their faith choice.

After all, I feel no shame over slavery. I acknowledge that there was a problem, obviously, and that there are lingering cultural effects that have resulted. I do not look at a black man and see a former slave. I see a man, and it is HIS character that counts.

 

Henry the 8th was not technically catholic....he broke off from the catholic church because they would not let him divorce his wife for absolutely no reason....He started the Church of England

 

There's always a reason. The Pope at the time was more inclined not to grant the king an annulment due to the fact that the Holy Roman Emperor at the time was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. Also, Carherine's short loved marriage with Henry's brother Arthur, Prince of Wales was never consummated.

 

Well, he didn't die as a Catholic.

 

As much as I love historical trivia, I am wondering how the Catholic Church made its way into this thread at all?

I know and respect MANY Catholics, find them to be engaging insightful, and I learn by watching them struggle through the aspects of their faith as they do watching me grapple with mine.

If a Catholic Church opened up next to me, I would invite the priest over for dinner and see what I could do to help out with any adjustements, etc. If a mosque opened up, I would do the same thing for a mosque and the Imam.

Having these institutions in yoru neighborhood is a good thing.

Now conversely, if someone opened up a crack house, a brothel, or a strip joint next to me ... well, that I would care about in a definitively different reception. Those two bring things into your neighborhood, and none of those influences on your community are in any way beneficial.

Catholic Churches and any other legitimate belief's organizational housing will ALWAYS be welcome in my neighborhood. There are alternatives, and I prefer them FAR less.

 

I have nothing against Catholics AT ALL. It was brought up as an example of a religion that has done a LOT of killing in the name of the religion.

Christians have never forced conversion - really?

I guess all those people burned at the stake for being suspected of being Protestants would beg to differ.

Some happen to be my ancestors and are why I am in America right now instead of England.

So my mother could marry a Catholic, hee- hee.

 

The Church of England persecuted Catholics and non Catholics alike. By the time of Jamestown, there where already strict laws against Catholics from serving in Government.

 

It was brought up by Mr. Conservative as an example of a religion with a tawdry past that has moved beyond it.

Yes, Christians have forced converstions, Charlemagne for example did so by cutting off an estimated 5,000 tribal leaders heads in order to force the conversion. It was a VERY different time, and the status of religion at the time was not of peaceful co-existance. It was a method of ensuring loyalty in an era where rebellion and political rivalry were often met with violence in an era where the apparatus of state, the movement of supplies and troops, precluded rapid responses to local power bases that could, and often did, attempt to establish their own little fiefdoms - sometimes successfully.

Swearing an oath of fealty before GOD was a method of preventing, or at least reducing the instances of, these antics. Swearing before some Pagan God that is different than mine? That is just a delay in the current fighting, and why Charlemagne did what he did. Why others did what they did. It was a VERY different time.

Most of the people burned at the stake were Jews or suspected witches. With the exception of bloody Mary, the church burned comparatively few heretics, with most of teh blood shed coming from BETWEEN states rather than between denominations.

Once again, the church held birth records (taxes), and, then unlike today, held much of the economic apparatus and judicial functions that we take for garnted today. The declaration of the a new faith was seen, not without merit, as an attack on the state.

It is the aftermath of the 30 Years War that much of the apparatus of teh modern state is transferred to the state from eth church - as the Protestant states did by simply appropriating the assets of the Church ... ostensibly for a new church. This is a trend that continues and is a significant issue in the French Revolution.

There are a lot of reasons you are here in America, and me, and why you can now marry a Catholic without fear of running afoul a vicious religious cycle that lies just beneath the veneer of civility - a veil that broke entirely when govenors attempted to use the ideologies of Nationalism and involked religion to rip the Balkans apart once again.

How that has a bearing on a mosque opening up, the vast majority of which function just fine in our secular society, is beyond me.

 

I have mentioned to the forum in past postings the concept of 'political theology' and everyone just wanted to cast it aside ... but now you bring it up again with a different choice of words. It just goes to show, that a lot of people don't look between all the wrinkles to see what is hidden in those folds.

 

Well, I live in a town about which the saying goes that it either rains there or the church bells ring and and on Sundays it's both at the same time. It's utterly impossible to live anywhere central here without being frequently being harrassed by the noise of frantic metally clinc clanc every couple of hours from some belfry or the other. Personally I would prefer the melodic sound of a muezzin any time. And when I get woken up on Sunday mornings at 9:30 with non-stop full volume out of tune massive bell-ringing after I just got home from a tough nightshift at about 6:00, I seriously consider crashing a plane into this darned belfry next door one day.

Only joking of course.

 

When exactly? Because every day there's another nut claiming the second coming is tomorrow... always "tomorrow", never today or yesterday, always tomorrow.... Hmmmmmm.

 

there is a mosque being built right now not 2 miles from where i live. sadly because of the storms recently their mosque was harshly damaged and construction is gonna take longer. but one of the bigger christian church's in the area remedied their need for a place to pray with letting the muslims use their church.

i have no problem with it and seemingly neither do alot of these horrible southern christian rightwinger hillbillies either.