People furious as star athlete insults Islamic prophet Muhammad

As a follower of Jesus I do find all the Jesus hate comments to be "messed up" but that is my opinion and I don't expect anyone to adhere to that. So i guess the quick answer is YES, you have that correct

 

And let's not forget that it was white evangelical Christians who were at the forefront of the American abolitionist movement. Or that Thomas Jefferson tried to eradicate slavery from the jump, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence. The first draft of his epic bitch slap of King George includes the following 168 words:

"... he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

Approval of the Declaration required a unanimous vote. South Carolina & Florida would not support a document containing any anti-slavery language. The 11other colonies agreed that slavery should be abolished. As TJ later observed, the issue of slavery at the Constitutional Convention was "like holding a wolf by the ears. We didn't like it, but didn't dare let it go."

 

Jefferson's Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, is quite interesting, too. In a nutshell, he took the New Testament and pulled all the miracles and supernatural stuff out of it. It's been said that he was a Deist but I've always wondered if he was a closet atheist.

As for his advice to read the Qur'an, it's a good idea to accompany that with a good exegesis (tafsir) and a reading of the history of Muhammad's time. I would also recommend reading 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad, by Ali Dashti which provides both a rationalist critique of the Qur'an and facts surrounding the writing of the book and Muhammad's life in Mecca and Medina. If you don't want to buy the book you can check it out here for free:

https://ia803403.us.archive.org/8/items/twentythreeyearsen_202105/twentythreeyearsEN.pdf

 

Another little known fact that you probably won't find in any of Howard Zinn's revisionist Marxist tracts is that James Otis Jr., the father of our Fourth Amendment, asserted that Blacks possessed the same natural rights as Whites during his arguments in Paxton's Case in 1761.

 

Sure, and there were great developments during the Islamic Golden Age that we still benefit from today. You can associate pretty much any major religion with extremely positive and extremely negative things, though with a vast majority of things somewhere in between. Picking out any one of those extremes and trying to present it as a reason to unilaterally celebrate or condemn that entire religion and everyone who follows it, especially in the context of the present day, is ridiculous.

 

Straw man.

A) Kindy cite where I have "celebrated or condemned an entire religion & everyone who follows it."
B) Present day, there is no question whence the worst and most violent of the extremists come. You had to reach back centuries to cite a relevant Christian example. In the here & now, slavery is alive and well in the Muslim world (see: Boko Haram, the Levant, Somalia, Sudan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, Yemen, et al). So is pitching homosexuals off rooftops, forced clitorectomies, denial of education for girls, hit lists for those who criticize (Salmon Rushdie) or satirize (Charlie Hebdo massacre) Islam.

On the other hand, I suppose we shouldn't be too hard on Clifton Geoffery Worthington, the guy who nearly killed Rushdie last year. After all, he only cost Rushdie an eye and the use of one of his hands. Wait a sec - it wasn't Clifton Geoffery Worthington. That's a typo. The attacker was Hadi Matar. Calling him out & trashing his religious motivations is calling a spade a spade. That appears to trouble you, which I submit is a 'you' problem.

But to be fair, I do remember the wave after wave of Christian violence in the wake of Piss Christ and the Last Temptation of Christ. You remember: all those Christian leaders issuing religious decrees to slaughter the producers of those blasphemies; Scorsese stabbed to death in the street with a kitchen knife... Oh waitaminit - that didn't actually happen. Never mind.

 

LOADS Jews believe in the Torah thing that God is their real estate agent, and greater Israel is theirs due to divine right and take it through violence and whatever. The bible also agrees on this as well. The entire theme surrounds theme of innocent Egyptian babies being killed for the sake that Jews could leave to the promised land. And ones there the Jews committed genocide on the indigenous people including the animals for the sole sake to get their hands on the lands. And look at the Jews go today massively helped by the western Christian world, by first ethnically cleansing +700.000 Arabs, and now keep on enlarging their colonies across their international recognized border and murder whoever objects.

And the western Christian world were damn happy to be able to buy a shirt for 2 bucks, made by enslaved children across the world. Their companies set this practice up without a care in the world.

While forced clitorectomies isn't a religious thing. A region in Africa does this.

And orthodox Christians and Jews alike have their idea's about women being equal, but have a different place in this world as in kitchen and making babies.
They also shun homosexuals as hard as they can. They get killed in Africa by Christians just as easy.

 

I think you're forgetting that we have violence against those of various religions all across America.

The fact that humans get upset when someone disparages their religion started way before recorded history.

Trying to measure the average level of violence per religion is ridiculous. Plus, we as a NATION have gone to war over Islam, and that absolutely has affected the views of Muslims.

 

Until the 1800s or so, saying similar things about Christianity would get you murdered in the Christian world as well. Eventually, secularists defanged murderous Christians. I'm glad they are doing the same thing for Muslims in the west.

 

Ares vs Thor would be interesting (though the obvious answer is Thor, who wasn't as much of an *******), but Aries was a goat. I can't tell if that was a joke about your avatar or not.

 

"Islam is the only religion I have a problem with." "Islam is a political movement and always has been." "The dogma & ideology are constant."

It all sounds fairly definitive and all encompassing to me, especially on the basis of a single historic example.

To an extent maybe, though I'd argue it's more complex than religion alone, rather than is just one factor in the wider socio-political factors that tend to lead to such things. As I said, we tend to get these kind of things when different cultures clash, and it just happens that a lot of different cultures have clashed in the part of the world over the years.

Also, other major religions have similar aspects to their underlying scriptures or doctrine as those used to promote and/or justify extreme violence (some of it might even comes from the same root sources) and I'd suggest that it is less the religions themselves that prevent the extremes but the secular societies that developed in some parts of the world despite them.

 

When/where did we as a nation go to war over Islam?

 

There has been a clear religious element in our wars in Afg, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

And, remember that this can only be judged in the light of those in those countries.

 

Remember the planes flying into the Trade Center buildings in 2001? 19 Saudis did it in the name of Islam. Hell, half of them were named Mohammad.

 

it turned into a joke that my user name makes better, but the idea of arguing over one god being more awesome seems silly. of course my dumb ass misspelled Ares, and I should be mocked accordingly!

 

Well, not so much with words, but the reality is that the US attacked Iraq just like Russia attacked Ukraine. The US was also as the occupying force responsible for the security of Iraq, and under that umbrella it just let ISIS spawn under it's wing, and spread into Syria. And it was fair to see attack Al Qaida was justified, but that ended after 3 weeks followed by 20 years of raging war against the locals with no point what so ever. The US is still present in Syria as far as I know. The US also fanatically supports Jewish Israel without any problem of them violently removing Arab civilians from their houses for the past 60 years with American made weapons, besides bombing hospitals and civilian houses exactly what Russia is doing now.

So ppl can say all they want it's not because they are Muslim, and it's just a coincidence.... and like: aha.

 

not true.

 

There is no law to stop him from saying such things, there is only common sense knowing muslims are hyper sensitive to such comments. Sure, this is common language in churches, but when you say on on TV, you might stir something up.

Some Tweeters, which translated to "people are furious"

 

Absolutely true.

The next step is to figure out why.

Bin Laden pointed out many times that his objective was to get America's military out of his country (Saudi Arabia) by making it expensive for America. With America gone, there could be a chance to improve the government of Saudi Arabia - a government that America and many Muslims despise. He believed (rightly, I think) that SA won't change as long as it gets the massive support of the USA.

Obviously, that was a major miscalculation of American power - something that he admitted.

I think people in the US forget what a massive imposition by a foreign power can mean.

We totally misjudged what we were doing to Egypt. We misjudged Vietnam. We misjudged what our impact was on Libya. We think those in Gaza should just suck it up and live in their open air prison. We think those in West Bank should accept Israel's military coming to bulldoze their homes and agriculture, and rule them with foreign military law in which they have no representation.

These are ALL things that America claims we stand against. But, those in these other countries witness the opposite.

 

Because western society allows absolutely anything no matter how perverse. Islam doesn't. Those are the rules, choose your "poison"

 

and nobody is forcing them to live here
If they don't like the rules of the country then too damn bad

 

Well, there are a lot of religious variations in America. And, I don't see the lines being as clear as you propose. Islam and Evangelical Protestants share some ideas of sin, for example. Islam and Judaism share some elements as well.

We're not going to go back to picking one religious variation and writing its ideas of sin into our law.

Our founders and their forefathers moved forward from that position in order to form one country where we have religious freedom.

 

It's not that easy.

We have the same problem within our country.

 

Well, number one, we haven't gone to war in Palestine. Number two, both of our wars in Iraq were with the Baathist regime that was anything but religious.

So that brings us to the wars against the Islamists/jihadists/takfirists based in Afghanistan (al Qaeda and the Taliban) and Syria & Iraq (the Islamic State and al Qaeda before it). While the Islamists/jihadists/takfirists viewed their attacks on the United States as a jihad, that doesn't mean we were fighting over Islam, and we weren't, and that the Islamists/jihadists/takfirists who attacked us on 9/11 (AQ) and started beheading Americans in Syria (IS) were engaged in a war that was both legitimate under Islamic law and supported by the majority of Muslims around the world. While those Islamists/jihadists/takfirists most certainly claimed they were following Islamic scripture, engaged in a legitimate form of jihad, and enjoyed the support of the majority of Muslims, again, that doesn't mean they were, and many Muslims rejected their claims - especially the ones who were victimized by their homicidal takfirism that is in itself a suspect "doctrine" under Shari'a law. Lest you are unaware or have forgotten, the first people who are victimized by those groups tend to be Muslims themselves.

To put this in perspective, think of the Christian holy rollers who kill abortion doctors, et al, in the name of their religion. Are we at war over Christianity here? We most certainly are not. Are their claims to be conducting a legitimate religious war/crusade/campaign legit under Christian doctrine? No, they are not. Do they represent and are supported by the vast majority of Christians? No, they are not.

I disagree. They can be judged by Muslims around the world, which was the constituency Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were trying to rally behind them in their jihads against the people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, they deemed worthy of death.