I saw this article at another site-- it made me physically ill. It shouldn't have been surprising I suppose, given the videos of ISIS and other radical groups sawing heads off of captured prisoners. The reality of the article and the horror it evokes manage to bring home more of this sad cult's fanatical and absolute devotion to
a religion based at its root in hate and intolerance.
There is no way I can come close in imagination to the actual experience of being pushed over the edge of a building to face my death by those who feel superior, who hate and absolve themselves through religious faith. I may not know half the terror by imagining it, but that doesn't stop me from the helplessness and horror of re-enacting the act in my mind before I fall asleep, whether I want it or not, or the nightmare it causes afterward. I cling to the idea that as awful as this makes me feel, it also strongly reminds me that people with whom I share a single harmless trait are being tortured and brutally murdered.
I saw an interview several months ago (Bill Maher? Maybe, I can't remember...) during which the point that Muslim's keep trying to make about the religion being perverted into something other than its basis in peace and love came under scrutiny. The interviewer posited that the point might be taken seriously if there were any scrap of evidence that there was a group of individuals taking action in country and pointing out a more evolved, less brutal approach to the religion. The article Virge linked here at GS about the murder of gay people illustrates the consequence at what they perceive as depravity, never mind openly speaking out against
the very basis of the Muslim faith. A large majority of its believers give unyielding support to this backward notion. We should call these proponents of the peace and love faction of Muslim religion what they are: Muslim apologists. These people who claim that the Muslim religion is based at its core in peace and love are completely overlooking the example and word of the Qur'an.
Quote:The Qur'an never once speaks of Allah's love for non-Muslims, but it speaks of Allah's cruelty toward and hatred of non-Muslims more than 500 times.
TheReligionofPeace?
Frankly, Christian apologists are no better. They espouse the rhetoric cherry picked from the Bible rather than all the bits that they are ashamed of shouting from the roof top. Most of us know this hypocrisy from the infamous book of Leviticus.
Quote:Leviticus is a funny book for modern Christians. Along with Deuteronomy and swathes of Exodus and Numbers, it lays out the Law for the Israelites. But it’s largely ignored by modern Christians because it’s felt that Jesus replaced the Law (except where He didn’t) and that Paul said a lot of it didn’t apply (except for the parts that did). And for all of that, many are still willing to cite Leviticus for things that they think are sinful, while ignoring it for things they don’t.
Things Banned In Leviticus
While Christians (most of them anyway) have evolved and as result are not beheading people or throwing gay people from the Freedom Tower, they must also be held to the same standard and labeled as Christian apologists.
Quote: Luke 14:26
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
-Authorized King James Version
Quote: Matthew 10:34-37
34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
36 And a person's enemies will be those of his own household.
37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
-English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK)
Why Christians are Cruel to Non-Believers
(I think I remember Virge posting this link in a different post concerning why the Catholic church is dieing, and if that is the case due diligence to him for providing me the reading. It is worth the time to read.)
My point here is not to hijack this thread and read the riot act to Christians or to class them in the same breath as radical Muslims. I merely attempt to point out that many learned people have been forced to re-evaluate their faith by means of common sense, societal pressure, the final acknowledgement of any given holy text's inconsistencies from one passage to another and one book to the next, or science which has sometimes conclusively pointed out the fallacies of those who adamantly believe in Christian parable and dogma as fact. Religious people who are stubbornly willfully immutable, or explain away sections of the Bible by virtue of some new realized age of enlightenment via a new prophet or Pope, must be labeled as Christian apologists. They pertinaciously ignore the words of sacred text while desperately holding onto the faith of the sections they find palatable. Even worse, they inflict their faulty belief systems on other people, pushing irrational tenets of their faith into systems of government and law.
Christians should never forget the bloody past of its own history. The Crusades, which have no doubt biased Muslims against Catholics to this day, took the lives of some estimated 1 to 3 millions people.
I'm not excusing the horrific present day actions by radically religious sects who kill without guilt and who feel justified in their actions. As I said at the onset of this tome, upon reading what ISIS is doing to LGBT people in their midst made me physically ill. It isn't hard to send me in the spiral of depression and this report easily sent me into the black.
As pessimistic as it sounds I agree with Virge.
Virge Wrote:I am getting to the point I'm disappointed with the entire human race for not cutting off and destroying these animals who kill just to kill.
I'd go even further I think.
Most of the rest of the world didn't stand by for the atrocities of World War II, and there is an arguable similarity between the cause of both horrors, then and now. I'm not sure when the idea of war became civilized. While the idea that innocent people may be killed during a war is utterly appalling, when faced with a government who embraces the ideology of selectively killing those individuals it finds undesirable on a mass scale,
we must remember that innocent people are being killed now.
In addendum are those sympathizers of ISIS recruited here in the US and France (among others), meaning we also must remember that innocent people are not merely being killed in foreign lands, the hate has reached our shores. Eventually innocent people at home will not be felled by ISIS recruits with guns only, but rather larger and more deadly attacks. Gorilla style fighting and stealth attack have become vogue for terrorists. I am a proponent of police and intelligence detection. Past a certain point however, we must acknowledge that prevention is not curing the problem. Thoughtful discussion and diplomacy are not working or even an option. And while we merely attempt to fend off the attacks, people in the center of the storm are dieing in violent fashion.
Worse, for me the longer I live the more disillusioned I am with the entire human race. There beautiful exceptions to the horror, dishonesty, mismanagement of resource and wildlife by the intelligent custodians of Earth, murder, greed and mad scramble for power at any cost, but these beautiful exceptions are so few drops in the vast ocean of ugly reality.
Perhaps the answer isn't full scale war. War didn't seem to help when the twin towers fell. Then again, we were only attempting to wage a civilized war with a very uncivilized opponent. Welcome to the slippery slope.