OK for people to be called Muhammad, but not a teddy bear (not in Sudan anyway)

[WendyWeber]

Poor woman

40 lashes???

I love the calm quote from the Muslim teacher at the school:

"I was just impressed that she got them to vote"

These are 6-7 year-olds, they chose the alternative names and they voted for Muhammad (also the name of the most popular boy in the class apparently) and most of the parents are fine with it - just one fanatic took offence from the sound of it.

As Betty Bowers says : It has been my experience that by the time most of my brethren Fundamentalists get finished redacting the portions that they don't wish to apply to them, there is so very little left of the Bible that it is hardly likely that those few passages will contain any errors!

Good grief, been sat reading bible things.
unruly children must be killed (Deuteronomy 21:21)
and those that talk back, (Exodus 21:17; Matthew 15:4)
or hit you (Exodus 21:15).

You can also eat your children in times of seige (Ezekiel 5:10; Deuteronomy 28:53, 57; Jeremiah 19:9).

Lets hope a US bible literalist theocracy remains a pipe dream. There's even more vile things you should do to your womenfolk, adulteresses, neighbours who work on a sabbath etc etc
But I did know poeple who kept a 'rod' for beating and Christian magazines sold them ina range of attarctive colours.
This could be a whole new thread actually.

but true, there was nothing about calling a teddy bear 'Jesus'

Yes, but the bible isn;t seen as the literal word of god - some nutters would like it to be, but reinterpretation is allowed.. It isn't with the Qu'ran.

An Islamic politician refused to condemn the stoning of women last month becasue it had happened during the lifetime of the Prophet, "so you are asking me to condemn my Prophet"."

The most terrible violence agaibst women and children is legitimised by the Qu'ran and the Hadith. I am not saying that all Muslim's would want to actually do this, but they are not allowed to challenge it either, or condemn it when it happens! Moderate or no.

And I'd also like to see an example of a country where the Bible forms part of the legislation and the Old Testament civil law is carried out. (you know, death penalty for adultery and all that)

Because I can't think of one off-hand, but I can think of a couple where Quranic law is part of the legislation and carried out, too.

(And is there a purpose to the random contextless proof-texting out of the Bible?)

Sue - that is because the vast majority of Christians, unlike yourself, do not believe the Bible is the literal word of God. Therefore, no need to do everything it says to do, even if one considers himself a Christian.

I also think there is an important distinction to be made between Muslims and Islamists. Most people who practice Islam are muslims, Islamists promote and enforce the literal word of god for political ends.

It would be pretty difficult - impossible, I imagine - to enforce each and every OT prohibition in law. You'd be arresting and trying people for touching the skin of a pig, planting two different crops in the same field, having sex with a woman while she is menstruating, having hair trimmed, eating shellfish, owning slaves which are not from neighbouring countries, approaching the altar of God with a visual defect....

I honestly think its splitting hairs to say that the Bible can be interpreted and the koran can't. Cleary different Muslims interpret the Koran differently and many Christians have not been tolerant of different 'interpretations' of the bible.

I don't think you can argue that its only nutters who interpet the Bible 'incorrectly' when so much blood has been shed in its name, and then argue that moderate Muslims are somehow missing the point of their own religion. I don't think religion is as simple as that. Its a bit like when it was questioned whether SueBaroo was aware of the history of the bible further up (down?) thread, as though this might be news to her. Clearly she does, but there is more than one way of understanding these 'facts'.

'the vast majority of Christians, unlike yourself, do not believe the Bible is the literal word of God.'

How does any body know what the vast majority of Christians think? Even dealing with the C of E, with in 2 miles of me we have a C of E church in the evangelical tradition, a Forward in Faith C of E church and a C of E church which seems to be for Polish catholics.

And the various Korean Christian churches that worship in those C of E churches.

MP - There are polls for this sort of thing, that is how we know majority of Christians don't take Bible to be literally true. About 1/3 of Americans believe Bible to be literally 'True' and in UK, Catholic Church itself says we shouldn't expect Bible to be totally accurate.

Personally, I have never met anyone who believes Bible to be the literal word of God, or even, literally true. Given that it is obviously made up of accounts of different flesh-and-blood people, this is hardly surprising.

The pope, for example (and the AB of C ) is on record as saying that evolution is 'real'

I think the problem is with understanding what different people mean by the 'literal word of God'.

The Muslim and Christian understandings of inspiration differ in how the inpsiration was done. I appreciate this makes no never mind to those who don't accept the inspiration of either, but it is significant if it's the discussion at hand.

Muslims believe, as far as I recall, that Muhammad was conscious of being sort of a scribe, reciting directly what an angel had told him to say.

Christians believe that men wrote, for example, letters, that were inspired and guided inwardly - using the personalities and circumstances of the person to do it. It wasn't like a secretary taking down notes, or people in trances being taken over by outside forces in that.

So, for Muslims, the important thing is to preserve the exact revelation as given - down to the language it was given in, because it's literally 'the things God has said'

For Christians, it's important for us to understand the context and background of each passage of the scripture, because that's part and parcel of understanding it.

So all these wild examples from the OT law don't give me any pause, because in the context of an ancient, theocratic, national Hebrew nation, they had a certain meaning, but as a Christian, they mean something else. I could take up a lot of space elaborating on that, but I'm not going to write a sermon

I'm not in favour of a theocracy and am in favour of the separation of church and state.

As to being aware of the facts of the history of the Bible, yes, I'm well aware of those facts, and the various creeds and councils that get cited in these things. There's a lot more to the topic than what Dan Brown might tell you, though.

Monkey trousres, there are people who see the bible as the literal word from god. Don't why you say that there isn't. I've met them. I've also met muslims who are literal and those who are not. There are all sorts.
We have had Christian countries who uphold biblical laws but we don't right now. And there are muslim countries that don't insist on religious law.
You keep sterotyping and making generalisations from what is happening in Sudan.
Religion is not simple and religious people are not identical.
Problem is the media likes the 'extreme'stories (and sadly enough there's always someone willing to oblige) so we have stories of fundie looneys in the US bombing abortion clinis or beating children, fundies here beating kids to death to get the demons out of them, muslim mobs wanting a woman killed because of a teddy bear or children burned to death because zealots wouldn't let them out of school. Sadly all these are true but they are still not the majority of religious people. But the media have little interest in muslim charities helping landmine victims in Ethiopia, or the elderly Christian lady in Alabama who opens her home every breakfast time to the poor and homeless and feeds as many as she can or the pagan young man who tried to help me fix my bike tye once, apologised when he couldn't and reappeared half an hour later having cycled to a bike shop and bought me a new one.
Stories of good people rarely make the press. Or the media focus on illegal immigrants and not the hardworking legal ones. Oh, the list goes on.
I've travelled all over the world and I'd say the majority of humans are pleasant beings and helpful. But the bad ones get the press
And Qu'ranic law, also called Sharia is based on the Qu'ran and hadith but some of what is labelled sharia is not Islamic and much of what Govt's do is not islam (why are suprised?). Sharia also evolves.
But we're now arguing in circles.
I think we all agree that there are looneys in every religion, that all of them have bits that make your jaw drop and that the mob baying after that teddy woman is unreasonable. But its best not to tar every religious person with the same brush.
And a lot of people think being religious = being looney, cos after all, we believe in an invisible being that tells us things , whether its Jehovah, Allah or the great NooNoo.

SueBaroo - Mohammad was illiterate and Quran is believed to have come down to him, already written, page by page. There is no question of Mohammad being a 'scribe' to an 'inspiration'.

Lucky you Cote. I once shamed myself at an American Homeschooling group by suggesting that we went to the Natural History museum in Washington DC. There was this frosty silence and someone said 'its the work of the devil because it shows evolution which is proved to be false'
I started to smirk and then realised that the speaker was deadly serious and half the women were nodding.
We were just down the road from Pat Roberston's university that teaches creationsim and young earth (world is 5000 years old). Thousands believed every word and that the bible was to be taken literally. They believed in the biblical flood, that dinosaurs were on the ark and only disappeared a few hundred years ago and when questioned on how Noah could possibly have picked up all those animals, told me that the super continent of Pangea existed only 4000 years ago then the continents moved apart (at ship speed apparently)
I started ayahoo group so we could talk about this without falling out - its on yahoo called debate-rel-pol if anyone would like to come join.

Cote - you're missing, or rather making my point. The Muslim understanding of revelation and inspiration is significantly different to the Christian understanding.

I reckon most of you don't know what the 'bible belt' is like and this was Virginia, near Washington DC and these were educated people. The lady next door worked for the CIA but believed the earth was 5000 years old.
I had never met bible literlists before. A real eye-opener.

Creationists believe the earth is roughly 6000 years old as far as I'm aware, not 5000. Could be wrong there, it's a while since I've done any reading on it.

It isn't spltting hairs to state the fact that you can be imprisioned or killed for criticising Islam in an Islamic county while you are give a right by law to demonstrate against anything in many other places.

Or that women are bartered and raped as part of marriage, refused education, refused right, that the individual is considered less important than the collective ideology.

4004 BC? according to Bishop Usher (no relation of mine

MB, that's roughly 6000 isn't ? For once I am little unsure because my skill with numbers is akin to my skill on a rugby field...

see, I have crap maths, especially cos the BC years are a counted down.

Yes, 4000 BC would be about 6000 years.

[I am quite interested to hear not 'why' but 'how' you can believe creation circa 4000 BC, given carbon dating on not only fossils but many human settlements, but I'd rather not hijack the thread.]