Kuwait left you a lil' jaded eh?

A thread about Islam on the internet? How novel!

Hey Miss Katie. are you in Kuwait now? when are you back in oz? sounds like you need a holiday. i think it's pretty brave and amazing of you to go live and work in such a drastically different culture.

There is a reason Christianity is the prime religion of the West... because it has evolved and us with it.

Are you sure about this, Miss K?

France has it right: Assimilate or leave.

Are we thinking of the same France here, the one whose innate racism and xenophobia has resulted in the creation of an Islamic underclass, widespread unemployment and antagonism towards anyone seen as 'different'?

God help us all.

Which God is that, exactly?

Coming this summer, ''When expats go crazy!''

If you get a chance, go see the film 'The Reluctant Infidel' (or just 'The Infidel' outside of Aus). Though it's a comedy and parody to a certain degree, being set it middle class suburban England, it shows an interesting insight into the culture of moderate muslims, who often see extremist/fundamentalist muslims as 'loopy', OTT, or even crazy. But, they know it's part of what comes with the religion. And if the film is anything to go by, Islam seems to be passed down through families, and inherited, much like happens in Jewish and Catholic families. I think this is where they get their deep pride and protection of the religion from. Its not about a faith, it's about a people. Where 'western Christianity' is a faith, and a choice to believe, Islam's rules and laws frame a culture and people who must adhere, obey, or suffer the consequences, as carried ou by... people. And so, such is the expectation on the rest of the world. Little is mentioned about the Islamic view of Jesus and the gospels. There is a distortion from the Christian bible (just as there is with the Jewish origins of parts of Islamic texts), but there is still a reverence and respect of what this Jesus (or 'Isa' if I'm not mistaken) did and said. What I'm talking about isn't tolerance, or even acceptance of Islam... I think it's about dialogue. The issues that arise always seen to be about people. Israelies vs Palestinians. Westerners vs Middle Eastern people. Why there isn't as much vocal opposition to the Buddhist or Hindu East I can only attribute to history, and the ongoing trend of Westerners vocally (and physically) opposing Islam, all too often under a 'Christian' banner (or scapegoat as I like to think of it). At the end of the day, it's about power. Leaders of people want power, and so legitimise vocal and physical opposition to other people. The Nazis did it, the governing bodies in most countries have done it regarding war, religious extremists do it, opposing governing parties do it, sports teams do it... I think you get the idea. This is a world in conflict. Whilst organised masses of people are busy opposing other organised masses of people, I think it's our responsibility to keep loving and building relationships with people in our own little worlds. I personally think there is a 'truth' out there, but I don't think we're going to find it by throwing stones at each other from a distance, or creating massive divides that just promote fear. (I'm writing this on my phone, so if something doesn't make sense, forgive me)

I don't know anything about Islam at all really.

Its quite amazing how knowledgeable this board is.

The Andrew Bolt blog is on another page ofthe internet, Miss Katie

Dear Islam,

You ought to be indicted for inciting insanity.

(Alliteration!)

I'm so tired of being tolerant. Yes, the Koran promotes love and respect, but your people continue to manipulate your truth and use it as an excuse for barbaric behaviour. At the end of the day, you are archaic, tribal and irrelevant. The more the West accept you, the more you take the piss because you see it as weakness. You truly believe you are superior and scoff at those with a more forward-thinking philosophy. Your people let cats starve and die in the streets; dogs are beaten and tortured, starved and allowed to die because a phrase in the Koran supposedly proclaims them to be unholy. Pigs are 'unclean'. A woman's face and skin are for her husband's eyes only. Archaic. Archaic. Archaic.

People kill in your name, time and time again...and yet we romanticise you...discuss your positive points...allow you to erect places of worship and encourage your people to 'be themselves'. Your people do not see this as a gracious act of tolerance. They see it as the way it should be. They do not feel humbled in the presence of unconditional acceptance. They grow in self-righteousness and intolerance.

There is a reason Christianity is the prime religion of the West... because it has evolved and us with it. The Crusades were a long time ago. You are a safe-haven for the ignorant and the naive. Your people do not question. To merely mention the existence of another faith or belief system is unthinkable. Your people murder those who do in cold blood. Your people black out Isreal in the Atlas!! This is not sane behaviour.

The blind faith and ignorance present here in the Middle East is astounding.

The face of Europe is changing as your people spread out and expand. They enjoy the peace of our West; the perks of freedom and equality. Yet they carry with them such contempt for us. They insist upon our understanding but do not return the same courtesy. For their way is the true way.

France has it right: Assimilate or leave.

I'm sorry Islam, but you are the cause of too much anguish. Your intentions may be right, but somewhere along the way your message became royally screwed and your people are responsible. If we continue to accept and support you, we are opening ourselves up to an insidious enemy.

God help us all.

Miss Katie.

dear Miss Katie

you're quite ridiculous

i think - you and this guy have a lot in common:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-already-knows-everything-he-needs-to-know-abou,17990/

SALINA, KS—Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world.

Gentries, 48, said he had absolutely no interest in exposing himself to further knowledge of Islamic civilization or putting his sweeping opinions into a broader context of any kind, and confirmed he was ''perfectly happy'' to make a handful of emotionally charged words the basis of his mistrust toward all members of the world's second-largest religion.

''I learned all that really matters about the Muslim faith on 9/11,'' Gentries said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United States undertaken by 19 of Islam's approximately 1.6 billion practitioners. ''What more do I need to know to stigmatize Muslims everywhere as inherently violent radicals?''

''And now they want to build a mosque at Ground Zero,'' continued Gentries, eliminating any distinction between the 9/11 hijackers and Muslims in general. ''No, I won't examine the accuracy of that statement, but yes, I will allow myself to be outraged by it and use it as evidence of these people's universal callousness toward Americans who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers fell.''

''Even though I am not one of those people,'' he added.

When told that the proposed ''Ground Zero mosque'' is actually a community center two blocks north of the site that would include, in addition to a public prayer space, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant, and athletic facilities, Gentries shook his head and said, ''I know all I'm going to let myself know.''

Gentries explained that it ''didn't take long'' to find out as much about the tenets of Islam as he needed to. He said he knew Muslims stoned their women for committing adultery, trained for terrorist attacks at fundamentalist madrassas, and believed in jihad, which Gentries described as the thing they used to justify killing infidels.

''All Muslims are at war with America, and I will resist any attempt to challenge that assertion with potentially illuminating facts,'' said Gentries, who threatened to leave the room if presented with the number of Muslims who live peacefully in the United States, serve in the country's armed forces, or were victims themselves of the 9/11 attacks. ''Period.''

''If you don't believe me, wait until they put your wife in a burka,'' Gentries continued in reference to the face-and-body-covering worn by a small minority of Muslim women and banned in the universities of Turkey, Tunisia, and Syria. ''Or worse, a rape camp. That's right: For reasons I am content being totally unable to articulate, I am choosing to associate Muslims with rape camps.''

Over the past decade, Gentries said he has taken pains to avoid personal interactions or media that might have the potential to compromise his point of view. He told reporters that the closest he had come to confronting a contrary standpoint was tuning in to the first few seconds of an interview with a moderate Muslim cleric before hastily turning off the television.

''I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I didn't want to hear,'' Gentries said. ''But then I remembered how much easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can assign the label of 'other' to someone and use him as a vessel for all my fears and insecurities.''

Added Gentries, ''That really put things back into perspective.''

I'd really like to read that, Mo, but I've been informed that you are ''archaic, tribal and irrelevant''

i'm an athiest

but i do play in a rock band - which is most definitely archaic, tribal and irrelevant

Ha! Just for the record, it's funny, but it's the Onion... fake news. But a story based on elements of truth no doubt.

I'm completely agnostic, i find perspectives from all camps interesting but am a permanent fence sitter.

yes i am aware the Onion is a satirical website.....

but the point rings true

you know hazard man, i find it odd - i sent this article to a mate for lolz purposes and he said ''dude - you are aware this is a joke website etc'' - to which i replied ''hence why i sent it saying 'you will laugh'''

• is it not common knowledge that the onion is a joke? i thought that would be blatantly obvious

The Onion is so funny, has been since forever. It's the most consistently funny part of the internet.

I know quite a bit about Islam! (I'm not Islamic though, so no bias!)

Ask me about Islam!

Yes, the Koran promotes love and respect, but your people continue to manipulate your truth and use it as an excuse for barbaric behaviour

You don't have to manipulate 'the truth'; it also promotoes barbaric behaviour.

The love it promotoes is a kind of pithy, pathetic love.

I'm not attacking Muslims, I'm just talking about the texts they believe to be the word of god.

I try to be very cautious when it comes to my comments on Islam because whenever I say anything negative about it (as an educated opinion, I might add) people immediately assume that I have an axe to grind because my mother's family was basically kicked out of Egypt because they're Christian... At this stage I'll just say that miss katie does have some valid points, but I'll elaborate further when I'm a little less frazzled.

Oh, and the issues I have with Islam are the same I have with almost all organised religion (or to be more specific, the fanaticism associated with; especially Roman Catholocism and Orthodox Judaism re: inciting hatred, fear and the oppression of women.)

People use religion for their own purposes. I mean, The Bible and the Koran were even written/collected by people using religions for their own purposes - one book of the Old Testament will say one thing about what to do with non-Jews (kill them all!), and another will say another (trade with them and make money!), and this is because the two books were written at different times when Israel faced different challenges. There's a lot of conflicting information in any ancient religious text still read today, and people ignore some of it and pay attention to other bits. And always have.

The Middle East is going through a phase where fundamentalist Islam is very much in the ascendance, and I have no doubt that Katie has seen some pretty horrible things in Kuwait, as a result. I feel like this fundy Islam that's going around at the moment is very much equivalent to the Inquisition - it's a response to the complete disconnect between the world and their worldview. The kind of fundamentalist Islam that's big now (and which Katie has likely experienced in Kuwait) - Wahabiism - is quite new, historically, and is basically a result of the political power of families like the Saudis as a result of oil money. Because oil is basically state owned/taxed in places like Kuwait and is more or less the foundation of the economy over there, the government there basically has a lot of control over people because they're the ones supporting their livelihoods. It's in their interests to perpetuate their power, and Wahabiism works well in doing this, by keeping the power structure of society the same. So governments promote it.

But just because Wahabiism is big now does not mean that it's going to stay that way for ever. When the rest of the world becomes less reliant on oil, and when the oil reserves start to run out, those societies will change.

Also, much of the Middle East is either basically medieval or has been bombed back into being medieval, and the attitudes of the people reflect that, in the same way that the attitudes of Christians in medieval times reflected that. As a result of the turmoil around there, they often have a difficult choice between amoral power-hungry warlords and (power-hungry) Islamic leaders who at least have some sort of moral code. The kind of sense of trust and common goals that is necessary for true peaceful democracy to happen take hundreds of years to develop, and countries like Kuwait will eventually get there, but it will take a while.

Also, Muslims are not all the same, and not all Muslims are in the Middle East or share their values. in the same way that Christians are not all the same. The biggest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia. And, you know, there are Christian leaders in Africa (the fastest growing area of Christianity in the world) who are actively attempting to execute gay people for being gay.

I feel like this fundy Islam that's going around at the moment is very much equivalent to the Inquisition

i object to you using such a cute word as ''fundy'' like that.

Your gist is to just cobblestone of random pieces of information to make it look like you know what you're talking about when really it just gibberish.

Natural law, reason and all that isn't intrinsically part of Christianity. These are not religious things. The bible - both Hebrew Bible and the New Testament - set down a heap of godly commands that are completely at odds with reason, natural law and all those other things you talk about.

Oh no no I beg to differ, I think I've just shown the fundamental difference between Islam and the west. Reason.

I dont think there is anything wrong with islam. I did not see any indonesians, malay, pakistanis or somali looking people. I just saw photos of middle eastern looking brutes with beards. These 6th pillar gangsters are scary shit.

Then watch the news golden-shower, it's not an Arabic thing

Sting Bono, I believe the Koran also says to follow the law of the land you are living in, although I am no expert on Koran.

Seahunt, a lot of those ''godly commands'' probably made sense in terms of group survival- at that time.

The gist is this, Christianity and the roman empire and the ancient Greeks all believed in natural law and reason.

so called natural law and reason was also the basis for slavery within all those societies. there are a great many things that a Roman or early Christian would call 'reason' or natural law that we would not understand as such today.

plus, a lot of the basis for the philosophy of reasoning, science and inquiry were gleaned from Arabic and Islamic sources (Avicenna etc), who were the only ones who had extant copies of Aristotle and Plato lying around. Aquinas and Augustine are unthinkable without Islamic scholarship.

seahunt is right - you're throwing together a grab-bag of ideas to demonstrate that Islam is so fundamentally alien to Western culture, and that this is something constitutive, that you ignore how much of these things are due to quirks and accidents of history.

the lesson to be learned from that is that there's no belief system so rigid and intractable that it can't evolve, and that you don't need force or coercion to make that happen (if anything, it makes it worse).

golden-shower said 14 minutes ago: I dont think there is anything wrong with islam. I did not see any indonesians, malay, pakistanis or somali looking people. I just saw photos of middle eastern looking brutes with beards. These 6th pillar gangsters are scary shit.

That's a fair point!

Davel I don't believe that includes nation states of non-believers. And sharia trumps that anyway.

This is getting silly. Holyrattlesnakes my post that you disagree with is cogent. I don't think you and seahunt have a grasp of the concepts up there (check your dates such as when Mohammed was born and when seneca or st Augustine were). I can think of a rigid religion that doesn't evolve, history is a great indicator of its deficiencies. Good night, go back to studyiours or your arts exams.

There have been protests in Indonesia too golden.

Holyrattlesnakes my post that you disagree with is cogent.

if you're relying on your own say so with regard to this, then you're in trouble. as always, you're a rolling barrel of logical fallacies (fine, I'll cop to my error when mentioning Augustine in unison with Aquinas out of habit, but you'll never cop to the dozens you've made throughout this and pretty much every other thread you post on).

as for the concepts of natural law and reason - these weren't stable concepts throughout the Greek, Roman or Christian worlds and meant many different things relying on many different methods that we wouldn't accept as being reasonable or natural today. you might credit them with providing some of the building blocks of the Enlightenment, but the impetus for modern science, reason and logic came from elsewhere. insist otherwise all you want, but your assertion Christianity is inherently modern, humane and the great bearer of the flame is rank bullshit.

Danth's Law essentially has your screwy self-regard and strident arrogance covered.

outerspace, there have been protests, but none so violent as committed by middle easterners in libya and egypt and australia. i really believe it's the culture that is the problem here.

mohammed picture archive

read the mail section for some laughs.

Holyrattlesnakes reason changes with the times, it's not rigid, reason evolves, that's why laws and government based on reason need to change and that's why we have democracy - to move with the times. Islam doesn't move with the times that's because it's laws are divine and not reasonable and that's why it's stuck in the past (the persian golden age of thought that i think youre trying to allude to disappeared with the emergence of islam) and has no need for democracy (I merely used christianity as an example of a religion that has solid foundations and room for secular civil laws). If i get my facts wrong let me know, til then i will facepalm for your brain. Do you want me to ge out the sock puppets for you?

Eugh, I feel stupid for responding

islam did evolve and it's golden age lasted for 600 years up to the sack of baghdad by the mongols. in the islamic empire, fields like science, mathematics and philosophy really excelled.

there is a lot of debate why islam didnt move after that period. but this still shows that islam is not the problem. it's the culture.

link for the facepalm here

''and room for secular civil laws''

by Christianity do you mean Catholicism? and by 'room for secular civil laws' do you mean this same Church - the worlds largest - who recognises only canon law, is not a legal entity cannot be sued, does not pay tax and systematically hides it documents from anyone it wants to?

Maybe get back to me when a bunch of Muslim rabble hold enough political sway as to halt any attempts to be investigated by a Royal Commission into systematic child rape, the continued protection of offenders and the hijacking of justice afforded to everyone else under Australian Laws.

If u think the catholic church is bad in christian countries, I dont think u have been to a muslim country. Any investigation into any criminal activity by a mosque or imam is just unheard of whether it be honor killings, wife bashing, terrorist activity. U name it. The church is far more accountable. But its the culture the religion. U cant judge a religion by its followers.

Do you want me to ge out the sock puppets for you?

that would be pretty awesome actually ...

Do you want me to ge out the sock puppets for you?

that's my trademark insult when i want to be condescending!

condescension kind of implies lowering one's self from a position of dignity in the first place ...

I love how Melbourne's Islam ''riots'' consisted of about 10 muslims, 10 bogans and 300 police standing around the steps of the State Library. I honestly think Melbournians couldn't give a shit about any of this, we're too busy getting on with life and each other.