What a pitiful equation it is to say that a book is the equal of a Person.

When you go to bed at night which would you want beside you? If you were on your death bed would you want your loved ones to send you a book? Can a book love you back?

Who is richer? The person whose heart is filled by the love for a divine Person? Or the person whose heart is in love with a book?

Who is richer? The Christian who experiences the Love of God poured freely abundantly and directly into their hearts and is then healed and motivated by that love and driven by that love through life towards heaven? Or the Muslim who is filled with their own love for God and who, driven by a lack of enough contact with God, strains (greater jihad) under his own meager power to impress God and to have fleeting contact with Him and strives to earn from Him the healing and connection that we all want and then receives that happiness only after death?

Think about this only for a minute and you will see the difference between adoring the Word of God in a living Person who sacrificially came down to complete our healing (salvation)and adoring a book as the Word of God sent from a distance like a get well card exhorting us to make ourselves better with our own power.

I’ll take a beautiful Person, a Person who is indeed water for the soul over a beautiful (for some anyway) collection of words any day.

I HAVE HAD MANY Muslim friends, and cherish their friendship. All of them have been moderate, with no intention to hurt anyone; “Lucky is the man who has an Arab for a friend.” However, Islamists are different, in complex ways. My comments may seem muscular, but they are not designed to violate the basic Golden Rule of reciprocity. Controversy occurs in all religions.

UNTIL MOHAMED, most Middle Eastern peoples worshiped multiple deities, with disagreement over who was the highest god, or “Allah”. For at least 5000 years, the moon god was usually the “Allah”. Mohamed appears to have adapted this by eliminating all gods but the moon god, named it Allah, and asserted himself as His messenger. There seems to be no better explanation of why Islam displays the half-moon on mosques, flags, and myriad other places. Most Muslim scholars acknowledge that the Koran is based on Bedouin values and culture. Mohamed said Islam descended from Judaism, and Christianity, and claimed these religions as a subset of Islam, but nothing actually proves this, or explains the huge discrepancies between the ideas about God and Allah. A fair comparison of the values, directives, teachings, and goals of Allah (as interpreted by Mohamed and his Bedouin disciples) seem to have very little to do with the God of the old and new testaments. The Koran mainly concerns rules of conduct in tribal life in war and peace. Many troubling parts of the Koran advocate hate, murder, and revenge, particularly regarding the subjugation and/or genocide of other cultures, especially Jews and Christians. The Golden Rule, the heart of most other important religions, does not seem to be emphasized. Unfortunately, these historical thought patterns recur in current Islamist thinking. Islam was spread almost entirely by war, and it seems incredible, but Islamists actually seem to want to impose Bedouin culture on the West.

SHOULD MUSLIMS work to reform their religion so that it can adapt to the changes demanded by democratic society? Democracies have a right to insist that their citizens do not promulgate anti-semitism or other hate. Of course, mainstream Muslims are moderate, and avoid these extremes. However, one can argue that Islam needs to rethink how it will integrate itself into democracies. Other religions are constantly remaking and re-interpreting themselves, and so must Islam. For non-Muslims, we must work to convince our co-religionists that our problem with Islamists lies in dealing with their hate, not their religion.

To me a Christian….God revealed himself in the flesh (Logos) as Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was God as a man …without sin and the embodiment of Love.

The Koran is a book written by a man . Jesus wrote no book ….Jesus as God wrote with his finger in stone , The Ten Commandments .

There is no comparative similarity between Jesus and the Koran .
I do not accept the premise
of your statement.

I see hatred, bigotry, violence and oppression everywhere. Some places worse than other places. I see this hatred, bigotry and violence justified by reference to the Muslim religion.

What do I know? I’m an outsider, I don’t speak the language and it’s a different culture. Am I wrong to take these Imams, Mullahs and Ayatollahs from Orange County, to Al Azhar, to the UK, to Algeria to Indonesia at their word?

How can so many “religious” scholars “misunderstand” their own religion? Yes, Christianity is used to justify the hatred and bigotry of the nutballs at the Westboro Baptist Church. But they have no followers, they have no contributors, they have not committed terrorist attacks to the acclaim of Christians worldwide. Judaism has produced fringe nutballs.

In both religions, in the 21st Century, they are just that, fringe nutballs. The hatred and bigotry of the Westboro Baptist Church is the mainstream of Islam. We see this kind of hatred and bigotry coming straight out of the Great Mosque in Saudi Arabia, out of the premier University of Islam, Al Azhar in Cairo, out of the Islamic tv preachers followed by tens of millions of Moslems.

Prof Mansur, please focus efforts on the correct audience, that is, speak to fellow Muslims. Organize like-minded Muslims. Become the dominant strain in Islam. That’s your job. As an outsider, I can only watch and see what Muslims do and say. I can only watch the almost daily mass murder, primarily of Muslims in Iraq. I’ve heard no condemnation of mass murder in the name of Allah. I’ve seen no support for the US and the Coalition, who are valiantly trying to stop the violence in Iraq from Egypt or Saudi Arabia. What I see is simply an unending incitement to murder from everywhere in the Muslim ‘Civilization’.

My mind will be changed by actions, not accusations that I ‘misunderstand’ Islam.

I wish you success, Prof Mansur. Your success will save the lives of tens of millions of Muslims and prevent future wars. Bottom line, end the jihad and that will end the war.

I am aware that internally corrupt ideologies have a tendency to fall over the long term without outside military intervention. But, you have to admit there’s a tradeoff between not doing anything versus doing something to hasten the fall, in terms of how long it takes. According to this theory, Saddam would have fallen eventually. The problem is that in the decades that took, the cost of containing him would also add up. Oh, there’d have been fewer gruesome headlines, but more costs for, e.g. monitoring troop movements within Iraq. The question then becomes would you rather pay a small amount for a long time or a large amount for a short time.

Add in to the mix the fact that, whether Saddam had it or not, WMD technology is floating around, and time becomes a much worse enemy, making the cost of trying to wait out a Saddam’s collapse much riskier.

The reason I used the “Night of the Long Knives” example is because it fits the principle that extremists can drive out moderates, especially if the extremists exhibit more ideological purity than the moderates and the ideology they are following is anti-democratic.

Your letter was very interesting and informative, except that I cannot help feeling it has been strongly influenced by Christian thought rather than the Muslim tradition. You assert there can be no belief without freedom, but in Islam there can be no free will at all given God is All Powerful and All Knowing. Modern Muslims in the West may like to deny this, but I do not know of any pre-Modern Muslim who has ever asserted otherwise.

You assert that freedom means freedom from idolatry, but that is just another way of saying that men are free if they have no right to choose. You defend a totalitarian religious ideology and assert that men are free when they obey like slaves. This is absurd. The only real freedom is to believe and worship as you, an individual, sees fit and not to allow the Imams to determine what is polytheism. When you go further and claim that the fight against tyranny is the fight against polytheism, what you are asserting is the 1984 dictum that Slavery is Freedom. The fight against tyranny is the fight against anyone who claims to hold a monopoly on the Truth and to be the sole possessor of the Keys of Heaven.

The Quran proclaims there was no compulsion in religion, but that was abrogated by Muhammed when he was powerful enough to enforce Islam. Before he took Mecca there were no Muslims in that city. After, there were no pagans.

Again to assert that there is no Faith unless it is freely chosen is to assert a Christian, not Muslim, view. In Islam orthopraxy is what counts and that can be enforced. Only Christians insist on people being “Born Again”. Forced conversion has long been a Muslim practice and one that is not yet dead.

The problem with Jihadis is that they do not have to misquote the Quran. They have support for what they do in the Quran, the aHadith and the Sira. Muhammed oppressed others, he murdered girls for singing songs about him, he stole, raped and allowed his men to. The Devil is not misusing the Quran for that purpose or at least you have failed to explain how the Jihadis have done so. It is true that the Bible says “by their fruits you shall know them.” By that measure, Islam’s fruits are illiteracy, dictatorship, oppression, terrorism and violence. The Muslim world nowhere presents a healthy, free and prosperous society without large non-Muslim minorities.

You assert that a common mistake made by non-Muslims is to draw a comparison between Jesus and Muhammad. That is true, but by denying the evidence of the Quran and aHadith, by asserting Muhammed did not sin, Muslims makes that comparison every day.

I fail to accept that being honest about Islam means any comparison with the Jihadis. We are all called to be honest about ourselves, our beliefs and the world around us. If the Jihadis understand their religion correctly, so much the worse for Muslims. If they do not, you have no provided any evidence of that fact. Either way, we have no obligation except to search out the truth because the truth will make us free. If you call that defaming your religion, so be it. It will not change the fact that the Quran contains errors and Muhammed married a six year old girl.

Yours

HeiGou

It would help if you understood the concept of abrogation when approaching Sura Nine – one of the last written by Mohammed’s followers. Oh sorry, the unreconstructed word of God. God can’t organize passages into their natural and coherent order, apparently.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/009.qmt.html

Adolf Hitlers don’t just pop up on the world scene like dandilions. Doesn’t mean that Osama bin Laden isn’t a seriously bad guy, but not even seriously bad guys are Hitler.

Not every moment in world history is Munich. People like Newt Gingrich, who believed themselves tough-minded students of history, were wrong to compare Ronald Reagan to Neville Chamberlain for talking to Mikail Gorbachev.

That’s all fine, but like the Germans and the English and the Russians, bad people and bad ideologies don’t endure for all time. Fundamentalist Islam is a phenomenon with its roots in the 20th century, a nativist response to external pressures and internal failures.

As I wrote above, “we have and will continue to fight” Islam-inspired terrorists. But fighting Communism didn’t involve invading all that many Communist countries. Fighting Islamic terrorism might not either. (Terrorism and Communism are, of course, very different as to their capabilities, goals, methods, and animating philosophies).

As I understand it, we agree that Islam-inspired terrorism is a very serious and bad thing that demands a very serious and well-considered response. We disagree as to whether it makes an eternal foe of 1/6 of the Earth’s people.

Also, my corruption of your username is a nod to the fine Hives album of that name.

It’s a historical fact that there were colonists in the US that did not support the Revolutionary War. There were also those who did not want to fight Communism. Both of those groups turned out to be wrong, just as I think you will turn out to be wrong.

You don’t seem to understand the dynamics of political Islam. It doesn’t matter if the supporters of jihad are a relatively small percentage of Muslims. That small percentage will run policy because they are more committed to a vision than the majority. Anyone who’s studied the history of Nazism will be able to understand that small minorities can dominate policy in a country if they are ruthless enough. Read up on the history of the “Night of the Long Knives”, on which “moderate” Nazis were eviscerated by the more radical ones, setting in motion the events leading to WWII. I don’t understand why more people don’t realize this, but apparently it’s not a history lesson that’s been clearly understood.