SPEAK THE TRUTH! And Redeem This World From Hell

[Badger]

Eastern Roman empire too far away, it's a very different region. Spain much closer to western Europe.

The blending of the 3 religions reflects well on Islam of the time there, as they ruled and dominated the area, not the Christians or Jews. I know if no areas pre-Enlightenment at least where Christians or Jews who ruled were able to permit and encourage such a tolerant culture as was nurtured by Muslims in Moorish Spain.

The one thing you are ignoring which is absolutely decisive against your defense of the Jews is that the Jews control the Palestinians, not the other way round. Whatever blame Palestinians have accumulated over the years, and I don't deny it, they have, it's the blame of the dominated and defenseless. From the POV of the Nazis, the Underground's attacks in Nazi-occupied areas denied the Nazis right to exist and were dealt with accordingly. The pitiful, ineffective attacks from Gaza on the Israelis are nothing compared to what the Jews have done to them over the years with far, far greater firepower. The last big attack on Gaza killed 1,000s of innocent Palestinians and it was completely disproportionate in response to what the Palestinians did. There is nothing "biased" and "vitriolic" in narrating the facts when don't like to hear them. What else does one need to know about the utter absence of moral integrity of the Israelis, considering another example, of the well-documented fact of hundreds if Palestinian children locked up in Israeli jails and prisons, where they are raped, abused and horrifically treated, over the course of f'ing years for many of them? For what, throwing rocks at Israeli solders? Tell me - oh please tell me, I'd really like to know - what other "democracy" or even country in the world does this to kids? Karma doesn't wait forever, and no matter what illusions you have about Israel, it doesn't matter, because as is seen in these examples and so much more, Israel will have it's day of reckoning if they don't change and treat the Palestinians with fairness and justice instead of institutionally supported savagery against them. It's an utterly untenable situation for the Israelis, they cannot continue to maintain the world's largest open-air prison holding an entire people indefinitely. If you and those in your community who support the Israelis really cared about them, you would urge them relentlessly and vigorously to fix the problem before it's too late for them. This would include holding back money and donations to them until they did act.

You are right about the Jordanians, and one can see the hypocrisy and culpability of other Arab governments in their lack of support of the Palestinians. They too will have their reckoning when the time is comes.

On your last point, there is plentiful information showing the pagans attacked Muhammad and his small band of religious revolutionaries, and of course, this provoked self-defensive reprisals (or perhaps you don't allow self-defense as a legit reason for violence, only for Jews?). Members of his immediate family were murdered by the Quraysh too, and many ordinary Muslims were harassed and killed by the them Aside from preaching worship of one God, Muhammad had other ideas that the Quraysh found a mortal threat:

"Muhammad also wished to reorganize Arab society. The new doctrine that he put forward for this purpose, made Faith instead of Blood, the “linchpin” of the community. But the Arabs were bred in the code of pagan custom and convention; they believed in the basic tribal and kinship structures. For them “Blood” was the only basis of social organization. In their perception, if Faith were allowed to supplant Blood in this equation, it would wreck the whole structure of the Arab society. Muhammad also called upon the rich Arabs to share their wealth with the poor and the under-privileged. The poor, he said, had a right to receive their share out of the wealth of the rich. Such sharing, he further said, would guarantee the equitable distribution of wealth in the community.

Many of the rich Arabs were money-lenders; or rather, they were “loan sharks.” They had grown rich by lending money to the poor classes at exorbitant rates of interest. The poor could never repay their debts, and were thus held in economic servitude in perpetuity. Sharing their ill-gotten wealth with the same people they had been exploiting, was for them, tantamount to a “sacrilege.” By suggesting to them that they share their wealth with the poor, Muhammad had tampered with a hornets' nest! For the Arabs, all these were new and unfamiliar ideas; in fact they were revolutionary. By preaching such revolutionary ideas, Muhammad had infuriated the old establishment. Most furious amongst them was the Umayyad clan of the Quraysh. Its members were the leading usurers and capitalists of Makkah, and they were the high priests of the pagan pantheon. In Muhammad and the message of Islam, they saw a threat to their social system which was based upon privilege and force. They, therefore, resolved to maintain the status quo. In the years to come, they were to form the spearhead of an implacable war against Islam, and of die-hard opposition to Muhammad." https://www.al-islam.org/restatement-history-islam-and-muslims-sayyid-ali-ashgar-razwy/early-converts-islam-and-their

What Muhammad brought about when he and his religion won, under unbelievable odds against him - what he successfully accomplished was so unlikely that it's hard to deny Muslims seeing it as a miraculous, divine intervention - was to replace that decadent pagan worship system, which was dreadfully unjust and exploitive, with a monotheistic worship system of One God that honored and revered in various ways the two monotheisms before him. He achieved reformation of and even revolutionized an unjust social system. In short, even though you and your fellow partisans don't care to admit it, Muhammad was a winner, and the permanent establishment of his religion ever since an incalculably enormous success story. Not from a confessional or partisan POV, but from a historical one, a history of religions POV, what he did is unparalleled and unique in history.

In other words, I ask you: do you really think what he accomplished was evil and reprehensible and the world (at least of his time) would have been better off if he left those pagans alone? It's so easy to conduct amateur armchair theologizing from the comfort of your home, as echoed in your shallow, abstract, minimal sympathy for the Palestinians ("sad"), so I would not expect you to have much sympathy for Mohammad's earliest followers which the pagans of his time had made to suffer so grievously.

You did not answer my question on whether you have ever gotten to know Muslims, go to their places of worships, etc., so I assume no is the answer. That says your knowledge of Islam and Muslims is abstract, all second and third hand from tapes and books (probably cherry-picked as hostile to Islam and authored by people who have no contact with Muslims either) and the Jewish-owed and grossly biased media.

Another selective and biased comparison using the best of one culture and the worst of another. A more fair comparison of that age would be between the best of each, such as Spain under Moslem rule to that of the Eastern Roman Empire. Moreover the Golden Age in Muslim Spain has been attributed to the blending of several cultures including Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Moreover there is a lot of debate as to just how Golden the Muslim Golden Age was.

I already addressed the issue of Israeli occupation but will just say that your description of it is so biased, vitriolic and one sided that I don’t see much room for a fruitful discussion. I’ll just repost my reply to these same points you made before since you had ignored them the first time around.


“This is just more double standards and more untruths. Yes it’s unfortunate what is happening to the Palestinians but to only blame Israel for their situation completely ignores history. Just as in the partition of British India, it was necessary for Muslims living in the future Hindu lands to move to Pakistan as it was necessary for Hindus living in future Muslim lands to move to India. As mentioned, Jews were a significant presence throughout the Ottoman Empire and were actually the majority population of Jerusalem during the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Though the vast majority of Ottoman land was given to the Arabs, they refused to allow any other religious group to have a share. This is not only true for Israel but also true for the Kurds and many other ethnic groups now living under less than egalitarian Islamic rule.

The plight of the Palestinians is sad and needs to change but they have to bear responsibility for their situation as well. They continue to deny the right of Israel to exist and still maintain in their legal documents that Palestine must stretch to the sea, thereby destroying Israel. They also continue to reward suicide bombers and terrorists with pensions for their families as well as continually attack Israel with rockets from Gaza. If that was done to us by Mexico I doubt we would have tolerated it as long as Israel has.

I would also add that before the 1967 war and the capture of Jerusalem, the entire West bank was held by Jordan who annexed it in 1950. Talk about the theft of land. Moreover they did very little to help the people there and it wasn’t until Israeli rule that some semblance of development took place. Not one university existed under Jordanian rule whereas now there about two dozen started under Israel as just as one example.”

And as to your once again anachronistic comparison of violence in the Old Testament to that of Islam 4,000 years later, I addressed this too but maybe you missed this as well


“Any incitements to violence in the Old Testament where directed at specific tribes in Canaan at the time of the conquest and was primarily due to their common practices of demonic worship such as sacrificing their first born to Molech and other evil acts. It was punishment for specific sins against God, not an injunction to murder all non-believers. The New Testament of course also does not preach violence against innocent unbelievers for all time to come. Only Islam does that.”

 

[Badger]

True, I did not, out of politeness, as I saw this as a particularly silly form of reductionism, and did not want to offend you saying so. But you pushed me, so ok, I say it. Over the years, I've seen so many forms of reduction perpetuated on religions, and this one was so kooky, I laughed out loud.

As I said before, reductionism tries to analytically get at the truth by taking something complicated and simplifying it. What it really does is over-simplify religion, leaving out decisively important elements in that religion and super-imposing an external, foreign framework on the religion based on a few elements of the religion that correspond or map to the limited number of elements the external framework brings. In all cases, regarding reductionism in religion, the most important element of all is left out, as Eliade says, which is the "sacred." Which is what the followers of all religions believe in, whatever form it is expressed in. Whether one personally believes the sacred or not does not matter, just as long as he recognizes it as an analytical category. Even an atheist, if he followed Eliade's strictures, could properly analyze religion. The category of the non-this-worldly, the other-worldly, the transcendent non-sensible and non-intellectual but deeply and "otherly real" ontological domain. When your reductionist version of a religion fails to include this factor, it's just a freakish, crude caricature of the object (the religion) studied, and one looked upon as quite foreign to those who practice the religion. Eliade's phenomenological approach is very insistent that religion is analyzed by starting with how it's followers understand it, what their POV is. Reductionism always neglects doing that, hence the impoverished, unsatisfying pictures of religions it always comes out with.

Proof that reductionist approaches to religion are a failure is the fact there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mutually contradictory reductionist version of religion, all competing with each other, and above all, none ever becomes king of the hill for long, none permanently dominates. New ones are always coming along. Yours, one of the latest, is born from feminist ideology. Decades ago, it would have been Freud with his sexual theories of religion, or before, Marx, with his economic theories, and so and on and on. Much more recently, we are graced to receive biological and chemical theories that "really, finally" account for where religions comes from and what they are about. But including the sacred as fundamental to analyzing religion, factoring in how a religion's followers understand it, is Eliade's method in a nutshell.

Your rejecting him because he's from Un. of Chicago shows me how diverse the forms of bigotry are. One of my teachers (talking about bigotry, ironically, a black man) wrote his dissertation under Eliade's direction. My teacher published a fantastic book from it, about the Hindu mother goddess. Ideas in there you would like, even love and maybe inspired by. My professor said Eliade was the kindest, sweetest and most humble professor in the school of religion at Chicago. Yet he was the most learned of all the faculty - with many very heavy hitters - there.

At the end of the day, I would add to Eliade that reductionists of religion are, by definition, elitists, among some of the worst kinds. They take something much, much bigger than themselves or their shallow theories - lilliputians to Gulliver - and cut it down to size, so they can look down on it and those who practice it. Reinforcing their identity as elitists. That should be part a general definition of reductionists, especially of religions - "those who look down to feel they are smarter or more knowing than others."

You also never addressed the primary rejection most people feel, and the desire for the mothers life giving breast.

 

[LUH 3417]

True, I did not, out of politeness, as I saw this as a particularly silly form of reductionism, and did not want to offend you saying so. But you pushed me, so ok, I say it. Over the years, I've seen so many forms of reduction perpetuated on religions, and this one was so kooky, I laughed out loud.

As I said before, reductionism tries to analytically get at the truth by taking something complicated and simplifying it. What it really does is over-simplify religion, leaving out decisively important elements in that religion and super-imposing an external, foreign framework on the religion based on a few elements of the religion that correspond or map to the limited number of elements the external framework brings. In all cases, regarding reductionism in religion, the most important element of all is left out, as Eliade says, which is the "sacred." Which is what the followers of all religions believe in, whatever form it is expressed in. Whether one personally believes the sacred or not does not matter, just as long as he recognizes it as an analytical category. Even an atheist, if he followed Eliade's strictures, could properly analyze religion. The category of the non-this-worldly, the other-worldly, the transcendent non-sensible and non-intellectual but deeply and "otherly real" ontological domain. When your reductionist version of a religion fails to include this factor, it's just a freakish, crude caricature of the object (the religion) studied, and one looked upon as quite foreign to those who practice the religion. Eliade's phenomenological approach is very insistent that religion is analyzed by starting with how it's followers understand it, what their POV is. Reductionism always neglects doing that, hence the impoverished, unsatisfying pictures of religions it always comes out with.

Proof that reductionist approaches to religion are a failure is the fact there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mutually contradictory reductionist version of religion, all competing with each other, and above all, none ever becomes king of the hill for long, none permanently dominates. New ones are always coming along. Yours, one of the latest, is born from feminist ideology. Decades ago, it would have been Freud with his sexual theories of religion, or before, Marx, with his economic theories, and so and on and on. Much more recently, we are graced to receive biological and chemical theories that "really, finally" account for where religions comes from and what they are about. But including the sacred as fundamental to analyzing religion, factoring in how a religion's followers understand it, is Eliade's method in a nutshell.

Your rejecting him because he's from Un. of Chicago shows me how diverse the forms of bigotry are. One of my teachers (talking about bigotry, ironically, a black man) wrote his dissertation under Eliade's direction. My teacher published a fantastic book from it, about the Hindu mother goddess. Ideas in there you would like, even love and maybe inspired by. My professor said Eliade was the kindest, sweetest and most humble professor in the school of religion at Chicago. Yet he was the most learned of all the faculty - with many very heavy hitters - there.

At the end of the day, I would add to Eliade that reductionists of religion are, by definition, elitists, among some of the worst kinds. They take something much, much bigger than themselves or their shallow theories - lilliputians to Gulliver - and cut it down to size, so they can look down on it and those who practice it. Reinforcing their identity as elitists. That should be part a general definition of reductionists, especially of religions - "those who look down to feel they are smarter or more knowing than others."

Just because I reject paranormal experiences and “religious feelings” as coming from an invisible force in the sky I am a kook? Wow good one!

There is a tendency for some young people to speak with what appears to be arrogance when rejecting the false systems of their forebearers. I get the sense that’s because of the amount of sex and violence they’ve been exposed to on TV since children. If you think my point is simple and reductionist that’s fine. I don’t find anything you say particularly revelatory or enlightening. We both approach each other with our own experiences and subjectivities. You of course being an academic of religion rely on the other academics of religion to enforce your points.

Peter Kingsley wrote a book entitled Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. It’s a clue to where ontology comes from - hint hint nature and humans and the elements.

 

[LUH 3417]

True, I did not, out of politeness, as I saw this as a particularly silly form of reductionism, and did not want to offend you saying so. But you pushed me, so ok, I say it. Over the years, I've seen so many forms of reduction perpetuated on religions, and this one was so kooky, I laughed out loud.

As I said before, reductionism tries to analytically get at the truth by taking something complicated and simplifying it. What it really does is over-simplify religion, leaving out decisively important elements in that religion and super-imposing an external, foreign framework on the religion based on a few elements of the religion that correspond or map to the limited number of elements the external framework brings. In all cases, regarding reductionism in religion, the most important element of all is left out, as Eliade says, which is the "sacred." Which is what the followers of all religions believe in, whatever form it is expressed in. Whether one personally believes the sacred or not does not matter, just as long as he recognizes it as an analytical category. Even an atheist, if he followed Eliade's strictures, could properly analyze religion. The category of the non-this-worldly, the other-worldly, the transcendent non-sensible and non-intellectual but deeply and "otherly real" ontological domain. When your reductionist version of a religion fails to include this factor, it's just a freakish, crude caricature of the object (the religion) studied, and one looked upon as quite foreign to those who practice the religion. Eliade's phenomenological approach is very insistent that religion is analyzed by starting with how it's followers understand it, what their POV is. Reductionism always neglects doing that, hence the impoverished, unsatisfying pictures of religions it always comes out with.

Proof that reductionist approaches to religion are a failure is the fact there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mutually contradictory reductionist version of religion, all competing with each other, and above all, none ever becomes king of the hill for long, none permanently dominates. New ones are always coming along. Yours, one of the latest, is born from feminist ideology. Decades ago, it would have been Freud with his sexual theories of religion, or before, Marx, with his economic theories, and so and on and on. Much more recently, we are graced to receive biological and chemical theories that "really, finally" account for where religions comes from and what they are about. But including the sacred as fundamental to analyzing religion, factoring in how a religion's followers understand it, is Eliade's method in a nutshell.

Your rejecting him because he's from Un. of Chicago shows me how diverse the forms of bigotry are. One of my teachers (talking about bigotry, ironically, a black man) wrote his dissertation under Eliade's direction. My teacher published a fantastic book from it, about the Hindu mother goddess. Ideas in there you would like, even love and maybe inspired by. My professor said Eliade was the kindest, sweetest and most humble professor in the school of religion at Chicago. Yet he was the most learned of all the faculty - with many very heavy hitters - there.

At the end of the day, I would add to Eliade that reductionists of religion are, by definition, elitists, among some of the worst kinds. They take something much, much bigger than themselves or their shallow theories - lilliputians to Gulliver - and cut it down to size, so they can look down on it and those who practice it. Reinforcing their identity as elitists. That should be part a general definition of reductionists, especially of religions - "those who look down to feel they are smarter or more knowing than others."

You rely on the “other” (as otherworldly experience) as a legitimate categorical domain and then reject post structuralism which deals with the issue of the “other” - because it doesn’t fit with your views of the sacred. The other is the Mother, and the experience of bliss and belonging and connectivity to humanity the infant feels. What could be more sacred than breast milk? Oh wait let me guess, sacrificial blood that needs to spill?

 

[LUH 3417]

True, I did not, out of politeness, as I saw this as a particularly silly form of reductionism, and did not want to offend you saying so. But you pushed me, so ok, I say it. Over the years, I've seen so many forms of reduction perpetuated on religions, and this one was so kooky, I laughed out loud.

As I said before, reductionism tries to analytically get at the truth by taking something complicated and simplifying it. What it really does is over-simplify religion, leaving out decisively important elements in that religion and super-imposing an external, foreign framework on the religion based on a few elements of the religion that correspond or map to the limited number of elements the external framework brings. In all cases, regarding reductionism in religion, the most important element of all is left out, as Eliade says, which is the "sacred." Which is what the followers of all religions believe in, whatever form it is expressed in. Whether one personally believes the sacred or not does not matter, just as long as he recognizes it as an analytical category. Even an atheist, if he followed Eliade's strictures, could properly analyze religion. The category of the non-this-worldly, the other-worldly, the transcendent non-sensible and non-intellectual but deeply and "otherly real" ontological domain. When your reductionist version of a religion fails to include this factor, it's just a freakish, crude caricature of the object (the religion) studied, and one looked upon as quite foreign to those who practice the religion. Eliade's phenomenological approach is very insistent that religion is analyzed by starting with how it's followers understand it, what their POV is. Reductionism always neglects doing that, hence the impoverished, unsatisfying pictures of religions it always comes out with.

Proof that reductionist approaches to religion are a failure is the fact there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mutually contradictory reductionist version of religion, all competing with each other, and above all, none ever becomes king of the hill for long, none permanently dominates. New ones are always coming along. Yours, one of the latest, is born from feminist ideology. Decades ago, it would have been Freud with his sexual theories of religion, or before, Marx, with his economic theories, and so and on and on. Much more recently, we are graced to receive biological and chemical theories that "really, finally" account for where religions comes from and what they are about. But including the sacred as fundamental to analyzing religion, factoring in how a religion's followers understand it, is Eliade's method in a nutshell.

Your rejecting him because he's from Un. of Chicago shows me how diverse the forms of bigotry are. One of my teachers (talking about bigotry, ironically, a black man) wrote his dissertation under Eliade's direction. My teacher published a fantastic book from it, about the Hindu mother goddess. Ideas in there you would like, even love and maybe inspired by. My professor said Eliade was the kindest, sweetest and most humble professor in the school of religion at Chicago. Yet he was the most learned of all the faculty - with many very heavy hitters - there.

At the end of the day, I would add to Eliade that reductionists of religion are, by definition, elitists, among some of the worst kinds. They take something much, much bigger than themselves or their shallow theories - lilliputians to Gulliver - and cut it down to size, so they can look down on it and those who practice it. Reinforcing their identity as elitists. That should be part a general definition of reductionists, especially of religions - "those who look down to feel they are smarter or more knowing than others."

Also there is a huge difference between feminist theory and a feminine person who theorizes and uses the tools of a scientist.

 

[LUH 3417]

True, I did not, out of politeness, as I saw this as a particularly silly form of reductionism, and did not want to offend you saying so. But you pushed me, so ok, I say it. Over the years, I've seen so many forms of reduction perpetuated on religions, and this one was so kooky, I laughed out loud.

As I said before, reductionism tries to analytically get at the truth by taking something complicated and simplifying it. What it really does is over-simplify religion, leaving out decisively important elements in that religion and super-imposing an external, foreign framework on the religion based on a few elements of the religion that correspond or map to the limited number of elements the external framework brings. In all cases, regarding reductionism in religion, the most important element of all is left out, as Eliade says, which is the "sacred." Which is what the followers of all religions believe in, whatever form it is expressed in. Whether one personally believes the sacred or not does not matter, just as long as he recognizes it as an analytical category. Even an atheist, if he followed Eliade's strictures, could properly analyze religion. The category of the non-this-worldly, the other-worldly, the transcendent non-sensible and non-intellectual but deeply and "otherly real" ontological domain. When your reductionist version of a religion fails to include this factor, it's just a freakish, crude caricature of the object (the religion) studied, and one looked upon as quite foreign to those who practice the religion. Eliade's phenomenological approach is very insistent that religion is analyzed by starting with how it's followers understand it, what their POV is. Reductionism always neglects doing that, hence the impoverished, unsatisfying pictures of religions it always comes out with.

Proof that reductionist approaches to religion are a failure is the fact there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mutually contradictory reductionist version of religion, all competing with each other, and above all, none ever becomes king of the hill for long, none permanently dominates. New ones are always coming along. Yours, one of the latest, is born from feminist ideology. Decades ago, it would have been Freud with his sexual theories of religion, or before, Marx, with his economic theories, and so and on and on. Much more recently, we are graced to receive biological and chemical theories that "really, finally" account for where religions comes from and what they are about. But including the sacred as fundamental to analyzing religion, factoring in how a religion's followers understand it, is Eliade's method in a nutshell.

Your rejecting him because he's from Un. of Chicago shows me how diverse the forms of bigotry are. One of my teachers (talking about bigotry, ironically, a black man) wrote his dissertation under Eliade's direction. My teacher published a fantastic book from it, about the Hindu mother goddess. Ideas in there you would like, even love and maybe inspired by. My professor said Eliade was the kindest, sweetest and most humble professor in the school of religion at Chicago. Yet he was the most learned of all the faculty - with many very heavy hitters - there.

At the end of the day, I would add to Eliade that reductionists of religion are, by definition, elitists, among some of the worst kinds. They take something much, much bigger than themselves or their shallow theories - lilliputians to Gulliver - and cut it down to size, so they can look down on it and those who practice it. Reinforcing their identity as elitists. That should be part a general definition of reductionists, especially of religions - "those who look down to feel they are smarter or more knowing than others."

@Badger to be fair I have not read Merrel-Wolff yet, it’s $44 and this is a review of it from amazon:

To my mind, this reading about enlightenment and then having it really happen to you is unique. Imagine watching porn films for years and, suddenly, out of the blue, a beautiful girl knocks on your door and has sex with you. Well this is what happened to lucky Dr Merrell-Wolff.

 

[x-ray peat]

Eastern Roman empire too far away, it's a very different region. Spain much closer to western Europe.

Another fine example of how your arguments are mostly based on selective and unfair comparisons as well as a biased presentation of the facts. "Let's limit our comparison to not only the time periods I choose, but the regions I choose as well."

Your attempt to paint Muhammad and his marauding Arabs as victims is laughable and seems like a bit of Stockholm Syndrome has taken root. It reminds me of ill-informed liberals that continue to welcome the Muslim invasion of Europe, which among the many harmful and irreversible societal changes, has destroyed the quality of life for millions of European women, whom are now warned not to go out at night. Telling that your source is a Westernized Islamic Religious Organization; not exactly fair and balanced. You may wish to look into the Islamic concept of Taqiyyah.

I’ll ignore the ad hominem attacks but find it ironic that you once again claim a false authority while continuing to make such basic mistakes of theology as to misquote the Bible, not understand the Christian perspective of OT prophecy, and claim that Islam is an improvement or correction to Christianity. Not to mention your original false statement that Christianity has more in common with Islam than with Judaism that started this whole thing off.

Your last sentence on “the Jewish-owed and grossly biased media” is as disturbing as it is revealing that you believe this false anti-Semitic canard. Last I checked Fox Corp, Hearst, Times-Warner, Clear Channel, Washington Post, Sony and countless others were all non-Jewish owned or controlled. The Jewish Media: The Lie That Won’t Die

What is really sad is that you have no clue as to how much your thinking has been manipulated by Propaganda. So much so that you see Jewish control everywhere, openly equate them with Nazis, refer to them as Tribal card carrying xenophobes, and continue to exalt Islam above all other religions. Are the only Jews you know the ones vilified on YouTube or the Israelis continually portrayed as the aggressor on mainstream media?

And because you seem so concerned, I have several friends who are Muslim from both College and High School and have traveled to many Islamic countries, as well as Israel and the West Bank. My knowledge of Islam comes from reading the Koran as well as books on both sides of the issue; not just the PC ones taught in school.

Moreover, as I said before it is is a myth that the conquest of Spain by invading Berbers was a golden age of toleration. This is more Propaganda. The majority of the native people had converted to Islam by the time of the reconquest due to their harsh subjugation and second class treatment. It is hardly different today. The treatment of Coptic Christians in Egypt is just one example.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise - ISI Books
"Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—“al-Andalus”—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth.

In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed.

This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course, with the Islamic Caliphate’s conquest of Spain. Far from a land of religious tolerance, Islamic Spain was marked by religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of Christians and other groups—all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise provides a desperately needed reassessment of medieval Spain. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” Fernández-Morera sets the historical record straight—showing that a politically useful myth is a myth nonetheless."

Eastern Roman empire too far away, it's a very different region. Spain much closer to western Europe.

The blending of the 3 religions reflects well on Islam of the time there, as they ruled and dominated the area, not the Christians or Jews. I know if no areas pre-Enlightenment at least where Christians or Jews who ruled were able to permit and encourage such a tolerant culture as was nurtured by Muslims in Moorish Spain.

The one thing you are ignoring which is absolutely decisive against your defense of the Jews is that the Jews control the Palestinians, not the other way round. Whatever blame Palestinians have accumulated over the years, and I don't deny it, they have, it's the blame of the dominated and defenseless. From the POV of the Nazis, the Underground's attacks in Nazi-occupied areas denied the Nazis right to exist and were dealt with accordingly. The pitiful, ineffective attacks from Gaza on the Israelis are nothing compared to what the Jews have done to them over the years with far, far greater firepower. The last big attack on Gaza killed 1,000s of innocent Palestinians and it was completely disproportionate in response to what the Palestinians did. There is nothing "biased" and "vitriolic" in narrating the facts when don't like to hear them. What else does one need to know about the utter absence of moral integrity of the Israelis, considering another example, of the well-documented fact of hundreds if Palestinian children locked up in Israeli jails and prisons, where they are raped, abused and horrifically treated, over the course of f'ing years for many of them? For what, throwing rocks at Israeli solders? Tell me - oh please tell me, I'd really like to know - what other "democracy" or even country in the world does this to kids? Karma doesn't wait forever, and no matter what illusions you have about Israel, it doesn't matter, because as is seen in these examples and so much more, Israel will have it's day of reckoning if they don't change and treat the Palestinians with fairness and justice instead of institutionally supported savagery against them. It's an utterly untenable situation for the Israelis, they cannot continue to maintain the world's largest open-air prison holding an entire people indefinitely. If you and those in your community who support the Israelis really cared about them, you would urge them relentlessly and vigorously to fix the problem before it's too late for them. This would include holding back money and donations to them until they did act.

You are right about the Jordanians, and one can see the hypocrisy and culpability of other Arab governments in their lack of support of the Palestinians. They too will have their reckoning when the time is comes.

On your last point, there is plentiful information showing the pagans attacked Muhammad and his small band of religious revolutionaries, and of course, this provoked self-defensive reprisals (or perhaps you don't allow self-defense as a legit reason for violence, only for Jews?). Members of his immediate family were murdered by the Quraysh too, and many ordinary Muslims were harassed and killed by the them Aside from preaching worship of one God, Muhammad had other ideas that the Quraysh found a mortal threat:

"Muhammad also wished to reorganize Arab society. The new doctrine that he put forward for this purpose, made Faith instead of Blood, the “linchpin” of the community. But the Arabs were bred in the code of pagan custom and convention; they believed in the basic tribal and kinship structures. For them “Blood” was the only basis of social organization. In their perception, if Faith were allowed to supplant Blood in this equation, it would wreck the whole structure of the Arab society. Muhammad also called upon the rich Arabs to share their wealth with the poor and the under-privileged. The poor, he said, had a right to receive their share out of the wealth of the rich. Such sharing, he further said, would guarantee the equitable distribution of wealth in the community.

Many of the rich Arabs were money-lenders; or rather, they were “loan sharks.” They had grown rich by lending money to the poor classes at exorbitant rates of interest. The poor could never repay their debts, and were thus held in economic servitude in perpetuity. Sharing their ill-gotten wealth with the same people they had been exploiting, was for them, tantamount to a “sacrilege.” By suggesting to them that they share their wealth with the poor, Muhammad had tampered with a hornets' nest! For the Arabs, all these were new and unfamiliar ideas; in fact they were revolutionary. By preaching such revolutionary ideas, Muhammad had infuriated the old establishment. Most furious amongst them was the Umayyad clan of the Quraysh. Its members were the leading usurers and capitalists of Makkah, and they were the high priests of the pagan pantheon. In Muhammad and the message of Islam, they saw a threat to their social system which was based upon privilege and force. They, therefore, resolved to maintain the status quo. In the years to come, they were to form the spearhead of an implacable war against Islam, and of die-hard opposition to Muhammad." https://www.al-islam.org/restatement-history-islam-and-muslims-sayyid-ali-ashgar-razwy/early-converts-islam-and-their

What Muhammad brought about when he and his religion won, under unbelievable odds against him - what he successfully accomplished was so unlikely that it's hard to deny Muslims seeing it as a miraculous, divine intervention - was to replace that decadent pagan worship system, which was dreadfully unjust and exploitive, with a monotheistic worship system of One God that honored and revered in various ways the two monotheisms before him. He achieved reformation of and even revolutionized an unjust social system. In short, even though you and your fellow partisans don't care to admit it, Muhammad was a winner, and the permanent establishment of his religion ever since an incalculably enormous success story. Not from a confessional or partisan POV, but from a historical one, a history of religions POV, what he did is unparalleled and unique in history.

In other words, I ask you: do you really think what he accomplished was evil and reprehensible and the world (at least of his time) would have been better off if he left those pagans alone? It's so easy to conduct amateur armchair theologizing from the comfort of your home, as echoed in your shallow, abstract, minimal sympathy for the Palestinians ("sad"), so I would not expect you to have much sympathy for Mohammad's earliest followers which the pagans of his time had made to suffer so grievously.

You did not answer my question on whether you have ever gotten to know Muslims, go to their places of worships, etc., so I assume no is the answer. That says your knowledge of Islam and Muslims is abstract, all second and third hand from tapes and books (probably cherry-picked as hostile to Islam and authored by people who have no contact with Muslims either) and the Jewish-owed and grossly biased media.

 

[Badger]

Not enough time in the day to comprehensively respond to you and all of your goofy accusations. But I went to Amazon reviews of the "Paradise" book, and the pattern of virtually all of the most critical reviews is this book is written by someone partisan and prejudiced against Muslims at the outset, someone who cherry-picks sources that "prove" the author's thesis. Pseudo-scholars always ignore all data that contradicts their thesis, never factoring it in, and tells his audience what they want to hear. That's how such as your Dr. Veith gets to make a comfortable living, giving his market what it wants, not the truth.. In the same vein as the other movies and books you directed me too, this another author with deep partisan leanings hostile to Islam and emitting an aura of fringy nutballness. If you directed me to videos that exhibited your fringe anti-Muslim pseudo-scholars - or even trained mainstream Christian, say Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian scholars - in debate with legitimate scholars and historians of Islam, I would exceed the speed-limit driving off to acquire and watch it. The excerpt from a review of the book below mentions, BTW, a documentary (which I haven't seen) that appears to offer proof that's not nutballish about not a strawman Muslim Spain your author depicts, but an imperfect but a flourishing, tolerant, artistic, intellectual and highly civilized Muslim Spain, a country which went into decline after they threw out the Muslims. How about you and I get the docu, watch, and discuss later?

"But the greatest evidence of Muslim tolerance in Spain is that after 700 years, Christians existed in Spain, but after 100 years of Castilian rule, Muslims did not. When the Christians had the power to expel the Christians, they did. When the Muslims had the same power, they did not. The author creates all these reasons why it was justified to expel the Muslims, but he doesn't cite the same reasons as why it would be justified for the Muslims to do the same. He goes out of his way to apologize for the acts of the Castilians and exposes his double-standard way of thinking.The problem with this book is that it has no standards...In comparison with the contemporaries, the treatment of Jews was more tolerant in Islamic Spain. The Visigoths forced many Jews to convert to Christianity. Islamic Spain did not. Castilian Spain expelled the Jews entirely and the inquisition was created to root out secret Jews. There was never an Islamic inquisition...
For those that want a more fair look at the true al-Andalus which was far from being a "paradise" but nevertheless most certainly had architectural, literary, and artistic marvels and with a more religiously tolerant form of government than the highly intolerant Christian-based Inquisition that came after, I recommend the documentary "When the Moors Ruled in Europe" which uses both contemporary written records and archeaology to PROVE that al-Andalus was a rich, flourishing civilization but that its flaws (same with ancient Greece and Rome and Byantium)."

Another fine example of how your arguments are mostly based on selective and unfair comparisons as well as a biased presentation of the facts. "Let's limit our comparison to not only the time periods I choose, but the regions I choose as well."

Your attempt to paint Muhammad and his marauding Arabs as victims is laughable and seems like a bit of Stockholm Syndrome has taken root. It reminds me of ill-informed liberals that continue to welcome the Muslim invasion of Europe, which among the many harmful and irreversible societal changes, has destroyed the quality of life for millions of European women, whom are now warned not to go out at night. Telling that your source is a Westernized Islamic Religious Organization; not exactly fair and balanced. You may wish to look into the Islamic concept of Taqiyyah.

I’ll ignore the ad hominem attacks but find it ironic that you once again claim a false authority while continuing to make such basic mistakes of theology as to misquote the Bible, not understand the Christian perspective of OT prophecy, and claim that Islam is an improvement or correction to Christianity. Not to mention your original false statement that Christianity has more in common with Islam than with Judaism that started this whole thing off.

Your last sentence on “the Jewish-owed and grossly biased media” is as disturbing as it is revealing that you believe this false anti-Semitic canard. Last I checked Fox Corp, Hearst, Times-Warner, Clear Channel, Washington Post, Sony and countless others were all non-Jewish owned or controlled. The Jewish Media: The Lie That Won’t Die

What is really sad is that you have no clue as to how much your thinking has been manipulated by Propaganda. So much so that you see Jewish control everywhere, openly equate them with Nazis, refer to them as Tribal card carrying xenophobes, and continue to exalt Islam above all other religions. Are the only Jews you know the ones vilified on YouTube or the Israelis continually portrayed as the aggressor on mainstream media?

And because you seem so concerned, I have several friends who are Muslim from both College and High School and have traveled to many Islamic countries, as well as Israel and the West Bank. My knowledge of Islam comes from reading the Koran as well as books on both sides of the issue; not just the PC ones taught in school.

Moreover, as I said before it is is a myth that the conquest of Spain by invading Berbers was a golden age of toleration. This is more Propaganda. The majority of the native people had converted to Islam by the time of the reconquest due to their harsh subjugation and second class treatment. It is hardly different today. The treatment of Coptic Christians in Egypt is just one example.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise - ISI Books
"Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain—“al-Andalus”—as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth.

In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed.

This supposed beacon of peaceful coexistence began, of course, with the Islamic Caliphate’s conquest of Spain. Far from a land of religious tolerance, Islamic Spain was marked by religious and therefore cultural repression in all areas of life and the marginalization of Christians and other groups—all this in the service of social control by autocratic rulers and a class of religious authorities.

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise provides a desperately needed reassessment of medieval Spain. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” Fernández-Morera sets the historical record straight—showing that a politically useful myth is a myth nonetheless."

 

[Badger]

Not a bad analogy, but probably will be misleading to anyone who doesn't read it.

@Badger to be fair I have not read Merrel-Wolff yet, it’s $44 and this is a review of it from amazon:

To my mind, this reading about enlightenment and then having it really happen to you is unique. Imagine watching porn films for years and, suddenly, out of the blue, a beautiful girl knocks on your door and has sex with you. Well this is what happened to lucky Dr Merrell-Wolff.

 

[Badger]

In principle, true. But in actual practice or fact, not necessarily at all. I have encountered many a humanly rancid, nasty, hostile feminist theorist come across just as rancid, nasty and hostile as her feminist theorizing. Many, many a flawed theory turns perfectly nice and normal persons into something just as or more flawed as their theory, whatever their gender or theory.

I've seen something very analogous to this in photos of many women going through early adolescence, late teenage years, early college, to middle and late college, then graduate school. In their teenage years they look wonderful - fresh, innocent, sweet, and feminine above all, just beautiful and so applealing, and this usually lasts until the end of first semester freshman college year. By sophomore year something takes a turn, one suspects but is not quite certain, for the worse. Hair shorter, a tat here or there, a subtle loss of something, what could be it be? Innocence, femininity? By the time they are juniors and seniors, there is no more ambiguity about a change in them: very short-cut unnaturally colored orange or purple hair, multiple often gross tats, ugly sluttish clothing (often too little of it), femininity almost absent, replaced by some subtle but weird caricature of it that is rather mannish. This inversion of the ugly duck and swan story happened because their feminist professors hijacked their brains, and these girls, believing feminist balderdash they are forced to consume, allowed the rest of their body to follow suite.

Also there is a huge difference between feminist theory and a feminine person who theorizes and uses the tools of a scientist.

 

[LUH 3417]

In principle, true. But in actual practice or fact, not necessarily at all. I have encountered many a humanly rancid, nasty, hostile feminist theorist come across just as rancid, nasty and hostile as her feminist theorizing. Many, many a flawed theory turns perfectly nice and normal persons into something just as or more flawed as their theory, whatever their gender or theory.

I've seen something very analogous to this in photos of many women going through early adolescence, late teenage years, early college, to middle and late college, then graduate school. In their teenage years they look wonderful - fresh, innocent, sweet, and feminine above all, just beautiful and so applealing, and this usually lasts until the end of first semester freshman college year. By sophomore year something takes a turn, one suspects but is not quite certain, for the worse. Hair shorter, a tat here or there, a subtle loss of something, what could be it be? Innocence, femininity? By the time they are juniors and seniors, there is no more ambiguity about a change in them: very short-cut unnaturally colored orange or purple hair, multiple often gross tats, ugly sluttish clothing (often too little of it), femininity almost absent, replaced by some subtle but weird caricature of it that is rather mannish. This inversion of the ugly duck and swan story happened because their feminist professors hijacked their brains, and these girls, believing feminist balderdash they are forced to consume, allowed the rest of their body to follow suite.

I had a women’s studies professor with beautiful thick hair who dressed in flowy and flattering clothes and was quite attractive. I don’t know the details of her personal life, if she ever married or had children, but she was in her 50s I guess. She was very feminine in the traditional sense of being soft and approachable but she was also very direct, sharp, and witty. She was like RP in the sense that she could be elusive - she never defined what feminity was exactly, she taught the class by alluding to something like woman as a wholesome being, with a body connected to mind, does not even exist yet. Go out and create that woman.

I think something happened when feminist theory jumped from France to the US. The US tends to make everything that is beautiful, ugly whereas French people are usually associated with sexy things. Sometimes I wonder if feminist theory is part of an elaborate and complicated court ship game to make women more interesting to men and to also make men more understanding of women. Anyway look at photos of Julia Kristeva as a young woman and maybe it’ll make sense.

I think the decline in physical attractiveness has to do with living in college dorms and eating Sodexo food.

 

[Badger]

The people who speak this way are reductionistic in the sense they are merely using metaphors to describe what they assume at the outset is purely a material or psychological experience or whatever trendy object of reductionism is popular at the moment. If by structuralism (post or not), you mean someone like Levi-Strauss, see Eliade, who makes a strong case showing he is just another materialist reductionist, as are (which you would see from Eliade), many other anthropologists.

The way you have been writing about religion in a number of posts lately makes it hard, at least for me, to avoid concluding that your notions of what you would call sacred in this instance is just a metaphor for materialistic dogmas of some type or another.

You rely on the “other” (as otherworldly experience) as a legitimate categorical domain and then reject post structuralism which deals with the issue of the “other” - because it doesn’t fit with your views of the sacred. The other is the Mother, and the experience of bliss and belonging and connectivity to humanity the infant feels. What could be more sacred than breast milk? Oh wait let me guess, sacrificial blood that needs to spill?

 

[LUH 3417]

The people who speak this way are reductionistic in the sense they are merely using metaphors to describe what they assume at the outset is purely a material or psychological experience or whatever trendy object of reductionism is popular at the moment. If by structuralism (post or not), you mean someone like Levi-Strauss, see Eliade, who makes a strong case showing he is just another materialist reductionist, as are (which you would see from Eliade), many other anthropologists.

The way you have been writing about religion in a number of posts lately makes it hard, at least for me, to avoid concluding that your notions of what you would call sacred in this instance is just a metaphor for materialistic dogmas of some type or another.

I just don’t see a huge distinction between the divinity inherent in invisible and visible forms. To me the material world and nature are enough to induce an enormous array of feelings and experiences and I really don’t feel like I need some elaborate mystical system to get me through life anymore. Evil exists because humans have to face less than ideal environments and have not yet learned how to be kind to one another while facing harsh realities. That’s all there is and all there ever will be. Rocks have patterns just like religions do so to me rocks are just as sacred as a bleeding statue of Jesus. If anything a rock is even more sacred to me because at least it doesn’t bring up so much macabre psychic material.

 

[LUH 3417]

The people who speak this way are reductionistic in the sense they are merely using metaphors to describe what they assume at the outset is purely a material or psychological experience or whatever trendy object of reductionism is popular at the moment. If by structuralism (post or not), you mean someone like Levi-Strauss, see Eliade, who makes a strong case showing he is just another materialist reductionist, as are (which you would see from Eliade), many other anthropologists.

The way you have been writing about religion in a number of posts lately makes it hard, at least for me, to avoid concluding that your notions of what you would call sacred in this instance is just a metaphor for materialistic dogmas of some type or another.

I’m interested in the here, the now, and the future. If there were a giant cyproheptadine spill and we could just move forward and away from all this ridiculousness, we’ll that would be fine and welcomed by me. Humans aspire to be gods and hopefully end up as humans.

 

[LUH 3417]

The people who speak this way are reductionistic in the sense they are merely using metaphors to describe what they assume at the outset is purely a material or psychological experience or whatever trendy object of reductionism is popular at the moment. If by structuralism (post or not), you mean someone like Levi-Strauss, see Eliade, who makes a strong case showing he is just another materialist reductionist, as are (which you would see from Eliade), many other anthropologists.

The way you have been writing about religion in a number of posts lately makes it hard, at least for me, to avoid concluding that your notions of what you would call sacred in this instance is just a metaphor for materialistic dogmas of some type or another.

And MOSTLY I feel like religions all rely on the original lie - chaos is the official primordial state. So we need religion to get us out of this undifferentiated state of inexplicable material and anti material.

What if there is not chaos but order inherent in the biosphere, as nature shows us over and over again.

 

[Badger]

Always a few exceptions to every true rule. I think your theory has solid merit, but that does not mean it's a good theory for them to follow, because I see no sign it's working or working well. If so, feminists creating such theories ought to consider an old Turkish saying I recently read, am paraphrasing "If you find yourself way down the wrong road, turn around." Something I told a good friend who might be getting himself into a marriage, one which appears to have a number of red lights flashing outside the warm glow of the embraces he periodically has with his fiancee.

I had a women’s studies professor with beautiful thick hair who dressed in flowy and flattering clothes and was quite attractive. I don’t know the details of her personal life, if she ever married or had children, but she was in her 50s I guess. She was very feminine in the traditional sense of being soft and approachable but she was also very direct, sharp, and witty. She was like RP in the sense that she could be elusive - she never defined what feminity was exactly, she taught the class by alluding to something like woman as a wholesome being, with a body connected to mind, does not even exist yet. Go out and create that woman.

I think something happened when feminist theory jumped from France to the US. The US tends to make everything that is beautiful, ugly whereas French people are usually associated with sexy things. Sometimes I wonder if feminist theory is part of an elaborate and complicated court ship game to make women more interesting to men and to also make men more understanding of women. Anyway look at photos of Julia Kristeva as a young woman and maybe it’ll make sense.

I think the decline in physical attractiveness has to do with living in college dorms and eating Sodexo food.

 

[Badger]

My guess is you are in your 20s. You will change your mind when older, 100% guarantee it. Am not saying it as some sort of obligatory folk wisdom from older to younger. I would not say it if I thought were as dumb as most reductionists I've read. You're not.

I’m interested in the here, the now, and the future. If there were a giant cyproheptadine spill and we could just move forward and away from all this ridiculousness, we’ll that would be fine and welcomed by me. Humans aspire to be gods and hopefully end up as humans.

 

[Badger]

Refer to what I said about some day you changing your mind.

And MOSTLY I feel like religions all rely on the original lie - chaos is the official primordial state. So we need religion to get us out of this undifferentiated state of inexplicable material and anti material.

What if there is not chaos but order inherent in the biosphere, as nature shows us over and over again.

 

[LUH 3417]

Refer to what I said about some day you changing your mind.

Haha, I am. I’ll take that as a compliment.

If I had to pick I’d be a Taoist. Lots of metaphor and no grains.

 

[Badger]

It's meant as one.

Taoism is tremendous and splendid. The Asian religious closest in spirit and thought to Sufism, my favorite. A great, great and inspiring comparative study on Sufism/Taoism:
https://www.amazon.com/Sufism-Taois...&qid=1517558508&sr=1-1&keywords=taoism+sufism

Haha, I am. I’ll take that as a compliment.

If I had to pick I’d be a Taoist. Lots of metaphor and no grains.