By: bosskitty

bosskitty — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:20:45 +0000

We agree that the free interplay of ideas challenge tyranny.
I found a typo in my original response that is now corrected; maybe what I said makes more sense now. My position has been formed by decades of questioning and sifting through the rhetoric of dogma to find the original truths behind each religion. Look through my Religion page and find a vast array of beliefs; many are spun off corporate versions of major religions. I have found that by inserting charismatic leaders into the religious equation, original precepts have been lost. Your version of Christianity appears to promote dominance of your thinking over someone else’s. You focus on Islam as evil because you are convinced that Islam promotes violence against “infidels”. The very same concept in Christianity uses different words, like “evil and heathen” to justify “purification”, which equals violence. Why else would a confident and reasonable religion actually believe that others seek to overthrow it? Paranoia is NOT religion. Paranoia is a tool. Using generalities about Islam and Christianity seek to deceive and justify biased behavior.
No, Islam does not need to be questioned! Its leaders need to be held accountable for hijacking the original faith. The same holds true for Christianity! Too many Christian leaders are guilty of using the faith to mask deeper agendas that include power, money and sex. As soon as both Christian and Islam shed these hypocrites, the world will become peaceful again. Arrogance is a sin in every religion. Violence is a sin in every religion. Why is it so difficult to separate the religion from the men who claim to speak for it?

By: David Cashin

David Cashin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:23:11 +0000

Thanks for your response. I appreciate the detail and effort involved in this. Honestly I think many of the things you said confirmed what I said, though that was perhaps not your intention. I would only encourage you to think through your positions to their logical conclusions. Do you really like where you end up? I was not advocating for the muzzling of atheists, quite the opposite. What happens when certain groups are muzzled, but others have complete freedom to speak their minds? Isn’t that exactly what tyranny is? In the free interplay of ideas which is the source of our strength as a nation we need to question the assumptions of others. Islam needs desperately to be questioned. If I were a trade unionist working in a fascist regime I would be not only breaking the law, I would be endangering the workers that I was talking to. Do you really want to punish the trade unionist and those who listen to him while affirming the values of the regime that suppresses his ideals? I use these secular examples because in the realm of ideas there is no difference between secular and religious ideals. This is exactly where cultural relativism runs amuck. I noticed that you didn’t really address my question of double-standards. That is because the ethics you are advocating are a set of institutionalized double standards. One group is allowed to maintain highly oppressive structures today because that is their cultural ideal while another group is condemned for events that happened 1000 years ago, ala crusades. The issue is, what is the common ethic for today? Take it a little further, if Europe goes Islamic, or America, does that mean that the ideals of freedom of religion and freedom of speech should now be negated because that is what the new cultural elite wants? If Sharia law is enforced in England does that mean that wife beating is no longer a crime? Or that women have no right of divorce? Or that their testimony is worth half of a man’s in court? Your ethnical relativism is fine as long as the peoples of the world don’t live together, but now we live across the street from each other. Therefore we need a universal system of ethics and human rights that applies to everybody. We need a level playing ground around the world that would prosecute Christians for persecuting Christians who convert to Islam (not much of a problem I think you would have to admit), and that also would prosecute Muslims for persecuting members of their community who decide to leave. By the way, some of my best ex-Muslim friends are atheists. Believe me, they are persecuted even here in the United States. It’s even worse in Europe. If you don’t believe me let me send you an article by a British atheist who details what is going on in the wake of ethics in the sway of cultural relativism. I am simply appealing to you to start advocating for a level playing field where everyone has to play by the same rules. Not too long ago two of my friends were walking through a park in England handing out Christian tracts. Two Muslim fellows came up to them and said “don’t give these to Muslims! If you give tracts to Muslims we in the Muslim community have the right to kill you!” You may not like this direct proselytism but what would you say if a “christian” saw Muslims handing out tracts and made a similar threat? Is the first case right and the second one wrong, and if so, how do you justify that? The rules should be the same, in Afghanistan and in England. Anything else is tyranny.

Comments on: To Dave Cashin Re: Proselytizing

By: bosskitty

By: David Cashin