Quote: (06-06-2017 07:49 PM)Sherman Wrote:
A devote practicing Muslim is someone who practices faithfully for years and it changes his life and makes him peaceful. A hijacker who drinks booze and goes to girly bars and than at the last second blows something up thinking he will be forgiven, is not a devote Muslim.
This is the classic misunderstanding someone brought up on latte, liberal Christianity and MTV brings to Islam. It assumes that Islam, like Christianity, is a meditational, contemplative religion designed to bring about internal transformation. The only Muslim sect that even
looks like this is the Baha'i, which has a lot in common with Sufi mysticism ... and which sect is heavily persecuted in every Muslim nation on Earth by both Sunni and Shia alike.
A devout, practicing Muslim holds that the Quran is the literal, inerrant word of God. There's hardly a Muslim scholar on the planet (apart from the ones against whom fatwas get issued) that says otherwise. That being so, a devout, practicing Muslim is bound to comply with the following directives from both God and Muhammed (both of whom are inerrant):
"Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate." —(Koran 9:73)
"Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous." —(Koran 9:123)
"The believers who stay at home—apart from those that suffer from a grave impediment—are not the equal of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons. God has given those that fight with their goods and their persons a higher rank than whose who stay at home. God has promised all a good reward; but far richer is the recompense of those who fight for Him…He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apostle and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God…The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies." —(Koran 4:95 -101)
And while the Koran does say
"Do not destroy yourselves" (4:29) the loopholes for martyrdom by suicide are many—
"Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of God, whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him…The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan…Say: ‘Trifling are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for those who would keep from evil…‘ —(Koran 4:74-78)
The devout, practicing Muslim must also comply with the hadith, which are similarly held to be the inerrant word of God, and which contain wonderful chestnuts like this:
Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he godly or wicked.
A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.
A day and a night fighting on the frontier is better than a month of fasting and prayer.
Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah’s Cause).
He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief.
Paradise is in the shadow of swords.
Sherman's idea about Islam, as I said, is that you can pick and choose the bits of Islam you will follow and wring out a "peaceful" existence. Unfortunately for Islam, you have to basically chuck out entire books of the Quran and in passing admit that the Quran is not the literal, inerrant word of God.
Christianity's been doing this for the better part of a thousand years or so, notwithstanding that the more literal a Christian you become, the more peaceful you tend to become as Francis of Assisi's life demonstrates. As said, the Baha'i may well do this, but the vast majority of Muslims in the Sunni and Shia sects do not, and they persecute the Baha'i for that very reason: they are viewed without exception as apostates from Islam by both major streams.
It always amuses me when the same guys who ridicule the Catholic Church for holding that the Pope can make an infallible pronouncement in very, very limited circumstances have nothing to say about one billion people on the planet who hold as a central tenet of their faith that an entire book containing and commanding bloodshed on a mass scale is the infallible and inerrant word of God. But that too is the disease of Westerners like Sherman: when you think another culture has all the answers just because it's not white or Christian.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm