The Forum > Article Comments > No one Muslim fits all > Comments
No one Muslim fits all : Comments
By Waleed Aly, published 2/9/2005Waleed Aly argues John Howard's meeting with Muslim leaders ended up pleasing no one.
- Pages:
-
- 1
- 2
- 3
- ...
- 22
- 23
- 24
- Page 25
- 26
-
- All
I think what puzzles me is that someone of your obvious and undoubted intelligence can write consecutively...
>>"You see, a person is not a Christian because they were baptized, christened, sprayed with holy water,"<<
and
>>"those who had crucified Jesus asked Peter "What shall we do now ?"
...Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you"
without seeing the inherent confusion that such a juxtaposition creates.
I can quite see your point - that christian-ness comes from within - but if that is the case, why can't you judge muslim-ness on the same basis?
But if in fact you side with Paul, and see christian-ness as a product of repentance and baptism, doesn't this invalidate your previous sentence?
By the same token, when you casually throw off a line about the Turkish application to join the EU, it appears to be without any kind of analysis or processing on your part.
You then confuse matters further by claiming "the memory in the Euro side may not have faded quite as much as Turkey has changed, and the 'sound bite' you described would suggest as much"
Boaz, I hate to remind you, but it was *your* sound bite, not mine. *I* didn't describe it, *you* did. It was I who questioned its provenance, suggesting that it was a poor basis upon which to translate a transient opinion into some form of categorical "fact". To add later that "it might reflect just the one view of the single person interviewed, but it didn't come across that way" is sloppy thinking.
And that, by the way, is what I found "unconvincing" - I have no brief to judge whether others find your arguments compelling. But when the internal logic is so flawed, I feel justified in pointing it out.