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The Forum > Article Comments > Anglo-Christian tribalism > Comments

Anglo-Christian tribalism : Comments

By Alice Aslan, published 29/5/2009

What lies at the heart of the fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools in some parts of Australia?

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Yes, we are a bit insular and parochial in this country, aren't we? As evidence of this, we need look no further than the national outpouring of self-defense after Sol Trujillo suggested that we are "racist and backward". We are not good at accepting criticism, not good at "negotiation of difference" and not open to change. We in this country know what we like and we like what we know. Whether they be indigenous, Moslim or intellectually disabled, they are not quite one of us, are they?
Posted by estelles, Friday, 29 May 2009 10:24:24 AM
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A pretty accurate summary of the situation.

The author forgot to mention one objection - which I'm sure will arrive in the comments thread soon - that is a variant of "look what would happen if you tried to build a Christian church in Saudi"

I've always particularly liked this objection, because it is effectively saying "we should conduct our communities like they do in Saudi Arabia", without the slightest trace of irony.

It's not that Australians dislike foreigners, of course.

Just as long as they don't want to live here.

Oh no, I forgot - it's not like that at all.

Everyone is welcome, as long as they adopt "Australian culture"

Also delivered without irony.
Posted by Pericles, Friday, 29 May 2009 10:44:28 AM
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And of course Pericles it is not possible to hate everything the religion stands for and yet still like the people is it? The amount of frothing from many on OLO about funding for Christian schools certainly demonstrate the lefts hypocrisy.
Posted by runner, Friday, 29 May 2009 10:52:15 AM
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I don't have much sympathy for the winging expressed in the article. We are all tribal. I recall my disquiet when a Muslim school was built on my path to work. I imagine it was felt by everybody - after all a new tribe was moving in. Undoubtedly they will have their own agendas to peruse and will in general shake the pot, probably in ways I am unfamiliar with.

After a time I got used to the school. The chaos outside was the typical mill of mothers, cars and children. Some parents drove aggressively, and earned the scowls of other parents, but for the most part people where polite and helpful, as always. And after a time I compared this lots behaviour with that of Christian firebrands around the traps I decided this mob was not so bad after all.

After a few decades they won't be a new tribe - just a tribe building a school, as tribes tend to do. And it will of happened gradually, and for the most part peacefully - the odd winge aside. What is the problem here. Isn't that how things are meant to work?
Posted by rstuart, Friday, 29 May 2009 10:59:45 AM
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A good mate of mine phoned yesterday to catch up for a beer and to celebrate his looking for a house - his first. He's looking at the Kuraby (Brisbane southside) area. Happily gay, he's buying a house for extended family and himself.

His father counselled him to beware, there were a lot of Muslims there and to 'be careful what side of the railway to buy on'. Kuraby has a mosque, a fantastic, eclectic community with a larger than usual proportion of Muslims.

Whenever he looks at a house he makes a point of asking about the neighbours. The body language of the various real estate remoras say all he needs to know - so he makes a point of saying hello over the fence while he's there.

Guess the reaction is from the violent, aggressive terrorist Islamist (there DID that word come from?) neighbours. Invariably "welcome - come over for tea when you settle in - anything we can do to help - it's a great neighbourhood." You get the idea.

Trujillo might have been a bit of a tosser, but he was spot on about Australia's racist psyche.
Posted by Baxter Sin, Friday, 29 May 2009 11:04:03 AM
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runner,

Medieval Spain:

"Spain developed three different literary traditions during the Middle Ages. The presence in the Iberian Peninsula of three different established religions--Christianity, Islam and Judaism--gave rise to three distinctive intellectual communities and practices. Muslim philosophers and scientists developed knowledge in areas like medicine, optics, algebra and chemistry. Jewish scholars gave shape to the Talmudic tradition, and Christian Europe sent its theologians to discover Aristotle among the few who still could read Greek in Western Europe: the Arab and Jewish scholars of Córdoba and Toledo. The Iberian Peninsula was known simultaneously as Al-Andalus, Sepharad, and Hispania, depending on the cultural tradition of the scholar approaching it. The 11th century saw the figures of Averroes and Maimonides as towering philosophical figures in search for a solution to the contradictions between religious truth and the truth of science." (Braswell)

For some centuries, benefitting from cross-cultural scholarship and understanding, folk of the three religions lived harmoniously side-by-side under an atmosphere of freedom. Too much for the hard-core Christians. "We can't have scholarship, can we?" In 1492, Christians, Ferdindand and Isabella expelled the Jews and the Muslims, bringing the close relationship to its end.

You will recall that Christians acted in a similar manner, after Constantine, when non-Christian artifacts were destroyed in Taliban fashion.
Posted by Oliver, Friday, 29 May 2009 11:34:01 AM
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I agree with the line in this piece but I would have like to see the subject expanded a bit. Not all people who don't want a Islamic school or mosque build is a racist. As a beliver in secular world I would not any religious school built anywhere..
Posted by Kenny, Friday, 29 May 2009 11:38:33 AM
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Have a look to Europe.

Migrants arrived in big numbers because of generous social security payments in those countries.

Today in big cities 65 % of all children are coming from muslim background.

Which I would not object to at all, but:

Children from the German minority get abused in the school yards an being called christian pigs.

Public pools where fathers cannot go to swim with their kids since muslim women have complained being seen by men, so the pools were turned to no-men zones at certain times.

The German laws prohibit cruelty against animals. Muslims got there way they can now slaughter animals so they suffer terrible pain.

That are first signs of changes to the society. Even political leaders admit now quietly that something is going wrong.

More than half of the children being muslim now, means in around 20 years a considerable part of the adult population will be muslim.

Those will elect muslim parties which eventually will be the majority in parliament, and sooner or later turn those countries into islamic countries.

That will have serious consequences for the remaining indigenous people, as one can see clearly nowadays in countries like Turkey oder Arabia, where the is just NOT the multiculturalism like some people might dream of but exactly the opposite.

Those countries in Europe are beyond the point of no return.

1.7 children per woman for the indiginous population as opposed to 5 children per woman for the muslim migrants means within a few decades Denmark or Germany will be islam republics.

Autralia should learn from that and stop that development at the earliest possible stage.

The migrants are unwilling to learn the language and to integrate. There is no need to learn the language since for example many suburbs of Cologne everybody speaks Turkish.

So if muslim migrants are ready to integrate, no problem. But if they are not, and instead build mosques and set up arabic towns on Australian soil, the government should say, thanks for your visit, here we have a free ticket to Beirut for you.
Posted by gdann, Friday, 29 May 2009 11:51:34 AM
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Nursel, you say "What lies at the heart of this fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools is some Australians’ inability and unwillingness to accept and acknowledge that Australia is a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact."

"Multiculturalism" is a discredited word today. Not because we (the host community) are any less prepared to welcome people of different background, but because SOME immigrants, in practice almost uniquely Muslim (and admittedly not all Muslims), take a hostile and non-integrating approach to the host country and culture.

Turks have not raised hackles here because, post-Attaturk, they've been secular. Unfortunately most of the Arab world and areas adjacent to it (like Somalia), and now Pakistan (which shot its brains out under Zia in the 1970s), have got enmired in religious and political attitudes which are incompatible with and hostile to our culture. Why should we, normally tolerant Australians, import any element of Islam that's open to fundamentalism - a mental, economic and cultural disease - and which pursues insulting and mindless jihadism?

In December 2006 students at the East Preston Islamic College tore out pages of a Bible and urinated on them. A petition from teachers at the school included the words “This whole incident implies a deep hatred inculcated in the students towards the Christians / non-Muslim teachers”. That hatred certainly reflected attitudes of at least some of the parents. [See page 1 of The Australian, 6 December 2006.]

The Islamic community needs to accept that this country’s fundamental values are secular and democratic. By contrast, Islamic theology is profoundly incompatible with western democracy. [I am not Catholic but commend Cardinal Pell's paper Islam and Western Democracies, on the web at from http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/Archbishop/Addresses/200627_681.shtml .]

Australians believe in religious toleration. But the attitudes displayed in the behaviour of the East Preston Islamic College's students in desecrating the Bible not only enrage me, they make me withdraw my preparedness to tolerate Islam in Australia. Islamic schools are NOT WELCOME.
Posted by Glorfindel, Friday, 29 May 2009 12:09:26 PM
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I believe the underlying question that for the sake of political correctness is not being asked is whether or not some religions and sects (be it Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or Christian sects) are inherently flawed in respect to recognising and preaching that each and every individual is as valuable and precious as the next.

It would do Australians a wealth of good to unbiasedly scrutinize the fundamental beliefs of such religions and simultaneously pay very careful attention to how those religions treat minorities in countries where they are the ruling majority.

This also means questioning the religiously justified exploitation of all people of the world from Asia to Africa to the Middle-East and Israel.

Where we see examples of religiously justified and fueled hate crime, we should collectively ask that the leaders of those religions denounce those actions and make an effort to educate their followers... if refused than those leaders should be held accountable.
Posted by bach, Friday, 29 May 2009 12:13:37 PM
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Cardinal Pell's article on Islam and Western Democracies is now at
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3980

The web page I gave before no longer works, but this one does.
Posted by Glorfindel, Friday, 29 May 2009 12:19:18 PM
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Gdann,
190% of you stats are wrong and 137.5% of your views are emotionally perceptional (yep I made the stats up too)

NB Muslims according to British govt stats make up 4-5% of the population in Britain
Australia is about 2%
Now those national stats I didn't make up.
As for the birth rate at current levels the Muslim rates, given future generational lapsing of their faith,integration with society as a whole and other factors it has been estimated that somewhere around 2780 Muslims MIGHT dominate. By then I don't think the population will care so why should we. (I didn't make that up either)

You're not xenophobic are you? it's just your views that are. :-)

PS perhaps you should consider Evolution it's an amazing concept.

No irony intended satire yes irony no.
Posted by examinator, Friday, 29 May 2009 12:29:38 PM
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[By contrast, Islamic theology is profoundly incompatible with western democracy]

Unfortunatly, it would seem that Glorfindel is correct, when you look around the world at all the majority-Muslim countries and see what goes on there, and what sort of governments they run. Muslims in Australia can argue this point as much as they like, and can claim whatever they want about wanting to assimilate. But the proof is in the pudding, on the other side of the world.

This is in a stark contrast to Christianity which has contributed to building Western democracies.

Another case of needing to analyse each religion on it's own terms rather than lumping them all together.
Posted by Trav, Friday, 29 May 2009 12:45:54 PM
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What a coincidence! I heard on Radio National just one hour ago, that 500 Indian students in Australia have been hit or abused in some way.
Before that, I spent a couple of hours with a group of women who take the line that "if they want to come here, they should be made to learn English first". I am convinced that tribalism is alive and well in Australia.
Posted by poddy, Friday, 29 May 2009 1:26:26 PM
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Examinator,

no emotions in my perceptions. I rather used Excel that returns numbers and facts.

My stated percentages are from the German Governments bureau of statistics. If you read German I suggest you have a look there yourself.

I am not xenophonic, how then could I live between all you Aussies. I love it here. I have spent years in other countries as well, it was a pleasure. And I have muslims in my family which I will better not comment on.

Sorry for my bad English, at least I try to make myself understandable and do not expect someone talk in my mother tongue when I visit the RTA or so.

Evolution is amazing as long as I do not get evolutionized back to the dark ages.

I did not mean to say that in Australia it is as bad as in Western Europe.

I just mean it would be wise to watch that, and draw conclusions, like not supporting those who refuse to integrate, but let them enjoy life where they are welcome and will feel at home, namely in an islamic country.

The future generations you mention, in Western Europe they do not lapse their religion, just the opposite, and they do not integrate with society but change them they way they want.

They have already taken over parts of big cities where they treat the indigenous population with contempt.
Posted by gdann, Friday, 29 May 2009 1:27:05 PM
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Hey Trav,

Christianity did not build the Western democracies.

After the fall the Western Roman Empire (496 CE), the West entered a Dark Ages under the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Under the Church, little was achieved, in comparson to, say,non-Christian China.

Christianity held back Western progress for over one thousand years.

With the Enlightenment and the Great Divergence, knowledge from the Greeks, gained via the Muslims, guided by free-thinkers, allowed theory to be applied to technique. Wealth and power shifted from the Church and Nobles to Capital owned by Commoners. Reason replaced superstition. Countries like France and the United States developed secular constitutions.

Admittedly, the Christian founders of the US, were heavily involved in the slave trade or were slave owners themselves (based on the Bible's teaching). Yet, slowly freedom and equality gained traction.

Christians formed bodies, such as the Ku Klux Klan. Even so, progress has been made.

As noted twice by me in this thread. It was the Muslims, not the Christians, whom guarded the knowledge of the Greeks. Circa. 800 to 1300, Western knowledge was behind that of the Muslims. The Christian Church supressed alternative sources of knowledge.

Modern democracy is about setting the individal apart from the Church and State.

We would not be able to debate religious matters on OLO, if the Christian Church was in power.

O
Posted by Oliver, Friday, 29 May 2009 2:29:00 PM
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Your status is irrelevant to the topic as is your language in that it isn't so bad that I can't see the faults in your reasoning.

Your stats are wrong. Muslims simply do not form 65% of the school aged children in Europe not least in Germany (in areas perhaps).
Stats available show that Muslims are very much in the minority in all W European countries.

The rest of your points are your perceptions but aren't supportable
to the extent you say those that are are trivial betraying their basis....your fear(phobia).

Evolution means cultures need to adapt or disappear German culture has and continue to change...
By adapting to Islam is not going to evolve you back to the stone age. That comment is emotional and silly. German day to day culture will change regardless of you
My concern is that you don't seem to be matching the change... but that is your right as it is mine to point out your phobic attitude for the sake of objectivity on the topic.
Anyway have a good stay.
Posted by examinator, Friday, 29 May 2009 2:43:35 PM
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The article seemed to contain a lot of spin, misdirection and double standards.

A couple which stuck out were

- Australians are judged on the basis of the actions of the more millitant anti-muslim part of the population yet the author does not seem to want Islam based on the actions of it's more millitant adherants.

- Building mono-theistic (and potentially mono-cultural ) schools is touted as a great step forward for multi-culturalism. In what way does isolating children from other faith backgrounds contribute to multiculturalism?

It was also interesting to note the lack of mention of "calls to prayer" in relation to opposition to the building of mosque's in suburban areas. That's an item which has featured heavilly in the media reporting I've seen on that issue and if the claims are true then a significant issue.

I do find it difficult when particular groups fight to maintain their own cultural heritage while insisting that other groups abandon aspects of their cultural heritage.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Friday, 29 May 2009 2:44:40 PM
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Glorfindel,

I'm not looking for an excuse but wasn't that Bible incident preceded by prison guards at Guantanamo flushing pages of the Koran down a toilet a few months earlier?

I also recall that public assaults against Muslim women wearing headscarves was fairly rampant at the time too. I personally witnessed several school children physically and verbally harrass one woman outside a shopping centre while adults stood by and laughed.

Maybe the mother of one of those students had a similar experience.
Posted by wobbles, Friday, 29 May 2009 3:13:46 PM
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If it were just an issue of resistance to multi culturism, one would expect a similar reaction to the construction of a temple of other religions, such as the Bahai temple.

As far as I know there hasn't been any resistance.

The reaction to Islam is a predictable response to publicity agents such as Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, Bin Laden, and Abu Bakar Bashir, who promote the killing of non muslims, and that raped women deserve it.

That most of the British bombers were home grown in the Islamic schools doesn't inspire confidence in the local population.

The fact that most sharks are harmless doesn't prevent a panic when one is sighted.

Islam needs to fire its agents and get a new image that does not inspire fear.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Friday, 29 May 2009 3:26:32 PM
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Australia federal politicians acted more stupidly than they do normally when they opened the gates to the large scale spread of Islam into our country.

It’s not governments that Muslims have to battle; it’s ordinary Australians, held in disdain by their politicians, who are at last getting their feelings across. They were not consulted on matters of multiculturalism and mass immigration but, by crikey, they can stir the pot when it comes to their neighbourhoods.

The suspicion of Islam and Australian governments is being heightened as more people find that, although our governments claim that religion and politics do not mix, they have spent at least $8,000,000 of our money to establish, in Australia, an organisation to spread Islamic information, and they have also paid for a booklet called “Muslim Australians: Their Beliefs, Practices and Institutions”, which does not actually tell the truth. The booklet was written the way a Professor Abdullah Saeed would LIKE Islam to be, not the way it really is.

It can said that, having let Islam come to Australia, Australia must now allow Muslims the same rights as other religions to have their own schools and places of worship (which they do have in some areas where they have become dominant).

That sounds right to me, except for this:

Both our elected dictatorships – Coalition and Labor – totally ignored considerable public objection to a completely alien religion being deliberately introduced to Australia, when consultation and education could have prevented the actions against the establishment of Mosques and Muslim schools.



The author also accuses we Australians of “inability and unwillingness to accept and acknowledge that Australia is a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact.”

Well, like Islam, that was forced upon us by dictatorial politicians, too. Besides, it seems to me that the people who have most trouble coming to terms with multiculturalism are Muslims.

Told you so. The chooks are now coming home to roost.
Posted by Leigh, Friday, 29 May 2009 3:42:10 PM
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Well said Oliver.
A little bit of historical truth can really mess up a overly simplistic theory. Yep, all religions claim to be doing good despite their history and current actions. Never give power to someone who claims it as God given! Never ever.
Bach: If religious leaders were held accountable then they would evolve into scientific entities that actually concerned themselves with Truth. Stasis is a necessary part of Tribalism and is part of the success formula of the memes of religion. Pandering to simple egotistical minds, keeping people scared (starts with kids) and consistency is more important than truth, or honesty, or Good for that matter. Look at the worldwide ongoing Catholic paedophile protection organisation. Imagine a secular organisation with that record. Bikes look like saints in comparison.
Kenny: I'm with you. All religious teachings that are not comparative are a form of child abuse. Closing minds at a young age is akin to brain-binding. My parents always said "respect them all, but make up your own mind". To this day I am so grateful they gave me true ethics and freedom of thought.
Alas, this is *my* culture and it gets no respect from any established religions.
(Except most Buddhists, but they are Taoist in nature, not theists. It seems most non-theists can get along, but the notion of God gives one the evangelistic domination urges!)
Despite the gains from science (most of civilisation as we know it), Christians are actively trying to dismantle it via creationism/ID and insane moral crusades. I'd suggest that Christians make up the majority of the intolerance. Tribe vs Tribe. Isn't it ironic that the humans who don't believe in our animal ancestry behave the most like animals?
Posted by Ozandy, Friday, 29 May 2009 4:19:02 PM
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Ozandy

I think it unfair to blame your parents for your warped mind. Your selective view of history and you god hating attitude is certainly not something that is helpful to any society.
Posted by runner, Friday, 29 May 2009 6:08:41 PM
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Glorfindel: "Islamic theology is profoundly incompatible with western democracy"

Yet nonetheless Pell acknowledged in the link you gave there are fully functioning Islamic democracies. He only chose to mention 2, but there are many more. I notice Pell didn't try an explain the apparent contradiction. You ignore it as well. The obvious conclusion is theology isn't hugely relevant to democracy one way or the other. I suspect Pell and yourself find it a bit hard to swallow.

runner: "Your selective view of history and you god hating attitude"

Pericles, Ozandy. You know you hit a home run with runner when he starts using the word "hate" in his replies.
Posted by rstuart, Friday, 29 May 2009 7:34:22 PM
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Oliver,

Re “the three religions lived harmoniously side-by-side under an atmosphere of freedom”

I think you may be simplifying it a bit too much and, this may encourage some who have in the past seen Muslim rule in Spain (from beginning to end) as a multicultural/liberal golden age.

“In general the caliphate of Cordova was a remarkably tolerant regime under which Christians and Jews were able to prosper , though, as in Umayyad Syria, , there were limits to that tolerance and the Christians and Jews were discriminated against in all sorts of ways*. The caliphate of Cordova fell apart in the early decades of the eleventh century and towards the end of the same century Spain was occupied by the Almoravids, Moroccan Berbers who espoused a much more bigoted form of Islam. Both Christians and Jews were intermittently persecuted by the new masters of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). In 1066 there was a massacre of Jews in Granada. A number of Christian Churches were demolished and many Christians and Jews were deported to North Africa. [ For Lust Of Knowing – By Robert Irwin]

*This discrimination included:
Death to anyone proselytising Muslims
Death to anyone who hid apostates’.
Death to anyone who insulted Islam.

(More like a modern Muslim society, than a modern multicultural/liberal society)
Posted by Horus, Saturday, 30 May 2009 12:06:38 AM
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"Anglo Christian tribalism"? Really?
The many and diverse non Anglo Christians have told me plenty about a certain non- Christian tribalism that discriminated against them, mocked them, tortured them and even killed many of their family past and present. They migrated to Canada, the US, Australia and Europe to get away from this horrible situation.

Will enough people and will our media speak up on behalf of the Middle Eastern Christian people and African Christians who have suffered, been raped, died, had their daughters kidnapped?
I somehow don't think so.
We live in an new era of secular humanist intolerance against Christians in which secularists have absolutely no shame about using hypocritical words and actions. Very unilateral behaviour.
Posted by Webby, Saturday, 30 May 2009 12:22:07 AM
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Ho-hum. Another standard Anglo-bashing article in which the European Christian majority in this country is demonised as "intolerant" and blamed for the failure of Muslim immigrants to assimilate and fit in to Western society.

According to the author's logic, if certain immigrant minorities are culturally incompatible with the host society, then it must be the host population's fault. Rather than the newcomers changing to better fit in with the host population, the host population must change to better suit the newcomers. If they don't, then they are "intolerant", "bigoted", "xenophobic", even "racist".

I can only imagine what would happen if a large population of Westerners moved en masse into a Muslim country, say Nursel Güzeldeniz's ancestral homeland, and demanded that the host society change to suit the newcomers and redefine itself as a multicultural country (an oxymoron if ever there was one). When the Muslim host population reacts in fear and outrage to the changes this alien cultural group is imposing on their country, the Westerners answer: "What are you so uptight about, brothers? You need to accept and acknowledge that your country is now a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact. Your old, pre-multicultural identity is no longer valid."

Of course, if Western immigrants flooded into Muslim countries and began changing those societies to better suit themselves, they would be accused of "cultural imperialism" and more than likely forcibly evicted by the host populations.
Posted by Efranke, Saturday, 30 May 2009 7:43:01 AM
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Pericles wrote: "I've always particularly liked this objection, because it is effectively saying "we should conduct our communities like they do in Saudi Arabia", without the slightest trace of irony."

Oh, I see.

So, in order to demonstrate our moral superiority over the intolerant, we here in Australia should be tolerant of groups which are highly intolerant and accept peoples and cultures that would never accept us if the roles were reversed?

Obviously tolerance, like immigration, is a one-way street.
Posted by Efranke, Saturday, 30 May 2009 8:26:00 AM
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Moral superiority is I suppose one way of looking at it, Efranke.

>>So, in order to demonstrate our moral superiority over the intolerant, we here in Australia should be tolerant of groups which are highly intolerant and accept peoples and cultures that would never accept us if the roles were reversed? Obviously tolerance, like immigration, is a one-way street.<<

Or you could call it civilization.

Which is in a very crude sense a form of moral superiority, I suppose.

Otherwise, why would we have bothered introducing tolerance into our culture in the first place?

The process of civilization over the centuries has always been a matter of choosing behaviours which makes it easier to live as a group, and rejecting those which don't.

I for one feel that is a good thing, rather than something to be regretted.

You clearly don't.
Posted by Pericles, Saturday, 30 May 2009 9:24:13 AM
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I'll bet these immigrants didn't do all this moaning and groaning in the the countries they came from - they know what would have happended to them if they did.

We are told that these people are escaping from totalitarianism and persecution; but, when the arrive in a democratic country, they don't like that either. The only difference is that they can feel free to citicise their hosts because they know that they can get away with it. They abuse free speech, and blame the host culture for their own problems.

I'm sick and tired of johnny come latelies badmouthing Australia. Nursel Guzeldeniz is an extremely rude person, as are all immigrants who can't keep their mouths shut and be grateful for being allowed to come here.
Posted by Leigh, Saturday, 30 May 2009 10:05:42 AM
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Wobbles: I don't justify the Guantanamo incident. The guards’ Islamophobia is reaction by uneducated people to perceived unprovoked attack on the USA by Muslims.

Belittling the core of other people's culture and mythos usually produces a hostile response. Who needs enemies?

I live in Brisbane and I haven't seen or heard of any harassing here of women wearing headscarfs. Of the different types of headscarf, the hijab (jilbab), al-amira, shayla, khimar and chador all show the complete face, and are not all that different from shawls worn by old Greek women or rural Russian women. It's the niqab (a veil for the face that leaves just the area around the eyes clear) and especially the burka (which leaves the woman just a mesh to see through) that are likely to engender hostility, because they go beyond "modest" and brand the woman "property - keep out". They deny the capacity of men to show self-control in the face of what Al-Hilaly so drolly referred to as "uncovered meat". Maybe Muslim men are just animals?

"Mainstream", visible Islam has become much nastier since Qutb founded the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab cultural imperialism through Wahhabiism started spreading, not just through the Muslim world, but into Western Europe and elsewhere, helped by Saudi funding. If (like these people) you regard the Koran as the WORDS of God, interpretable only absolutely literally, then Islam is a violent religion thoroughly offensive and insulting to non-Muslims. For example:

2.191 And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.

2.216 Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it....

3.28 Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves against them ...

Muslim schools anyone?
Posted by Glorfindel, Saturday, 30 May 2009 12:43:30 PM
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“I can only imagine what would happen if a large population of Westerners moved en masse into a Muslim country, … and demanded that the host society change to suit the newcomers……”

There’s no need to imagine Take your next holiday, as do millions of people from all over the world, in Bali. Anywhere in Indonesia or Malaysia, in fact.

Ask some of the bikini-clad or shirtless Aussies, Brits, French etc. who have moved there for the “laid-back” lifestyle how they are received.

In Malaysia, where topless women visitors drape the beaches, being sold drinks and trinkets by Muslim vendors, ask them how much harassment they receive from their Muslim hosts.

Get a grip, people. Our closest neighbors are Muslim, multi-cultural countries. They are inundated by millions of stoned, inebriated, sexually-active, half-clad visitors all year round, seeking the time of their lives. Thousands of whom stay on and demand pubs, strip-clubs, mushroom milkshakes, mixed-gender hostels and dormitories,

And get completely enraged when one of their number gets thrown into jail for importing drugs i.e. coming under the jurisdiction of the laws of the host country. (Until they forget all about her/him and move on to the next scandal).
Posted by Romany, Saturday, 30 May 2009 12:57:35 PM
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Horus,

Thank you for your post.

Yes, I agree my cite was the passive eye-of-tornado, when Spain was playing musical chairs with the conflicting monotheists religions. Again, I agree branches of Islam were as destructive as the Christians. Islam's factions go back to arguments over whose geneology best claims the right to be the heir of Mohammed.

Christian enjoinment with Muslim Spain was significant in allowing the West caputure lost knowledge. In the dying centuries of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Attic Greek was lost to vulgar Latin, with dire consequences for Western progress.

O.
Posted by Oliver, Saturday, 30 May 2009 1:34:14 PM
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A key to answering the by-line question "What lies at the heart of the fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools in some parts of Australia?" can be found in the second paragraph of the article. In referring to sociologist Michael Humphrey's 1989 academic article in Migration Monitor, “Is this a mosque free zone? Islam and the State in Australia.”, Nursel Guzeldeniz brings to light Humphrey's use of the term 'Muslim communities in Australia'.

There, from the pen of what is in all probability a member of a perceived Australian elite, rather than that of any apologist for Islam, is the deal-breaker: the reference to 'Muslim COMMUNITIES', instead of a reference to individual migrants and/or their descendants who happen by circumstance of birth to claim, or be accorded, a Muslim affiliation.

So what is the 'deal' in relation to which the use of the term 'communities' constitutes a deal-breaker? The author comes very close to recognising it. She says: "What lies at the heart of this fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools is some Australians’ inability and unwillingness to accept and acknowledge that Australia is a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact".

Could it be that it has long been the expectation by the vast majority of Australians that persons who may desire to migrate to Australia should do so as individuals, abandoning all expectations as to any 'community status' for their erstwhile culture in the process?

It is interesting to see the use of the term 'Anglo-Christian' in the title. It is perhaps a most productive distinction. Australia is, after all, a constitutional monarchy under the peculiarly protestant Crown of Great Britain and Ireland. If there is one thing that such polity has achieved with spectacular success over recent centuries, it is the largely bloodless throwing-off of the claims of organised religion, whether purportedly Christian or otherwise, to any corporate say in the formation of public policy.

Has envious non-Anglo-Christian organised religion been the real imposer of multiculturalism?.
Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Saturday, 30 May 2009 2:00:44 PM
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"the right to maintain their specific ethnic cultural and religious identity," That's acceptable as long these "communities" obey the mores of Western liberal democracy,the danger is of course is that they won't. It all still sounds like tribalism to me, the Anglos are simply playing the same nasty game,this is our future.
Posted by mac, Saturday, 30 May 2009 2:19:15 PM
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Dear Mac

'liberal' democracy is actually the problem and the elephant in the room. No fault divorce, topless bathing and immodesty is all anti Catholic. It is the Catholic Christian Church that is our heritage and which politically correct liberal/libertine legislation is fast undermining.
I believe in bi-cameral, multi-party parliamentary democracy as the best form of governance and we need to enhance and many palces restore this system so long as it is done UNDER acknowledgement to the Trinitarians and One True God ONLY.
Without this , whilst non Christian religions have their agendas, the average pagan Aussies who has ditched his/her Catholic and Christian way of living will continue to flounder.
'liberal' aka feral political correctness of the past 50 years in most Western nations is what is REALLY killing us and our way of life.
Posted by Webby, Saturday, 30 May 2009 3:14:01 PM
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Just for the record, Bali is a predominantly Hindu society, not Muslim. And while religion is enshrined in the Indonesian constitution, the founders of modern Indonesia deliberately evaded the question of 'what religion?'. They acknowledged the diversity within their population and decided that it was enough for people to have some sort of religious belief, rather than specifying that they must all be Muslims. I guess the only people discriminated against in that situation were (and still are) the atheists.
Posted by Otokonoko, Saturday, 30 May 2009 4:00:46 PM
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Webby,

Catholicism was not the Church of the early Christians. The early Christians were essentially focused on martydom, maintaining their virginity and their early expectation of the "end times".

The Catholic Church is the reminant of Constantine trying to keep the declining Roman Empire together. Likewise, Mohammed needed to unify the Arabs too, agsinst the encroachment of Christianity and the Persians.

The common character to the three monotheists faiths is Abraham, not Jesus.

The first sixteen Bishops of Rome were Jewish. A Latin leader was required only after those of the Jewish faith were expelled by Hadrian to Pella. Having a Latin leader (Marcus) was a device to be able to pray in the Holy Land. No Jews were allowed.

Pagans or Pangi were civil persons. Alternatively,the Jews and Christians were atheists, because they were too exclusive and did not pray for the safety of the Roman emperor. There would few if any Australian pagans, worshipping the Roman pantheon.

The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans developed systems to allow myths to merge or have the same god by two names. The closest the Christians come to this is Elohim cum Yahweh cum Jehovah. The trinity was likely a Nicaean compromise to the Roman system. The Egyptians had a trinity long before the Nicaean Christians.

O.
Posted by Oliver, Saturday, 30 May 2009 4:05:46 PM
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It all depends upon what is going to be taught at these Islamic schools beyond the set states curriculum.

If the school is being funded by the Saudis which is a highly likely then the religious curriculum will contain a high level of extreme anti semitic and anti western material, as well violence against non believes. According Freedom House the curriculum funded bythe wahhabis has still NOT been cleaned up as the the Saudis promised to do.

The material in the three Koranic books is overwhelmingly anti western and anti non believer-death to the kuffar stuff. One doesnt need to quote and counter quote selected verses, just read this statistical summary of the words themselves.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/28244/sec_id/28244

Until the religion has been cleaned up and brought into the 21st century people should be concerend about these Islamic Schools if only because what is likely to be taught, is not in our best interests.
Posted by bigmal, Saturday, 30 May 2009 4:59:51 PM
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Webby,

I agree that ethical standards are probably declining,particularly in modern citizens relationship and respect for the rule of law.This is one of the dysfunctions of multiculturalism where each cultural/relgious group maintains its own rules of conduct and weakens the liberal democratic state. However I certainly don't think that a return to Catholic theocracy is the solution, unless you're a devout believer.The reason that some people fear Islam is obviously because of the imperialism and oppression of non-Moslems by Moslems over the past 1400 years,it still continues in Islamic countries. What I tried to point out is that so-called "Anglo Christian tribalism" is a response to Islamic tribalism,it's a game we're all forced to play because of the pernicious doctrine of cultural relativism. On a personal note, many years ago I went on a tour of the Inquisition dungeons in Lima, nothing I have every read brought home the horrors and barbarity of theocracy as in that ghastly place where dissidents and heretics were murdered (and Jews of course,as usual, because they stubbornly refused to see the truth and the light).

Oliver,
I could add that the Romans realised the dangerous totalitarian threat Christians posed to the Roman state and to the intellectual tolerance of pagan society, they were right-no more theocracies Christian or Moslem.
Posted by mac, Saturday, 30 May 2009 6:29:00 PM
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I remember an incident that took place
when my two sons were growing up - and
there was a lot of negativity towards
Asians in the media at the time.
I decided to ask
one of my children whose best friend
at school was from China.

"Do you know that Benjamin is Chinese?"
I asked my son.

My son stared at me in silence for a few
minutes, then shrugged and said,

"Mum, he's Benjamin, my best friend!"

Out of the mouths of children...
Posted by Foxy, Saturday, 30 May 2009 7:00:46 PM
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Otokonoko,

O.M.G! How dumb am I? Thanks for pointing that out: I honestly was not aware that Bali differed!

However, Indonesia is 88% Muslim and thus the point I was trying to make still stands, I think.

The argument I was refuting was the oft-cited "You couldn't do it in their country" one, and so the very fact that Indonesia, which is predominately Muslim, tolerates and does not interfere with a Hindu Bali still stands in contravention of this.

Also in Malaysia, another predominantly Muslim country, the fact that Hindi and Buddhist temples are situated often only a few doors away from Islamic mosques further proves that things are not as black and white as is claimed.

This does not ignore the fact that there are more rigid countries with more repressive codes: - but all this goes to show in my view is that, as with Christianity or other forms of religion, one cannot make sweeping and blanket generalisations.

There are pockets of the USA or Europe where the brand of Christianity practiced is repressive, rigid and fanatically proselytizing but this doesn't represent the beliefs of every practicing Christian.

I have Muslim friends whose only connection with Islam is that they ticked that box when applying for the passports to make their parents happy - and just about the same number of friends who ticked Christian for the same reason.

I've friends from all denominations who never go to service or have any knowledge of their Holy books: Hindi, Muslim, Jewish and Christians alike. While others go to services but never bring anything away from these sessions that affects their daily lives.

Yet the idea persists that anyone identifying with the tag Muslim is going to be a wild-eyed fanatic with terror in their hearts and bombs cached under their floorboard.

And that's why the very idea of a mosque - where dozens of aforesaid wild-eyed fanatics will gather - continues to strike fear into many people. No matter how its rationalized, it really is only fear of the unknown which that motivates many such people.
Posted by Romany, Sunday, 31 May 2009 2:22:46 AM
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Romany,

I don’t know whether a ticked-box-Muslim can be seen as a character reference for Islam, since it would seem likely that much of what you find good and nice in such persons would have to do with their acceptance of secular norms.

“Also in Malaysia… Hindi and Buddhist temples are situated often only a few doors away from Islamic mosques…”
True, but there are also cases of --a few doors down, there are the ashes of a Hindi temple or Christian church that was fire bombed by Muslim Militants.

And if David Boaz aka Polycarp (PBUH) was still among us, he would tell us stories about the lack of tolerance – and often downright persecution shown non-Muslims in Malaysia,and the situation in Indonesia may be even worse, though neither of them are Muslim theocracies.
Posted by Horus, Sunday, 31 May 2009 9:48:59 AM
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After witnessing the number of deaths caused by secularist and the little value they put on human life I think most kinds of tribalism actually matches up well. Stalin, Mao and now the number of murdered unborn by secularist even makes the corrupt Catholic church (who killed millions of Christians) look not to bad in comparison.
Posted by runner, Sunday, 31 May 2009 10:30:11 AM
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Horus and runner

Both Malayasia and Indonesia are members of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC).

The OIC is the voting bock of the UN that has displayed its intentions and relationship with western values and freedom of speech etc by the way it has repeatedly voted in UN forums.We should be deeply concerned at the way these is playing out.

Of particular note is the way the block voted at the recent Durban 2 conference on Human Rights.They have been successful in getting it passed to outlaw all cricicisms of religions were there was only one mentioned--- Islam.

The Durban 1 &2 conferences are also notable for the way the western countries walked out because of the strident anti semitcism etc

This article is another attempt by the auther to wash over the real facts. Its not Anglo-western tribalisms that is the problem but the primtive 15th centrury practices of something that is not a religion at all, but an ideology, being driven by ignorance and heaps of Saudi oil money.

Australians have every reason to be wary of any Islamic school.

BTW Islam is the State religion of both Malaysia and Indonesia.

Malaysia has the equivalent of the Jizya tax on non believers written into their constitution --hence the preferences to bumis
Posted by bigmal, Sunday, 31 May 2009 12:00:43 PM
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A secularist society and government doesn't necessarily insulate Australia degenerating into what many fear – i.e. loss of a perceived freedom. It is perhaps a little ironic, the Zionist movement was started by European Jews who were mostly secular nationalists. Generally they were influenced by colonial ideas about Europeans' rights to claim and settle other parts of the world. As with many tribal cultures, the Jews similarly believed in a racial superiority but attributed the reason for their status as being ‘God's Chosen People’ – forgetting in the process the ‘reason’ for this ‘message’.

It is often cited, “Western notions of democracy and freedom are in opposition to orthodox Islam”. This is not say, doctrinally, Islam doesn't directly contradict any other religion – for in fact it does. However, doctrinal disagreement in religion is not the point of condemning the establishment of a mosque in a secular state. Taken superficially, Islam, as with medieval Christianity appears to take on a totalitarian utopian worldview – where ultimately freedom of religion does not exist (as within many current Muslim countries). It should be remembered, freedom of religion did not exist in a period of archaic Christian ‘Catholicity’, where domination was achieved through political control. Modern fundamentalists of any brand, in reality, have no real inkling of the separation of church and state – certainly an accusation made (sometimes correctly) against orthodox Islam.

The Catholic (meaning all embracing) Church has now become only one of many churches. A belief, however, continues in prevalence – the notion that "salvation" is obtained through placing yourself in submission not primarily to ‘God’ but to your church and the doctrines it teaches. Perhaps the dilemma of a basic ‘belief in God’ arises – a good secularist should, however, be entirely objective. Giving due consideration to a mosque built ‘next door’ needs to avoid the irrational - even if this passionate theism (Islam) is perceived a political threat to many or any. Western nations boycotting of Durban 1 and 2 is where our exercise of legitimate political strength poses a threat to the immorality and reality of anti-Semitism.
Posted by relda, Sunday, 31 May 2009 12:23:29 PM
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So you cant have Kebabs without mosques? Mate I can make a Kebab myself, and I sure didnt learn it in a mosque. And please, explain to me the technical difference between a Giro Souvlaki and a Donar Kebab? We have one of the largest Greek populations in the world in Austtralia, believe me we really dont need Mosques to get ourselves some nice food.

And why is it that when asked to supply a benefit of multiculturalism we always get food? Is there no other benefit? Or are we plebs simply too stupid to figure out the other ones?

And Muslims in Sydney have plenty of right to maintain their cultural folkways, what do you call the giant bloody mosque that towers over Lakemba? What does that have to do with colonising Camden?

If the islamic community in Australia has the right to its...

Quote
specific ethnic, cultural and religious identity

Then why doesnt ours? Why do we simply have to "accept" things? Or are we the children of a lesser god?
Posted by Aussiepride1983, Sunday, 31 May 2009 4:36:24 PM
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When immigrants voluntarily move into Australia and then demand that we accommodate them and simply allow them to change the country to better suit themselves, I feel nothing but a deep revulsion and a sense of personal insult - as if we have invited invaders, rather than immigrants, into our midst.

I'm not sure what imbues Nursel Guzeldeniz with such arrogance, but her message to "Anglo-Christian tribalists", otherwise known as Australians, is essentially this: "If you don't like the changes that we are imposing on the country, too bad! Australia is multicultural now!"

Guzeldeniz even has the temerity to assert that Australians must relinquish their "Anglo-European-Christian" identity so that immigrant minorities can retain theirs!

After reading this particular article, one can only conclude that "multiculturalism", far from being about benign colourful festivals and exotic foods, actually means handing your country over to alien peoples and cultures and allowing them to do with it as they wish.
Posted by Efranke, Sunday, 31 May 2009 4:53:48 PM
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Anyone researching what Islam portends in Australia should read the Witness Statement by Mark John Durie tendered in October 2003 in defence of the Catch the Fire Ministries against a complaint by the Islamic Council of Victoria about alleged defaming of Islam. The Witness Statement is on the net at
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/Witness%20Statement.pdf .

This gives detailed and expert answers to many questions about Islamic theology vis-a-vis non-believers, the nature and content of books sold by Islamic bookshops in Australia, and the views of prominent Islamic spokesmen such as Kaysar Trad on a range of matters.

To be fair, Turkish Muslims have not been the problem here. I do however find the growth of Arab cultural and religious imperialism deeply worrying. The mindset behind Abu Bakar Bashir (a Yemeni by origin), the spiritual leader of the Bali bombers, is making a bid to take over Islam altogether. Look at Pakistan, which is now trying to decide its future between the tolerant and inwardly spiritual Sufiism (historically the norm in the Punjab) and the fanatical, killjoy, misogynist, violent and obscurantist Taliban.

Even here in Brisbane you can go along to several mosques and get, free, a copy of the [King Fahd] Authorized Version of the Koran, full of "helpful" footnotes putting the extreme jihadist interpretations. Bankrolled by Saudi money, Islam is showing itself to be a vile, mediaeval, repressive and offensive religion. Wahhabi Islam is a boil on the bum of humanity, a perversion of mankind's search for spiritual values.

Mediaeval Christianity as a "total society" (term used by Paul Johnson in 'A History of Christianity') was forced to evolve out of repressiveness by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. Unfortunately Islam is currently moving in the opposite direction.

Thomas Mann said very correctly "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Westerners who bend over backward to be warm and fuzzy toward jihadist Islam need their heads read. Islam internationally needs to get its house in order and decide that it's prepared to SHARE the world, not just BE the world. Until that time ... NO MUSLIM SCHOOLS HERE.
Posted by Glorfindel, Sunday, 31 May 2009 6:59:45 PM
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"is scorned when it gives the minorities the right to maintain their specific ethnic, cultural and religious identity
...
And this leads to a tribal mindset based on Anglo-European-Christian identity in some suburbs where residents refuse to accommodate any difference"

"non-Anglo's" are permitted and actually have a "right" to maintain their identities, but whitey isn't.
Posted by Darrin Hodges, Sunday, 31 May 2009 7:23:00 PM
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Mac,
Multiculturalism is not what Australia is about. It is an ideology that is promoted and nothing more. It will only become a reality if immigration is increased and proprtions of immigrants from different cultures to our own are brought in. Multiculturalism is a fraud and is anti intellectual in nature, simialr to the silly idea called 'liberal democracy'. We in Australia have bi-cameral, multi-politrical party parliamentary democracy. The term 'liberal' is one of those things that those who believe in liberalism as a local political and/or worldview hold. Many people do not share this kind of politics. It should not be assumed.
Mac, you are wrong about your assumption to a "Catholic theocracy". I never called for one nor is anyone else. In fact no such kind of religious State exists nor has existed. Royalty eg Spain and other European nations had civil governments rightly influenced by the religion but it as not a rule as such by priests, hence no theocracy.
Devout believers do not believe in nor are taught to believe in theocracy. The Church's official Magisterium does not teach it and enver has. It teaches that legislation be derived from the ten commandments and other biblical injuctions not as the result of private interpretation but of interpreation rightly done by the Church's hierarchy in communion with the Pope.
Theocracies in 'reformation' times existed in Calvin's Geneva but that is another story as 'reformed' Christianity's doctrines have no valid lessons for Catholics except in the area of Catholic personal excesses and abuse with power ( as we all are prone to do regardless of if we be of any religion or of none).

In Peru it was not theocracy but civil govt influenced by harshness of the times and of course abuse. In any case there is no teaching in support of theocracy in the Catholic Faith at all.It is rather about the permeation of Christ's teachings to occur everywhere and not be privatised to home life but to exist as aderivative within our legal principles etc.
Posted by Webby, Sunday, 31 May 2009 7:27:25 PM
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>>Mediaeval Christianity ... was forced to evolve out of repressiveness by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. <<

"Reformation and Enlightenment" did not come from another planet (another civilisation or culture) to be forced upon Medieval Christianity, but arose from within the Judaeo-Christian heritage as a self-correction, as painful - and as desperately opposed by those holding the (cultural etc) reins of the "total society" - as it was.

I think similarly, instead of trying to "force" anything on the Medieval-like sections of the Muslim community, one should emphasize what their basic tenets have in common with Christian world-views, and encourage them to go the same way of "Reformation and Enlightenment" arising from their own heritage.

Unfortunately, the Muslims are right to point our that this way led too many in the West to the loss of their religious identity, of their links to even those (“metaphysical)” aspects of Christianity, Medieval or not, that are compatible, even might enhance, the contribution of "Reformation and Enlightenment".

I think we Westerners - Christians or post-Christians - should try to argue that in their case this does not have to be necessarily so (for various historical reasons), and even if, that the loss in quantity (number of traditional believers) might be outweighed by gains in quality (Islam-based world-views able to rationally coexist with, and be respected by Christianity and science- (and other) based world views).

I think this was also the message of the Pope’s Regensburg lecture, ill-famed through the clumsy Medieval quote obscuring this message.
Posted by George, Sunday, 31 May 2009 7:59:35 PM
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<<Aren’t Islam and Christianity sister religions that originate from the Middle East...>>
Hey, you forgot the Jews. Was that a Freudian slip?
* Take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends (Sura 5:51, 60:13).
Just another sisterly quote from the Koran.

<< or are they rival religions a bit like Coles and Woolworths?>>
* Strike off the heads of infidels in battle (Sura 47:4).
When was the last time you heard of Coles terrorists abducting Woolworths employees and beheading them on the internet?

* Infidels are your sworn enemies (Sura 4:101).
* Be ruthless to the infidels (Sura 48:29).
* Make war on the infidels who dwell around you (Sura 9:123, 66:9).
* Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day (Sura 9:29).
* If someone stops believing in Allah, kill him (al-Bukhari 9:84:57).
* Never be a helper to the disbelievers (Sura 28:86).
* Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them (Sura 2:191).
* No Muslim should be killed for killing an infidel (al-Bukhari 1:3:111).
* The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land (Sura 5:33).

One could go on but there isn't room for the entire Koran here.

Why is it that Buddhists, Hindus and Jews have no trouble fitting into Australia (or insert any other country here) but the followers of Mohammed do?
Must be those racist Australians (or insert any other nationality here).

The fact is that Islam is a supremacist ideology that admits no other belief system.

People rightly fear the encroaching Islamization of Australia but it isn't Islamophobia because a phobia is irrational and fear of Islam is totally rational based on the 1400 year history of Islamic bloodletting which continues to this day and knows no national boundaries, just as Islam acknowledges no national boundaries.
There is only Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
The house of Islam and the house of war.
Posted by KMB, Sunday, 31 May 2009 9:05:50 PM
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Two reasons why Anglo Christians oppose Islam and diversity:

1 - Anyone still claiming that Islam is a religion of peace needs Dr Andrew Bostom's book dropped in their lap. Review by Alyssa A. Lappen:

"The leaders of the free world have taken pains since late 2001 to explain that Islam is a religion of peace. But in this far-ranging, 759-page collection of Muslim and non-Muslim eyewitness accounts, scholarly Muslim theological treatises and superb historical surveys, it appears that Islam has actually practiced a grisly jihad campaign against non-Muslims from its earliest days, in the hope of satisfying the Prophet Mohammed's end goal: forcing the “one true faith” upon the entire world...

After viewing these accounts, histories and art works, it is hard to continue to believe that radical Islamists are in fact all that radical. Rather, in the most logical way, this collection shows that September 11 was not an aberration, but that Islam at its core seems a faith bent upon the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims...

Beginning in the time of Mohammed himself, Bostom refers readers to the early 20th century work of the late Columbia University professor Arthur Jeffrey, who belittled as “the sheerest sophistry” attempts in some modern circles “to explain away all the Prophet's warlike expeditions as defensive wars or to interpret the doctrine of Jihad as merely a bloodless striving in missionary zeal for the spread of Islam.... The early Arabic sources quite plainly and frankly describe the expeditions as military expeditions, and it would never have occurred to anyone at that day to interpret them as anything else....”."

http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7334

2 - Ethnocentrism is a universal fact of life, not particular only to Anglo Christians.

Lawrence Auster: "By taking away our historic society based on a common culture, ethnicity and race, a place which is ours and where we feel at home, by imposing these unassimilable foreigners on us, you are not enhancing our humanity, you are robbing us of the most basic human values."

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004784.html [continued...]
Posted by online_east, Sunday, 31 May 2009 9:57:59 PM
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Professor Robert Putnam: "In the presence of diversity," said Putnam, "we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities we don't trust people who look like us". The more people of different races that live in a community, the greater the loss of trust, said Putnam. "They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people, and they don't trust institutions. ... The only thing there is more of is protest marches and TV watching".

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52531

Jared Taylor: "Even the giddiest white liberals normally live, socialize, and marry among themselves."

http://www.amren.com/ar/1996/10/index.html

Dr Philippe Rushton: "Similarity, whether actual or perceived, is one of the most important factors in human relationships. It is more surprising to find just how fine-tuned the recognition process can be. The studies reviewed above show that the preference for similarity occurs within ethnic groups and within families..."

"Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies are beginning to demonstrate the neural correlates associated with viewing kin and facial self-resemblance... The results suggest that the detection of resemblance is occurring below the level of conscious awareness..."

http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_pubs.htm

"Researchers have found some people automatically produce stress hormones when they see someone of a different race."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97313840

Racial Tension In A 'Split Second'

Can brief hesitations in conversation (often associated with anxiety) actually cause interracial tension? ... a mere one second delay in conversation was sufficient to raise anxiety inintergroup but not intragroup interactions"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217124146.htm

My question to non-Anglos like Nursel is what lies at the heart of your "inability and unwillingness to accept ... and come to terms with" the above facts? Why can't you accept that "some Australians" believe Islam is not peaceful and that preserving our historic society is the most basic human value?
Posted by online_east, Sunday, 31 May 2009 10:06:47 PM
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Ladies and gentlemen,
It is normally about this time in proceedings that CJ Morgan says his little piece.He has unfortunately, been delayed this evening, having other pressing matters to attend to.But he has asked me to do the honours for him, in his absence. So I will give it a go.

“Racists!” “Wingnuts!” “Xenophobes!”
“Youse are all a pack of trolls…”

CJ will expand of each of these when he does arrive.

On behalf of CJ Morgan
Than you all
Posted by Horus, Monday, 1 June 2009 6:23:32 AM
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Frankly, I wouldn't ask you to wipe my arse for me, Horus.

However, thanks so much for pointing out that some of the more vituperous comments in this thread have come from those who could well be described by the terms you've used above. I would never use the word "youse" though - that's more typical of uneducated twats like you.

Thanks also to Nursel Guzeldeniz, who has obviously pointed out a few home truths, given the reactions of the 'White Australia' Neanderthals.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Monday, 1 June 2009 6:54:54 AM
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If one ever needed evidence as to the extent of academia being involved in the advancement of radical islam, here is a disturbing current synopsis of the situation in America,with a plethora of links.

Is Australian academia, to which the author belongs, any different I wonder?

http://www.meforum.org/2141/islamic-speakers-bureau-backed-by-radical-profs
Posted by bigmal, Monday, 1 June 2009 8:13:27 AM
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CJ Morgan and Horus typically have no facts to refute arguments but rely on ad hominem attacks.
So what's new?
Posted by KMB, Monday, 1 June 2009 8:21:58 AM
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When you think how few Muslims there are in Australia, the reactions here are quite remarkable for the level of fear they display.

On one side, 98 Australians

On the other, 2 Muslims.

Oh, oh, say the Australians, save us from those marauding Muslims, our very lives are in danger.

Pussies.
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 1 June 2009 8:44:42 AM
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Its heartening to see CJMorgan's passion for grammatical correctness, even if his foreswearing of the use of 'youse' could be taken by PC zealots as being a swipe at second-generation Australians of Maltese origin. His passion pricked my conscience as to an error in expression in my own post of Saturday, 30 May 2009 at 2:00:44 PM. It's last line read:

"Has envious non-Anglo-Christian organised religion been the real imposer of multiculturalism?."

It should have read:

"Has envious non-Anglo Christian organised religion been the real imposer of multiculturalism?"

Unlike Holy Writ, a jot and a tittle, so to speak, has had to disappear from my post for it to read unambiguously. Nobody can say I am being punctilious on the basis of this correction, but nuanced, maybe.

Glorfindel's post of Friday, 29 May 2009 at 12:09:26 PM in this thread, gave this link to Cardinal Pell's paper 'Islam and Western Democracies': http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/Archbishop/Addresses/200627_681.shtml

It seems that since it was copied, this link has ceased to work as a direct link to that paper. On clicking it you now get this message:

"Page not found. You will be automatically redirected to the home page; or click here to go to home page."

The paper can be found, however, by clicking on the home page tab 'Our Archbishop, Cardinal George Pell' at top left of the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese home page, then 'addresses and statements' on the right, then the '2006' tab on the page to which you are delivered. The paper 'Islam and Western Democracies' is a clickable text link at the bottom of that list.

When you finally get to the paper, if you copy the URL from the address bar of your browser into your word processor or text editor, you get this link: http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/people/archbishop/addresses/2006/200627_681.shtml , which, as can be seen, is slightly different to the one available to, or used by, Glorfindel when he/she posted.
Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Monday, 1 June 2009 9:04:11 AM
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Webby,
I support multiculturalism only up to a point and that is, when the values of certain cultures/religions conflict with liberal democracy,the values of democratic society prevail,and are enforced by the use of sanctions if necessary. All democracies are "multiculural" by default,so there is no need for a "multicultural policy".I'm sure you know more about Church history than I do,however that's not relevant, the problem is the effect one dominant religion has on society,it's the ideal totalitarian instrument, as in Islamic societies.

A general comment-
Earlier generations were faced with a very similar problem, the threat of Communism, the difficulty was how to tolerate an ideology hostile to liberal democratic principles and respect the human rights of its deluded believers,sound familar? The author of this article is a promoter of tribalism and surely cannot criticise others for taking a similar attitude. Of course some opposition to mosque construction is motivated by prejudice,however the attempt by Moslems to equate opposition to Islamisation as "racist" is simply a propaganda ploy, there are unfortunately plenty of "useful idiots" who are duped by this technique.
Posted by mac, Monday, 1 June 2009 9:31:13 AM
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I can't recall any incident that gave me a reason to be afraid of Australian Muslims. But gee, after reading the posts here I can imagine the Muslims watching their back whenever a non-Muslim walks by. I hope you guys restrict your activities to spouting off on on-line forums under pseudonyms.

Your principle argument for denouncing Muslims is to point out they have behaved badly in some countries. You ignore the inconvenient fact that in other countries they make great neighbours, and thus to convince yourselves they are the devil incarnate.

Well, who cares how Muslims behave in other countries - good or bad. How about commenting on how the Australian Muslims behave. That is all that matters, isn't it? We are after all talking about our fellow Australian's here. We all know that the Christians in Rwanda (95% Christian) went on a murderous genocidal rampage, but I didn't see anybody suggesting Australian Christians were about to do the same thing, or winging about new Catholic schools because of it.

Surely is guiding principle here is we are all Australians. We conduct ourselves like Australians - which is to say we are a tolerant and free society, who judge people on their merits on their behaviour here, not on how some distant relative in another country behaves. If the world started judging Australia on how you lot behave here, we would be in real trouble.
Posted by rstuart, Monday, 1 June 2009 10:14:40 AM
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rstuart,

"Surely is guiding principle here is we are all Australians. We conduct ourselves like Australians - which is to say we are a tolerant and free society, who judge people on their merits on their behaviour here, not on how some distant relative in another country behaves."

Well said! The religions exist "within" Australia society and not "over" Australian core values.
Posted by Oliver, Monday, 1 June 2009 11:55:16 AM
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rstuart, your post is blindingly naive and simplistic. I know of many Arab Christians, who will tell you about the stuff that goes on in their countries.

Is it relevant, OF COURSE! Why wouldn't it be? Muslims are Muslims first and Australians second, after all. That's true of a Muslim in Lebanon and it's true of Muslims in Australia.

I have no issue with that, per se, because as a Christian my values and worldview are informed primarily by being a follower of Jesus and secondly by my culture and upbringing in the democratic and free Australian way. So of course it'd be unfair for me to criticise Muslims for being the same with respect to their worldview and values.

What I do have an issue with, is if these Muslim values cause violence and intolerance towards others.

So, lets shift the focus off "Australian" Muslims vs "International" Muslims. That's a massive red herring. Muslims are muslims, and for any committed Muslim, their values will be primarily islamic, not Lebanese, or Australian, or American, or Egyptian....
Posted by Trav, Monday, 1 June 2009 12:05:09 PM
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Every society can be accused of racism, religious intolerance and parochialism to some extent.

1 I suppose, however, before Muslims start criticising the "tolerance" of the Christians in Australia to Muslim minorities, they might consider the tolerance displayed by Muslims to Christian minorities in countries in asia and the middle east.

People who live in Glass Mosques should not throw stones.

2 Maybe Muslim immigrants should be prepared to compromise their expectations to accomodate within a society based not on Muslim Values.
Posted by Col Rouge, Monday, 1 June 2009 12:24:06 PM
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I think it is stupid the way people protest against new churches, mosques, schools and initiatives of other similar community-building organisations, and then wonder why the youth and others of their area end up resorting to drugs and all kinds of wild activity.
Posted by john kosci, Monday, 1 June 2009 1:07:42 PM
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Or, Col, how about this for a wild, wacky idea.

There is a natural tendency for human beings to migrate away from harsh and restrictive regimes, and towards (relatively) free and open ones.

>>before Muslims start criticising the "tolerance" of the Christians in Australia to Muslim minorities, they might consider the tolerance displayed by Muslims to Christian minorities in countries in asia and the middle east.<<

I understand that this might be a bit "out there" as a theory, but hey, it might also shed a little light on why we see so few migrants headed the other way.

Of course, we could solve the problem ourselves, by turning our tolerance into bigotry, and become just like them.

Then they wouldn't bother to come at all.

That would be nice, wouldn't it?
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 1 June 2009 1:10:37 PM
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John, two wrongs don't make a right. Brainwashing children with daft Bronze Age mythology is not going to improve societies in the long
run.

And Nusel's essay is little more than an attempt to blur the debate by dragging up the usual accusations of racism and phobia.

Rather, opposition to Mosques and other pieces of religious infrastucture should be seen as a POSITIVE. Finally, in the 21st century, the people are choosing science, reason, and humanism over anti-human clerical dogma.

We secularists have had more than a gut full of religious stupidity, hypocrisy and violent tribalism.
Posted by TR, Monday, 1 June 2009 1:40:41 PM
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"opposition to Mosques and other pieces of religious infrastucture should be seen as a POSITIVE"

TR, if that's your logic then I assume you also oppose religious organisations? Organisations being, of course, human infrastructure?

I refer you to a quote from John Dickson:

"we should always be suspicious of an argument that cannot concede anything to the other side. It is naïve or dogmatic not to admit the great good done in Christ’s name throughout history (need I list them?!). Even today most non-Government welfare in this country is delivered through faith-based agencies. Create a list of all the organizations you know and do the maths. And, according to government figures, a disproportionate amount of philanthropic giving and volunteering is offered by those who regularly attend church."

I sometimes consider it unfortunate that society has to be shared with militant secularist fundamentalists such as yourself, TR.

You always need to consider both sides of the coin. Which is, unfortunatly, something militant fundamentalists are incapable of doing.
Posted by Trav, Monday, 1 June 2009 2:00:39 PM
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rstuart,

You say-"I can't recall any incident that gave me a reason to be afraid of Australian Muslims",I think that statement expresses what philosophers call a solopsistic view of knowledge. Presumably you wouldn't deny that WW1 happened just because you didn't experience it. As Trav said Islam, is not just another religion,its inventor was violent and aggressive,those atttitudes are core values of the belief and significantly,"there is no render unto Caesar" in Islamic ideology.If you're ignorant of Moslem imperialism I sugggest you visit the huge number of sites on the subject or read some history. You could indeed be correct that there is something unique about the "Australian" brand of Islam, however, where's your evidence? Indeed what are the odds?
Posted by mac, Monday, 1 June 2009 3:40:00 PM
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There is a reluctance to admit that multiculturalism is not a great
success. We are reluctant to increase the problems with a markedly
incompatible group. It has to be said and there I have said it.

It has not been an unsullied success with those that came before.
With the Moslems and their "separateness" it becomes just too much.

Why should we bother ?
Posted by Bazz, Monday, 1 June 2009 3:46:14 PM
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mac: "I think that statement expresses what philosophers call a solopsistic view of knowledge. Presumably you wouldn't deny that WW1 happened just because you didn't experience it."

It may be solipsistic to deny WW1, since as you say I wasn't there. But I do live in Australian now and I don't see numerous headlines touting Muslim generated unrest in Australia in the news. I have seen the (very occasional) news of Italians, Lebanese, Croatian, Australian (bikies), Hillsong Christian churches, and heaven knows what else causing trouble. But I can't think of a single Muslim news headline, let alone the 10's or 100's of them that would be required to justify the paranoia shown here. I am sure you can find one or two, but then I do also vaguely recall Dalai Lamar supporters being arrested so you will need more than that.

mac: "where's your evidence?"

I need some? You are the one declaring them guilty here. Last I checked they have a right to the presumption on innocence. It is the Australian way, you know.

Trav: "I know of many Arab Christians, who will tell you about the stuff that goes on in their countries."

Let me tell you about the stuff Christians do. Perhaps we will all regress so the 18th century like the Amish? How about those ultra orthodox Jews fighting it out with moderate Christians. http://www.rabble.ca/babble/activism/chrisitans-rios Or how about a good old massacre, 20 to 30 Christian gunmen barged into a Hindu school and began shooting last September. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/16/india.riots/index.html

Well, you say, that's different. And my retort is course it's different, it isn't in Australia. That is my point, as neither are these Muslim sects you keep banging on about. Muslim's and their mosques have been here since 1870, so that have had plenty of opportunity to make a public nuisance of themselves. http://www.islamfortoday.com/australia.htm If they are as bad as you say, there must be record of if somewhere. All I ask is you provide some links to it.
Posted by rstuart, Monday, 1 June 2009 4:58:54 PM
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GEORGE: I agree that reform of Christianity (Reformation and Enlightenment) came from within, and that "this way led too many in the West to the loss of their religious identity … (and) even those (metaphysical) aspects of Christianity..."

John Carroll's book excellent book 'The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism revisited" (Scribe, 2004) says

*Humanism on its own is not a culture, and the attempts to make of it more than it was, opened the way for demonic forces that only real cultures can check. (p143)

*In the nineteenth century, chaos manifested in … nihilism. The last places to stand, the rocks of Christian salvation and aristocratic honour, had splintered, leaving nothing under the feet. … The new reality was Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ and [the view expressed by several characters in novels by Dostoyevsky that] ‘everything is permitted’. (p159)

I agree wholeheartedly with Carroll's conclusion (p267-8) that
*We need to recover our capacity for spontaneous and unselfconscious revulsion, we need to recognize just how fed up we are with this heritage – fed up in a way that frees us to move on. … It is time to bury the dead, and to start the difficult business of restoring our capacity for life. In the beginning, at the foundation, where all truth roads meet, was the WORD.

Muslims CORRECTLY point out bad consequences of licence in Western culture. Ed Husain ('The Islamist - Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left - Penguin 2007) writes

*When Faye and I return home from a night out and walk past heaps of rowdy, drunken teenagers vomiting on the streets we despair as much as anyone else. Anti-social behaviour in our cities, high rates of abortion, alcohol abuse, and drug addiction are abhorrent to all right-thinking people, not just Muslims. The neglect of the elderly, shunting them off to ‘care homes’, does not sit comfortably with most Muslims. When the centre of social life in modern Britain is the local pub, where do Muslims and others fit in? Can an orange juice ever be enough?
Posted by Glorfindel, Monday, 1 June 2009 6:45:23 PM
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Rstuart,
“ these Muslim sects you keep banging on about. Muslim's and their mosques have been here since 1870, so that have had plenty of opportunity to make a public nuisance of themselves”
It aint necessarily so.
I think you’d have to agree that there’s been a few changes since 1870.
1) It was very much the case in the past, in Aust, that if you didn’t assimilate you were left behind. Now with our more “enlightened” policies people are encouraged not to assimilate. And if a group gets left behind or doesn't get all it aspires to – almost,weekly studies – will preach that it’s the fault of the dominant culture – a case of discrimination , maybe grounds for compensation and, certainly grounds to write a blog or article on OLO blaming Anglo-Christian tribalism.
2) With modern travel and media it is much, much easier for people to maintain links with their old countries and sustain old antagonism . I don’t recall reading anywhere about our resident Muslims in the 1800s threatening civil unrest because they didn’t like British Imperial polices re the Middle East or North Africa. Nor was wearing a veil so important until recent years.

CJ Morgan
Re “ Frankly , I wouldn't ask you to wipe my a### for me, Horus.”
And rightly so too, you haven’t needed anyones help since you bought that do-it-yourself kit three weeks ago
Posted by Horus, Monday, 1 June 2009 10:08:07 PM
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Regarding the protest of the proposed Muslim school in Camden. I was told by someone (a Christian) heavily involved in interfaith dialogue, that one very relevant reason for the obstruction was that this planned Muslim school would not allow any non-Muslims to join their school. The government rule for all independant schools in Australia is that anyone of any religion/denomination be permitted regardless of the religion of the school. Funny how this highly relevant point of issue has never been raised in any of the media.

Another thing he said was that any non-Muslim can never have any meaningful dialogue with any Muslim as they do not allow any criticism whatsoever, but they on the one hand can criticise other religions and other cultures - which occurs in their meetings. A bit of a poor state in interfaith dialogue don't you think?
Posted by Constance, Monday, 1 June 2009 11:35:40 PM
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One of the reasons that I'm less inclined to engage in these tiresome OLO Islamophobia/racism/xenophobia debates these days is that they're so repetitive. I only do so minimally because OLO remains a forum that lies somewhere between the Blair/Bolt et al wingnut end of the Oz blogosphere and the Larvatus/Blogocrats et al luvvie end.

Those who hearken back to the days of yore when the dominant social history of the Australian continent was Anglo and Christian are doomed and deluded - those days are gone, and will prove to be a blip in the history of human occupation of this continent, which extended for 50 or so thousand years in various degrees of ecological equilibrium prior to the gifts of European colonisation, industrial agriculture and capitalism.

Any prospect that Australia has for a socially, environmentally and economically sustainable future lies in our capacity to not only imagine collectively that ideal, but also to be able to organise together to achieve complex and difficult objectives.

Once again, I'm not very optimistic.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Monday, 1 June 2009 11:39:35 PM
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Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on religious intolerance against non-believers -

Kill those who are not Christian or Jewish:

You must kill those who worship another god. Exodus 22:20
Kill any friends or family that worship a god that is different than your own. Deuteronomy 13:6-10
Kill all the inhabitants of any city where you find people that worship differently than you. Deuteronomy 13:12-16
Kill everyone who has religious views that are different than your own. Deuteronomy 17:2-7
Kill anyone who refuses to listen to a priest. Deuteronomy 17:12-13
Kill any false prophets. Deuteronomy 18:20
Any city that doesn’t receive the followers of Jesus will be destroyed in a manner even more savage than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. Mark 6:11
Jude reminds us that God destroys those who don’t believe in him. Jude 5

Ignorance is bliss. Christians should not practice free inquiry nor socialize with non Christians:

Don’t associate with non-Christians. Don’t receive them into your house or even exchange greeting with them. 2 John 1:10
Shun those who disagree with your religious views. Romans 16:17
Paul, knowing that their faith would crumble if subjected to free and critical inquiry, tells his followers to avoid philosophy. Colossians 2:8

Judge other religions for not following Christ:

Whoever denies “that Jesus is the Christ” is a liar and an anti-Christ. 1 John 2:22
Christians are “of God;” everyone else is wicked. 1 John 5:19
The non-Christian is “a deceiver and an anti-Christ” 2 John 1:7
Anyone who doesn’t share Paul’s beliefs has “an evil heart.” Hebrews 3:12
False Jews are members of “the synagogue of Satan.” Revelations 2:9, 3:9

Everyone will have to worship Jesus -- whether they want to or not. Philippians 2:10
A Christian can not be accused of any wrongdoing. Romans 8:33

Several attempts at mass genocide (Europe and Rwanda plus the entire history of colonialism ) were at the hands of Christians.

All regions have their share of extremists as well as violent histories.

Religion itself isn't the problem.

Religious intolerance is.
Posted by wobbles, Monday, 1 June 2009 11:58:23 PM
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CJ Morgan wrote: "Those who hearken back to the days of yore when the dominant social history of the Australian continent was Anglo and Christian are doomed and deluded - those days are gone, and will prove to be a blip in the history of human occupation of this continent.."

Contrary to your delusions, Australia still remains a predominately British country, demographically and culturally.

As for the future makeup of the country, it should ultimately be up to the Australian people, and the Australian people alone, to decide what kind of society we wish to become. Just as a family has the right to determine who may live in its home, so too a sovereign country has the right to determine its own ethnic and cultural composition and the kind and number of people it invites to settle within its borders.

Our future is not set in stone by any means. Those who claim otherwise are effectively denying Australians the right to define and shape their own society.
Posted by Efranke, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 1:26:28 AM
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TR, I think your religion of science, reason, and humanism is one of the most stupid ever invented - some great technical advances, but at what cost to humanity and the earth! I am a Christian but if I had to choose another religion, yours would be at the bottom of the list.

But I am very happy for you to set up a regular meeting place in my street and would not dream of protesting against it.
Posted by john kosci, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 8:36:57 AM
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Efranke: << Australia still remains a predominately British country, demographically and culturally >>

You meant 'predominantly', didn't you? It's fascinating how many Anglophiles can't speak English correctly.

While a majority of Australians may be of 'British' descent, that demographic feature has been declining since World War 2. Also, while many of our cultural institutions are derived from our sorry colonial past, their 'British' origins have become concomitantly less relevant as we move inexorably towards independence. This obviously doesn't suit that minority of Australians who want to live in the past, but that's their problem.

I'm a born and bred Australian of 'British' descent, but I certainly don't identify with Britain, any more than I do with any other foreign country. Also, like many others, I'm not even nominally Christian.

Please don't presume to speak for me and the vast majority of tolerant, secular Aussies as you spout your ideologies of divisiveness and hatred. I think that anyone who wants to be 'British' should migrate to Britain, rather than try to turn back the clock in Australia.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 9:40:00 AM
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rstuart,

The right to presumption of innocence is a legal convention,I prefer to rely on the record of Moslems in those countries where they are a majority or a significant minority,such as in some European countries.Islam is a totalitarian ideology,to treat it as just another religion is to make a great mistake. Basically your attitude is "so far so good", I hope you're right.
Posted by mac, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 10:28:58 AM
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Firstly, I think we need a little historical perspective. An old Jewish myth about an "interfaith utopia" in the Middle Ages never existed – therefore, neither do the grounds exist for blame to be cast on the Jews and Zionism for destroying a ‘traditional harmony’ between the two peoples – rather, they co-existed. Jews were second class citizens, at best during this period. They were classed along with other religious minorities as unbelievers who did not recognize the prophet hood of Muhammad and the truth of the Koran. But this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to Christians, for unbelief in Christianity meant the rejection of Jesus as Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewish unbelief was to Islam because it challenged the theological basis of the whole religion. For Christian Fundamentalists today, this same affront similarly exists – albeit its degree is often hidden.

Secondly, there are two religions, Judaism and Islam, both based on a ‘singular’ mono-theism (i.e. without pluarity) and both having the same fundamental religious outlook, structure, jurisprudence and practice. An interesting inconsistency, hypocritical in proportion, occurs when one of these faiths is revered well above that of the other. For some strange reason (and I know it well) there are some who appear to hold ‘God’s Chosen ones’ in an ‘holy’ esteem, well beyond that of the other. Secularists aptly call it prejudicial - I’ll go one further and identify it as a bad and ignorant theology
Posted by relda, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 10:59:20 AM
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Efranke “Contrary to your delusions, Australia still remains a predominately British country, demographically and culturally.”

I agree, but delusions consistently overshadow that particular poster

And when we consider Australia has been politically and socially stable, largely free of civil uprisings (Eureka stockade being hardly worth a mention) or civil wars for the 200+ years of its existence, it might be worth thanking those British values which were bequeathed to us.

The government, legal and other civil and military institutions, including commercial and social practices and laws, upon which the fabric of Australian culture and values is founded did not just “happen” they were designed and implanted through colonization, most particularly by the migration of millions of British settlers over the centuries.

When I look at many other countries, particularly say, South America, colonized and settled by the Spanish and Portuguese and consider their history of civil war, attrition, genocide, corruption and these days kidnapping, drug trafficking and institutionalized murder I have to wonder…

would the South American continent have been better served with the same British colonial services which Australia and Canada and in a different way, USA, benefit from and which, stupidly, many African nations abandoned (to their detriment).
Posted by Col Rouge, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 11:04:09 AM
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relda,
>> this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to Christians ... For Christian Fundamentalists today, this same affront similarly exists – albeit its degree is often hidden. <<

An interesting angle of seeing things. However, where would you place Christian Zionists, since they are often seen as "part of the fundamentalist wing of Protestant Christianity". (see e.g. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4930.htm) ? Perhaps you meant "for SOME Christian Fundamentalists".

The essence of Christian Fundamentalism lies in a literal reading of the bible and this is exactly how Christian Zionists explain and justify their position and actions (Christ's "second coming").
Posted by George, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 4:24:08 PM
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Glorfindel,
Thank you for the info about John Carroll's recent book. As far as I can remember, his 1977 book (Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture) gave an analysis of the state of Western culture that had many valid (and original) points, however was too negative, too gloomy. I suspect the new book you mention - in addition to your quotes I had just a glimpse of one review - is equally pessimistic, although with the same qualities of sharp insights. I am not sure about his relation to Christianity - it is certainly not negative - however, he seems to be missing one of its main ingredients - hope, optimism, that is applicable, and should be applied, not only to the "hereafter".

We seem to be living in times that in some way resemble those of St Augustine: Although himself part of the declining Roman civilisation, he did not lament over its demise with the civilised pagans, nor did he rejoyce over its downfall with the new barbarians. His faith turned lament and nostalgia into respect for tradition, and fear of the new, unknown, into hope for a better world, as painful as the transitional period might turn out to be.
Posted by George, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 5:13:21 PM
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Thanks for the link George, I meant all Christians who bear the ESSENCE, as you say, of a Fundamentalism supporting a literal reading and understanding of the bible. From your link we find that “the Christian Zionist views find significant support among the charismatic, Pentecostal and independent Bible churches in Protestant fundamentalism”. These fundamentalists often tend to assert, "no creed but the Bible” - but this statement itself is a creed, for It says in effect, "I believe (credo) in no creed." This theoretical position is not amenable to practice. Even the notoriously anti-creedal Churches of the Christ denomination require some sort of implied statement of belief from persons seeking positions of authority in its fellowship. Finding a common denominator for Christianity can be a little nuanced as many shades of belief appear to exist - judging purely by historical standards, however, the Nicene Creed (as well as some of the lesser creeds) becomes a ‘reasonable’ place at least to define the faith.

It would seem many are becoming more polarised and trapped within their beliefs through, ironically, searching their bibles outside of any form of ‘orthodoxy’ and relying solely on their own biblical and private ‘revelation’. “Christian Zionists often view mainline Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations with hostility and have at times considered the World Council of Churches and related bodies to be tools of the Antichrist.” Interestingly, they almost mirror a kind of Muslim fanaticism - one they also intensely denounce; any real difference between them, however, often becomes more a question of degree.
Posted by relda, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 5:46:08 PM
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'TR, if that's your logic then I assume you also oppose religious organisations? Organisations being, of course, human infrastructure?'

Trav, if the 'Flat Earth Society' wanted to build a school for 1000 children to teach them the beauty of Earth's flatness then I see no ethical problem in opposing it as a concerned citizen. After all, children do not deserve to be mislead with nonsense.

However, if I oppose the 'Flat Earth Society' school and then lose then I'm not going to fall into a pit of depression. I have done my bit to promote science and learning and that is good enough.

Islamic and Christian schools are no different to 'Flat Earth Society' schools. Their basic teaching is just as daft.

'TR, I think your religion of science, reason, and humanism is one of the most stupid ever invented - some great technical advances, but at what cost to humanity and the earth! I am a Christian but if I had to choose another religion, yours would be at the bottom of the list.'

John, you are entitled to your opinion. You just so happen to be wrong in an objective sense. But so what.
Posted by TR, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 6:34:36 PM
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Relda: I agree with your comments about Christian fundamentalism. Spong's "Rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism" raises many issues that fundamentalists and Christians generally should think about. Blind faith incompatible with reason is a dead end. Narrow literalism is unsustainable.

Christianity differs profoundly from Judaism and Islam: while they are mainly about observances, Christianity is hugely concerned with doctrine - for nearly 2000 years. Judaism has evolved into a much more relativist faith: few Jews now read Leviticus as literally relevant to today's world.

Christianity has spawned many denominations and fringe groups, but broadly it considers FOUR key sources of Christian belief: scripture, church tradition, reason (critical study and judgment), and personal experience. Those reflect its passage through the early church councils, the "total society" of church and state, the Great Schism (Orthodox vs Catholic) of 1054, Western mediaeval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation (several strands), the Enlightenment, and continued engagement of Christianity with philosophical and political thought and science.

Against this, Islam has been poverty stricken. It split into two main branches (Sunni and Shia) not over doctrine but over the blood right to rule. It closed the gates of ijtihad (independent critical thought) about 800 years ago and has persecuted its own contemplative (Sufi) strand. It has had no resurgence of learning either in theology or science. It has no "quality control" over teaching, as it lacks a theological hierarchy (Pope, patriarch, bishops etc) and seminary system and its "priesthood of all believers" means it cannot stop any half-baked, self-educated rabblerouser from setting himself up as an imam and preaching to any congregation that will have him. (Thus, individuals like Benbrika in Melbourne.)

The Al-Azhar University in Cairo is supposedly the pinnacle of Islamic scholarship. A mouse against the intellectual giants among Western universities!

While Christianity (apart from the worrying Pentecostal strand of the past hundred years) has evolved into greater tolerance and awareness of complexity, Islam, since Wahhabiism, has careered into an abyss. Beam me up Scotty ... there's no intelligent life here.
Posted by Glorfindel, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 6:40:37 PM
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TR, do yourself a favour and stop making yourself look like an idiot. I'm almost embarrassed on behalf of you for the silly statements you keep making. I realise you must have serious emotional issues with religion, as that's the only thing which could start to explain your offensive and ignorant remarks, but try to clear through the fog in your head and get towards some rain or clear skies before you post next time.

[Islamic and Christian schools are no different to 'Flat Earth Society' schools. Their basic teaching is just as daft.]

Um, no. The "basic teaching" of religious schools is, in most cases, almost exactly the same, or extremely similar to the basic teaching of state schools. Ie: The school curriculum. You know, english, humanities, maths, science and the like
Posted by Trav, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 7:08:09 PM
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['TR, I think your religion of science, reason, and humanism is one of the most stupid ever invented - some great technical advances, but at what cost to humanity and the earth! I am a Christian but if I had to choose another religion, yours would be at the bottom of the list.'

John, you are entitled to your opinion. You just so happen to be wrong in an objective sense. But so what.]

Gotta love this. Gotta love OLO. Why can't people think rationally for a change and, at the very least, make an effort to understand each other rather than just taking pot shots?

And, if we do take pot shots, can we AT LEAST TRY TO MAKE EM FUNNY!?!?

I can just imagine the following conversation taking place in the playground at a primary school. John, and TR, and their mates, crowding around the monkey bars at recess...

"Your beliefs are some of the stupidest ever invented!"

"Yeah, well you're wrong. Not just wrong but...objectively wrong. So there! I used a longer word than you did. Top that!"

Dear me, I'm shaking my head here...
Posted by Trav, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 7:43:43 PM
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Trav,

You are being a bit mean-worded towards TR. This is a Forum for discussion.

Besides:

Old Testiment:

"The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the ends of the Earth." Daniel 4:11(KJV)

New Testiment:

"..the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." Matthew 4:8 (KJV)

- Think about it.

Cheers,

Oly.
Posted by Oliver, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 8:09:13 PM
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CJ Morgan wrote: "You meant 'predominantly', didn't you? It's fascinating how many Anglophiles can't speak English correctly."

Nope, I meant precisely what I wrote. 'Predominantly' and 'predominately' are both adverbs with identical meanings and can be used interchangeably.

I suggest you brush up on your own knowledge of the English language before you start haughtily lecturing others.

"While a majority of Australians may be of 'British' descent, that demographic feature has been declining since World War 2. Also, while many of our cultural institutions are derived from our sorry colonial past, their 'British' origins have become concomitantly less relevant as we move inexorably towards independence."

Australia has been independent since 1901.

As for the cultural institutions "derived from our sorry colonial past", you seem to forget that it is these institutions which are responsible for modern Australia's political freedoms, stability and economic prosperity.

And notwithstanding the anti-British edge of multiculturalism, the foundations of Australian civilisation remain, and will remain long after you have vanished from living memory, stubbornly British, even if that British heritage is not readily acknowledged or appreciated.

"This obviously doesn't suit that minority of Australians who want to live in the past, but that's their problem."

Sorry CJ, but I find it highly unlikely that the Anglophobic views of a splenetic old pseudo-intellectual are representative of the majority of Australians.

"Please don't presume to speak for me and the vast majority of tolerant, secular Aussies as you spout your ideologies of divisiveness and hatred."

Again, I would argue that your views are more out of sync with the majority than my allegedly "divisive" and "hateful" ideologies (whatever you imagine them to be).
Posted by Efranke, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 9:11:13 PM
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'TR, do yourself a favour and stop making yourself look like an idiot. I'm almost embarrassed on behalf of you for the silly statements you keep making.'

Trav, I'm not the one telling children (with a serious straight face) that angel whats-em-o-bob sped dowm from outside space-time to dictate a God book, or that a 75 KG bloke skipped across water without going splash. I'm sorry, but most of the idiot statements arise from theologians who take themselves too seriosly.

'Um, no. The "basic teaching" of religious schools is, in most cases, almost exactly the same, or extremely similar to the basic teaching of state schools. Ie: The school curriculum. You know, english, humanities, maths, science and the like'

Well, why bother having faith schools at all then!?

But maybe it's just an advertising splurge to promote sect 'X' in the minds of children. As in, Coca Cola/Mohammed/Jesus Christ "is the real thing".
Posted by TR, Tuesday, 2 June 2009 9:41:17 PM
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Please! intellectualise (think! analyse! think!, think sanely!) and the anti religious, particularly take note - do not put all named religions in the same category. The fundaments of Christianity is Love! Believe it! And consider all its faults, just aberrations. It is not perfect because humans are involved! Catholicism is the largest institution in the world and it has to have some faults particulary because of the numbers involved. It still needs correcting and at least eventually acknowledges and adjusts to the times. I am disgusted with the abuse of children that has been condoned. But think of all the Catholic charities throughout the world, largely involving selfless nuns, including their teachings even in some schools in Islamic countries - good education - and it is not missionary work and not like a Madras schooling - totally indoctrinated - nothing but reciting the Quran in a language alien to a lot of non-Arab Muslim cultures. Islam is not a religion, it is nothing but a Mohamedism cult, a totalitarian ideology stripped of any humanity. He was not a man of peace. He created his own cult - he was a complete egomaniac. He was a sexual hedonist, plus a pedophile and militant aggressor. Compare him to Jesus and his family? Action speak louder than words - look at the state of Muslim countries now. Their practices and beliefs are insane and empty. Muslims require instruction on every aspect of living, including on how to toilet - weird! The followers are brainwashed - robots. They need instructions on how to deal with the Dhimmis (unbelievers) - have seen site called Q&A Islam and plenty of ex-Muslim sites - it is us and them. Look, there is so much I can go into but time does not allow me. People must look more deeply into history. There is currently too much subterfuge going on.
Posted by Constance, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 1:53:23 AM
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Efranke, I'm hardly "Anglophobic" - rather, unlike some I don't regard Britain as the pinnacle of human civilisation. I acknowledge that contemporary Australia is a product of British imperialism and culture, but unlike some dinosaurs I recognise that we've moved on from those origins.

You say that Australia has been independent since 1901, which is an interesting claim given that our head of State is an hereditary English monarch. Most mature Australians expect that this anachronistic, unrepresentative and undemocratic situation will come to an end when the old duck finally expires, but there will undoubtedly be resistance from those like you who wish to maintain Australia as some kind of Antipodean colonial outpost of the 'mother country'.

I have no problem with your "delusions", as long as they are restricted to the fantasies of your Anglo-Christian "tribe". However, when your quaint hankering for a monocultural past approaches thinly disguised white supremacism, then it becomes a problem for the rest of us - who'd rather be Australians than Brits.

Your days are numbered, and you know it. By all means indulge your fantasies by engaging in weekend jousting, morris-dancing or whatever other anachronistic folk activities keep your identification with your ethnic roots alive. Just don't whinge too much when your particular ethnicity is eventually subsumed in this country by Australia's increasingly multicultural society.

And don't cry too loudly when we Aussies flog the Poms again at cricket next summer :)
Posted by CJ Morgan, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 8:09:53 AM
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Oliver,

You seem to be making a habit of quoting scripture to Christian contributors, meaning to rebuke, and that is well and good at any time – particularly where humility is lacking.

I wonder why you string these two particular quotes together to make your point though?

In the first instance, there is the high and mighty King Nebuchadnezzar (the tree), about to be humbled for his unwillingness to acknowledge Daniel’s God. Nebuchadnezzar’s vision is fulfilled – the tree is cut down – leading him finally to declare:

“And those who walk in pride he is able to humble” (Daniel 4:37).

Good so far.

This is the story of a proud non-believer, coming not only to humility, but to belief. In fact, from this we learn that humility is a pre-condition for belief. Humility before God, not man, although like the King N, we need to learn both.

The second quote, about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, shows us the humanity of Jesus, how to answer temptation and a bit more besides.

In each of the three challenges set up by Satan, Jesus responds by quoting scripture (Deuteronomy); eschewing the temptation of ruling over the world (the easy way) or forgoing the suffering.

Satan offers “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” but Jesus answers:

“Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only”. (Matthew 4:10)

One of the big take-aways from this passage, is that Jesus adeptly answers Satan’s quotes from Scripture, with more Scripture.

Where Satan relies on the words alone, out of context, without meaning, Jesus is able to respond with real substance, that is faith, trust and submission to God’s will as revealed in Scripture, which is at the very core of His ministry.

So, the lesson for today is…. ?
Posted by katieO, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 9:59:45 AM
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KatieO,

Thank you for your helpful and informative post.

There was not meant to be any great depth to the citations and my remarks were a mild chide to Trav for his hard tone towards TR.

The two quotes simply mean that only on a Flat Earth can one see all things from a high altitude. The Earth is a globe.

I do appreciate the text was written for the ancients and that the author was not aware of the shape of the Earth.
Posted by Oliver, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 10:30:40 AM
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Nursel:

I read your article "Not another wave of Islamophobia please!" of 17 December 08. So you are an atheist of Muslim background.

My position is that the West can live with Islam if Islam is prepared to be tolerant and pluralist. A good part of Sufiism fits this (like that of Gus Dur, former President of Indonesia), but not the forms of Islam coming out of the Arab world and Pakistan.

Calls to replace secular democratic government with shariah rule are obscurantist madness to be resisted by force. Rule "by God" is tyranny by mullahs. This is not an "orientalist stereotype of oppressive, violent and misogynistic Muslim men and oppressed and subservient Muslim women" but FACT.

You are doubtless right when you wrote of the great diversity of Muslims ( http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8300&page=1 ). But the ignorance of the Koran and Hadiths by very many Muslims is truly disturbing. If they did know their own theology, they would see that, taken in terms of its own theology, Islam is absolutely incompatible with Western civilization. YES I HAVE read the whole of the Koran, and a stack of books about Middle Eastern, Arab and Islamic history and theology, as well as Christian history and theology. Unfortunately the ignorance of many nominal and cultural Christians today about their own theology is also lamentable. But at least our theology includes "Love your neighbour [NOT JUST OTHER CHRISTIANS' as yourself" and "God is love".

The BBC News of 1 June carried an article "Egypt mufti issues fatwa on use of WMD" which began

"Muslims should not use weapons of mass destruction and possess them only as a deterrent, a top Islamic cleric says. Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa said using such weapons would violate Islamic teachings AS MUSLIMS AS WELL AS NON-MUSLIMS COULD BE KILLED. ...."

Charming. Muslim lives are the issue, not the lives of Dhimmi trash.

Wonderful news today that the proposed Islamic school at Camden has been finally rejected (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25579342-5006784,00.html ). I don't want to see this country trashed. Islam is NOT a legitimate part of Australian society
Posted by Glorfindel, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 10:44:32 AM
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['TR, I think your religion of science, reason, and humanism is one of the most stupid ever invented - some great technical advances, but at what cost to humanity and the earth! I am a Christian but if I had to choose another religion, yours would be at the bottom of the list.'

John, you are entitled to your opinion. You just so happen to be wrong in an objective sense. But so what.]

TR, you missed the point of my post (the bit you didn't quote), which was that no matter how much I look down on your beliefs, I think you should be free to form organisations and hold meetings centred on your beliefs without me running around trying to stop you.

Sorry if anyone (Trav) thought I was getting personal.
Posted by john kosci, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 3:53:19 PM
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John, in a free and democratic society any citizen should be able to oppose anything they like provided that they have good and rational grounds. So please, if you don't like secularism then say so by all means. I for one won't get offended.

On the other hand, the 'racism card' played by various Islamic communities is nothing short of emotional blackmail. Communities like Camden WILL be changed forever in that their long standing culture WILL be surplanted. That's OK if the external culture is sensitive and open-minded. That is, an accomodation can be reached based on mutual respect. However, it is to state the obvious that Islam isn't sensitive and open-minded. It is a monolith intent on maintaining its own exlusive purity according to the inflexible dictates of the Koran + Hadith.

There are good and rational grounds for opposing some religious schools and institutions.
Posted by TR, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 10:27:25 PM
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Glorfindel,

Whilst I’ll agree, Islam, as currently depicted, has an ugly shop front, the Sufi strand you mention runs far deeper through this religion than most imagine. Sufism, rather than a mere sect of Islam, is heir to its ancient mystical tradition - within both the Sunni and Shia branches of the faith. This tradition, albeit often dormant in the face of the hard-liners, is deeply threaded through the power structures of many Muslim countries. For the Islamists, fundamentalists like the Saudi Wahhabis and the Taliban, the Sufis are the deadly enemies who draw on practices atypical to the Quran.

The expansion of Islam outside the core areas of the Middle East certainly has some parallel to the crusades waged by Latin Christian Europe. Sufi orders led the armies that conquered lands in Central and South Asia, and in Southeastern Europe; the piety and mysticism of the brotherhoods then won the local populations over to Islam. They presented an Islam that incorporated local traditions and worship styles, including Christian saints and Hindu gods – not so unlike the pope ordained soldiers of Christianity.

The Sufi the tradition actually provides an effective bastion against terrorism - much stronger than anything the West can supply through military means alone. Our best hope for global peace is not a decline or secularisation of Islam but rather a renewal and strengthening of this faith, fully embracing its spiritual and mystical dimension. I agree with George, there is something within Islam worth preserving and it needs to evolve.

Organised Sufism, where it exists, has the aim of integrating traditional scholarship with contemporary issues affecting Islamic belief in a modern and secular society, whilst retaining its integrity - again, not so unlike Christianity.

Sufism is the antithesis of extremism, through their council (SMC) they totally condemn, inter alia:
• Muslim extremists, bin Laden and his affiliates, Omar Bakri and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri etc.
• The Nazis, oppressors of many and of the Jews.
• Christian-Irish extremists engaged in fratricide.
• Christian-Serbian extremists, oppressors of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosova, and
• Extremist Jews attacking innocents.
Posted by relda, Wednesday, 3 June 2009 11:39:28 PM
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relda,
I certainly agree with what you wrote about Fundamentalist Christians. However, in your previous post you seemed to have implied that they continued to see “Jewish unbelief” as threatening to their religion, and I just wanted to point to Christian Zionists as a notable exception: you can hardly see the “Jewish unbelief” as a threat to your religion if you believe that the restoration of Israel as a Jewish state is a precondition for Christ’s second coming.

Constance,
Thank you for your defense of the Catholic position. However, you might note that just recently “the pope struck a note of Christian-Muslim harmony... expressing "deep respect for the Muslim community" during a brief welcoming ceremony at Amman's Queen Alia International Airport“ (c.f. http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/emphasis-islam-makes-popes-trip-original).

“Because of the burden of our common history, so often marked by misunderstanding,” Benedict said, Muslims and Christians must “bear witness to all that is good and true,” especially “the common origin and dignity of all human persons.” (c.f. http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/benedict-xvi-sets-new-papal-record-mosque-visits).
Posted by George, Thursday, 4 June 2009 2:19:08 AM
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Relda: Thank you for excellent, balanced post about Sufiism. Exactly this point - the huge contrast between Sufiism and the intolerant, bullying shopfront of Wahhabiism - is made cogently by Ed Husain in "The Islamist", where he talks about his Pakistani background, suffused in mild, tolerant, personally spiritual Islam. Lamentably, just about everywhere this benign legacy of Islam is being challenged by a rabidly hostile and violent attitude combining hatred of Kuffars and a killjoy disdain for the value of the present life. Of course the West can't reform Islam: only the Islamic world can do that.

The culturally Christian world has junked the spiritual underpinnings of Western civilization and we've plunged into decline from within. Heading in the opposite direction, modern Islam has junked its own valuable underpinnings and its "shop front" evokes in me - a normally mild-mannered, cerebral and tolerant person with a phobia of violence - a seething anger towards those who would destroy “ civilization”.

Literalism is mainstream in today's Islam. If you read the Koran literally, it is a terrorist book exactly as Geert Wilders says in his film Fitna. If Muslims want to be taken seriously as partners in human civilization, they need to do FAR more to combat the monsters among them.

As a Christian, I deplore and condemn the US Religious Right and the (tiny) fringe of violent bombers of abortion clinics and so on. "Morality" covers far more than just sex and reproductive technology. But those politically correct left-liberals who cite this tiny fringe group as meaning that Christianity as "just as bad" as the madness behind the widespread fundamentalist excesses of Islam are both dishonest and intellectually bankrupt.

I am aghast at the ignorant antisemitism propagated throughout nearly all of the Islamic world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (egregious tsarist forgery) are still taught as fact in places like Egypt. I have heard Arabs in Australia call Jews in general (and I am not one) pigs. How can one feel anything but contempt for this?
Posted by Glorfindel, Thursday, 4 June 2009 12:41:40 PM
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Tariq Ali in his book "The Clash of Fundamentalisms" says in a “Letter to a young Muslim”:

"What do the Islamists offer? A route to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. If the 'Emirate of Afghanistan' is the model for what they want to impose on the world then the bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don't imagine that either Osama or Mullah Omar represent the future of Islam. It would be a major disaster for [our] culture if that turned out to be the case. .....

"I've met many of our people in different parts of the world since 11 September. One question is always repeated: 'Do you think we Muslims are clever enough to have done this?' I always answer 'Yes'. Then I ask who they think is responsible, and the answer is invariably 'Israel'. Why? 'To discredit us and make the Americans attack our countries.' I gently expose their wishful illusions, but the conversation saddens me. Why are so many Muslims sunk in this torpor? Why do they wallow in so much self-pity? Why is their sky always overcast? Why is it always someone else who is to blame? Sometimes when we talk I get the impression that there is not a single Muslim country of which they can feel really proud. Those who have migrated from South Asia are much better treated in Britain than in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States…

"Here lies the challenge. We are in desperate need of an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists but, more than that, opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are seen to be more advanced than what is currently on offer from the West. This would necessitate a rigid separation of state and mosque; the dissolution of the clergy; the assertion by Muslim intellectuals of their right to interpret the texts that are the collective property of Islamic culture as a whole; the freedom to think freely and rationally and the freedom of imagination....."
Posted by Glorfindel, Thursday, 4 June 2009 12:55:58 PM
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Relda, Glorfindel, George et al.

I have for many years said that the Sufi way would lead Muslim towards greater spiritual attainments and social harmony. When I suggested this to a Muslim friend -- a highly educated man who holds a high status in his faith-community and teaches others about Islam -- he said he had never heard of the Sufi!

If Muslim don't know about the alternatives in their own faith do outsiders need to inform them, I wonder.
Posted by crabsy, Thursday, 4 June 2009 7:14:19 PM
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Dear Glorfindel, Tariq Ali is not quite correct but I do agree with the general line being pushed. The fault lies in the unthought out assumptions that "new ideas" must automatically out-trump existing ideas, let alone religion. Evererything including new ideas and opf course religion mut be tested. Being 'new' doesn't rule out the 'old' quite so quickly. As for an "Islamic Reformation"- this automatically assumes that Christianity ie the Catholic Church needed Lutheranism and Calvinism. This is a false assumption. This is not a given and is certainly something that I question. Any religion either stands or falls upon what it teaches from its inception. That is something that Catholics and Muslims share in common although we both are diametrically opposed. Both cannot be right; either both are wrong or only one is right. That is the challenge for secularists whtether they be from the East or the West. The degree of separation of Church and State is another assumption that is a recent introduction and not accepted particulalry by those who hold to one religion being true. The assumption that God must keep out of everyday life and out of our legislation is not something that people must sign onto. Unless one be an intolerant person whcih today is not allowed by our laws. But those very laws are only meant to cut one way. I think this is unfair and should be open for debate. John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy in Scotland seems to think so. I agree with him.
Posted by Webby, Thursday, 4 June 2009 9:43:13 PM
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George,
Christian Zionists certainly have a strong focus in advocating Israel, however, this is far from meaning they accept Judaism as a legitimate means of ‘salvation’ after Jesus – something very unexceptional from a Christian Fundamentalist view point. Nor does it translate into genuine love for the Jews – even if the ‘Rev’ John Hagee, a prime example of a Christian Zionist zealot from the U.S. bible-belt, enjoins with the biblical description of the Jews as 'the apple of God's eye' [Zech 2:8]. As with Christian Fundamentalists generally, Christian Zionists believe that Christianity is the only religion acceptable to God – after all, a literal reading of the bible allows the rendition “salvation is possible only through Jesus, the Jews therefore cannot be 'saved' unless they convert to Christianity".

Biblical literalists like Hagee have a god in their imagination who performs like a quirky real estate agent - “God established Israel's national geographic boundaries” (Hagee) Christian Zionists are dogged defenders of the state of Israel and are fiercely anti-Arab and anti-Muslim – hence their unholy alliance with Jewish right-wing groups.

Glorfindel,
Fortunately, literalism is not a part of ‘mainstream’ Christianity – unfortunately, many see it as the shopfront for it has a pretty big window on display. Religious fundamentalists also often share some common traits and motivations with their secular dissident counterparts who engage in political violence. But perhaps the most disturbing situation is the convergence of fundamentalist interests and their potential to inflame or incite a global holy war.

crabsy,
“If Muslim don't know about the alternatives in their own faith do outsiders need to inform them, I wonder” - Nothing wrong in the attempt to ‘enlighten’ someone, perhaps today at least it is not so blunt an instrument as proselytization.
Posted by relda, Thursday, 4 June 2009 10:05:13 PM
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"What lies at the heart of the fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools in some parts of Australia?"
We know too much about the effect Islam has had on whichever country has been unfortunate enough to experience it.
We may be easygoing but we're not stupid.
As for the title "Anglo-Christian tribalism", what a joke.
How much more tribal can you get than the inassimilable followers of Mohammed.
Their cult demands that they don't assimilate.
Take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends (Sura 5:51, 60:13).
Don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for all the brainwashed followers of Mohammed, but not to the extent that their cult should be allowed to impact negatively on this country, like every other country it has infected.
Posted by KMB, Thursday, 4 June 2009 10:25:23 PM
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The Muslims in Egypt killed Coptic Christians and deprived them of their land. It's time non-Muslims help the Egyptians Coptic Christians rid Egypt of Muslim invaders.

The plan is underway; we have Christian Obama sweet talk the Muslims, next send in the drones, the Jews can then go in and claim back what belonged to King David.

The Coptic Christians can rightly claim back their land.

Repeat this process in Hindustan which rightly belongs to the Hindus. Hindustan includes Pakistan, Afganistan, Bangladesh. Claim them back from the Muslims.
Posted by Philip Tang, Thursday, 4 June 2009 10:39:00 PM
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TR,

[I'm not the one telling children (with a serious straight face) that angel whats-em-o-bob sped dowm from outside space-time to dictate a God book]

If you’d take the time to listen to the best Christian philosophers and scholars you’d soon realize it’s not as absurd as you obviously think.

Besides, it’s easy to make fun of any belief system. Atheist naturalism would have you believe that the universe popped out of nothing. Belief in naturalistic atheism also logically necessitates that you’re objectively of the same value as a mouse, that life has no ultimate transcending purpose or meaning, and that deciding whether the deliberate killing of another human being is an immoral act or not, is just as subjective as deciding whether to eat yoghurt or ice cream on a hot day.

As John Dickson writes: “only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity; any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism”.

So, if I was given the choice between sending my kids to a Christian school that teaches good Christian values and sending them to an atheist school, I’d choose the Christian one. And to use a more relevant example, I’d send them to a Christian school over your garden variety secular state school. So would many parents.

[Well, why bother having faith schools at all then!?]

There’s plenty of reasons.

For starters, there’s one incredibly obvious reason staring you in the face: This is a democracy, not a totalitarian regime. So religious schools should exist simply because people want them to exist.

And you may well ask, why would people want them to exist? Well, there’s also plenty of reasons for that. Parents may feel that they’d like their children’s spiritual development to have more emphasis placed on it than would be the case at a state school. Or they may feel that religious schools provide more of a well rounded education. Or they may feel that a religious school would be a safer environment for their child to grow up in.

.
Posted by Trav, Thursday, 4 June 2009 11:01:29 PM
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[If Muslims want to be taken seriously as partners in human civilization, they need to do FAR more to combat the monsters among them.

As a Christian, I deplore and condemn the US Religious Right and the (tiny) fringe of violent bombers of abortion clinics and so on. "Morality" covers far more than just sex and reproductive technology. But those politically correct left-liberals who cite this tiny fringe group as meaning that Christianity as "just as bad" as the madness behind the widespread fundamentalist excesses of Islam are both dishonest and intellectually bankrupt.]

Glorfindel, I agree with every word. Eloquently put
Posted by Trav, Thursday, 4 June 2009 11:33:28 PM
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"For starters, there’s one incredibly obvious reason staring you in the face: This is a democracy, not a totalitarian regime. So religious schools should exist simply because people want them to exist."
An excellent argument for allowing Muslim schools.
The first tenet of Democracy is -or should be- that Every One is equal before the Law. If Christian -or any religious- schools are funded publicly, then surely every religious school should have the same right.
Alternatively, if you oppose Muslim schools, then you should also stand against the indoctrination of the young by Christians.
But of course, the answer to this riddle is simply that Christianity is right, and Islam is wrong.
What I find most amazing about all religionists, is that they start with the premise that their God is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful; infinitely more superior to humankind than a man is to an ant... And then they proceed to explain exactly how we should please him/her/it, and why.
And it always seems like the least intelligent, and least imaginative are the most secure in their perfect understanding of this ineffable being
Posted by Grim, Friday, 5 June 2009 11:58:31 AM
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TR,

"We secularists have had more than a gut full of religious stupidity, hypocrisy and violent tribalism." Oh yeh, speaks another one-eyed secularlist who just does't get it. You don't understand humankind and culture much do you. You just would not be able to comprehend that it was actually religion, eg. Christianity which has greatly inspired the arts, such as the fine arts and music and it would seem was the actual instigater for what we can appreciate today such as that thing called culture! Yeh! and even spirituality for that matter, and in some cases, even "Science" - astronomy and seismology for example. You know some humans need such desires called faith and hope (helps makes them human) in their imaginations, in their lives. This means you are bagging all those black American gospel singers - which I think has inspired some pretty great music that I listen to today. What do you think the impovershed people in the world would hope to live for. But no, they must be idiots too if they have a religious faith.

Oh you smug secularists are so myopic and cold.

I myself am not particularly religious but I at least see the point.

George,

Thanks for your response, but what do think the Pope is going to say. After his run-in in the Uni in Germany where he spoke as an intellectual in a scholarly environment. These days no public figure is able to be sincerely honest at their own peril. He had no choice but to be diplomatic. That incident in Germany was so sensationalist - there are media vultures/trouble makers hiding in all the corners. The Pope is no trouble maker. He was just rationally speaking and reiterating relevant history. It was all about being rational afterall!
Posted by Constance, Saturday, 6 June 2009 1:00:56 AM
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TR,

"We secularists have had more than a gut full of religious stupidity, hypocrisy and violent tribalism." Oh yeh, speaks another one-eyed secularlist who just does't get it. You don't understand humankind and culture much do you. You just would not be able to comprehend that it was actually religion, eg. Christianity which has greatly inspired the arts, such as the fine arts and music and it would seem was the actual instigater for what we can appreciate today such as that thing called culture! Yeh! and even spirituality for that matter, and in some cases, even "Science" - astronomy and seismology for example. You know some humans need such desires called faith and hope (helps makes them human) in their imaginations, in their lives. This means you are bagging all those black American gospel singers - which I think has inspired some pretty great music that I listen to today. What do you think the impovershed people in the world would hope to live for. But no, they must be idiots too if they have a religious faith.

Oh you smug secularists are so myopic and cold.

I myself am not particularly religious but I at least see the point.

George,

Thanks for your response, but what do think the Pope is going to say. After his run-in in the Uni in Germany where he spoke as an intellectual in a scholarly environment. These days no public figure is able to be sincerely honest at their own peril. He had no choice but to be diplomatic in Jordan. That incident in Germany was so sensationalist - there are media vultures/trouble makers hiding in all the corners. The Pope is no trouble maker. He was just rationally speaking and reiterating relevant history. It was all about being rational afterall!
Posted by Constance, Saturday, 6 June 2009 1:02:32 AM
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Constance,
I do not understand how one could read the quotes I provided as showing only that "the pope had no choice but to be diplomatic".

Also, his Regensburg lecture has to be read in toto (not just the unfortunate quote used by islamist extremists to incite the mobs) to appreciate that "it was a considered reflection on the inseparable linkage of faith and reason in the Christian understanding, an incisive critique of Christian thinkers who press for separating faith and reason in the name of “de-Hellenizing” Christianity, and a stirring call for Christians to celebrate the achievements of modernity and secure those achievements by grounding them in a more comprehensive and coherent understanding of human rationality" (First Things 167 -November 2006, pp. 59-76). It was also an indirect appeal to Islam to go the same way, which led to the well known "Common Word" initiative by a cross-section of Muslim scholars.

Just recently, John L. Allen, the well known American expert on Vatican, has had something to say about the pope's intentions that go beyond mere diplomacy (c.f. http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/remarkable-congruence-between-pope-and-president-islam).
Posted by George, Saturday, 6 June 2009 8:11:38 AM
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George,

Without wishing to place too much of a damper on the Catholic-Muslim dialogue and the recent ‘congruence’ of the Vatican with Obama’s recent Cairo speech, one must also note John Allen’s more sobering reflection, “Any partnership between pope and president, therefore, may have a limited shelf life”. A primary objective for Benedict and the "alliance of civilizations" is for Muslims and Christians to join forces against Western secularism, much of which Obama, quite ironically, embodies with his liberalism. Rather than an alliance between the Vatican and Obama I’d agree with Allen and say it is merely an “intersection” of interests. We’ll therefore leave the battles on contraception and gay rights etc. for another day….

How ‘outsiders’ (of Aussie flavour), with some intellect, might view the current state of Roman Catholicism is perhaps revealed here: http://ozsoapbox.com/rest-of-australia/the-crucifiction-of-father-peter-kennedy/

Historical reality and congruence with what an hierarchical Church defends as the ‘truth’ certainly needs analysis, preferably on a level that is honest as it is intellectual, viz:

“The church as it exists today is a Constantine church. It was Constantine who brought the bishops of the early Christian centuries together in order to unify his empire, and that was the Nicene Creed, and he imposed that upon the bishops that were there. So the church was domesticated, became part of the empire, and that’s the church that exists today...” and this is congruent with,

“...when you get theologians like Dupuis beginning to question or to say how can we understand the divinity of Christ, how can we understand the trinity, how can we retheologise that for people in the 21st century? – as soon as any foremost theologian begins to do that, immediately they are suspended or they are told that they’re no longer teaching in a Catholic theological seminary... No dissent is allowed.”
(refer: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/doc/Peter_Kennedy_web_interview.pdf)
Posted by relda, Saturday, 6 June 2009 10:16:51 AM
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[The first tenet of Democracy is -or should be- that Every One is equal before the Law. If Christian -or any religious- schools are funded publicly, then surely every religious school should have the same right]

Unless you reject a religious school for reasons not directly relating to their religious beliefs. In that case, it's perfectly reasonable.
Posted by Trav, Saturday, 6 June 2009 11:32:54 AM
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Constance, I have just thing to say;

We secularists have had more than a gut full of religious stupidity, hypocrisy and violent tribalism.
Posted by TR, Saturday, 6 June 2009 5:15:40 PM
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George:
Thanks for the link to John Allen's article "Remarkable congruence between Pope and President on Islam".

This quotes John Esposito referring to “the strong sense among Muslims that they're not respected as equal partners." Hardly surprising, because since Sunni Islam closed the gates of ijtihad about 800 years ago, Islam has contributed virtually nothing to advancement of human civilization. How can one respect a religion whose shopfront is a truculent moron?

I don't think either the secular or the Christian West should support Islam in (re)criminalizing gays. This issue is very different from abortion, where the life of a fetus is involved; it would legislate for "morality" in arguably a victimless crime. It denies that homosexuality is inborn in some people, but if you reject that view, it also denies Christian theology of free will to choose between good and evil (if you see homosexuality in those terms). Islamic theology asserts social control over individual rights and criminalizes a range of behaviours as crimes against society – like adultery. You may deplore these behaviours but oppose theocratic control.

Relda:
Ozsoapbox's blog on Peter Kennedy denies the essence of Catholicism, which is "strict quality control" in matters of theology - hence over 2000 items in the latest Catechism. Some of Kennedy's views fit well with Spong, but not within a church whose policy is to remain monolithic. Kennedy was never going to prevail against that. The New Age elements of his outlook (tolerance of a Buddhist statue, for example) are a last straw to many Protestants too - including me.

The ABC Web Interview with Kennedy is a good read. His Liberation Theology was trenchantly rebutted in 1984 by the now Pope Benedict (see "Let God's Light Shine Forth - the spiritual vision of Pope Benedict XVI", edited by Robert Moynihan - p49-54). Benedict also deplores the attack on religious vestments (see p72-73) as part of a broader attack on the sacred in Christianity: "They [people like Kennedy] see the sacred as THE thing to transcend, and the profane is the sole way to be a true Christian.
Posted by Glorfindel, Saturday, 6 June 2009 5:18:54 PM
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'If you’d take the time to listen to the best Christian philosophers and scholars you’d soon realize it’s not as absurd as you obviously think.'

I have listened and read Trav - for the last 30 years or so.

But, which ever way you carve it, the Bible and Koran are so chock full of hypocrisy and wild contradictions you couldn't possibly use them to teach meaningful ethics to anyone, let alone to school children. The point is, Jehovah/Allah is just another god in the pantheon of horrible spiteful jealous dieties. Admitedly, Christianity has tried to redeem him with the personage of Jesus Christ. But really, the rescue mission is too difficult. The monotheistic God is beyond redemption and should be spared from young minds.
Posted by TR, Saturday, 6 June 2009 5:27:31 PM
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Glorfindel,

I wouldn’t expect an ‘outsider’ to express the essence of Catholicism; rather it is a ‘good’ Catholic who reveres and is bound by certain agreement to hierarchical authority. This, however, need not necessarily be ‘Christian’.

If the term “thy kingdom come” is to have any relevance then one must consider the challenge Liberation theology provides to how a religious order responds to a changing political and social landscape – it is a useful lens, far from alien to the gospel story. The aspiration for 'liberation', as the term itself suggests, repeats a theme which is fundamental to the Old and New Testaments. In itself, the expression "theology of liberation" is a thoroughly valid term: it designates a theological reflection centered on the biblical theme of liberation and freedom, and on its practical realisation.

Ratzinger, in his rebuttal of liberation theology said, "Jesus was not Spartacus, he was not engaged in a fight for political liberation” In the 1980s, he blasted it as a "fundamental threat" to the church. Kennedy is obviously a threat to this magisterium , therefore, for the sake of the institution, he is silenced and thus sacked. I cannot see Kennedy as “Spartacus” fighting for “political liberation”, he appears to have little desire in the overthrow of a secular state, but appears concerned more for the reform of a church whose business should be essentially removed from the power-play of politics.

Fernando Segovia, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Vanderbilt University in the U.S. says Ratzinger took measures to disarticulate the liberation theology movement: silencing theologians, closing seminaries and appointing traditional bishops and auxiliary bishops.

Craig Nessan, professor of contextual theology and academic dean at Wartburg Theological Seminary says liberation theology has been incorporated more as a dimension of mainstream theology, advocating justice for the poor, women, oppressed racial groups and other minorities.

Daniel Bell, assistant professor of theological ethics at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Columbia, S.C., has written about Latin American theology - he says that Latin American liberation theology has moved from advocating a socialist revolution.
Posted by relda, Saturday, 6 June 2009 9:15:05 PM
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its both sad and funny that the question needs be asked..[to begin im against any money going to any private run school]..but back to my explanation

US President Barack Obama is visited Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany...Obama wass joined at Buchenwald by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Buchenwald survivor Elie Weisel.

Buchenwald held over 250,000 prisoners from 1937 to 1945,..when it was liberated by the US Army...Prisoners included Jews, resistance fighters, POWs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and convicts..."Buchenwald" means "beech wood" in German.

Over 56,000 people died at Buchenwald,due to medical experiments, malnutrition,and abuse by guards;..the article continues but lets end the quote here..[im sure many of you would have heard the report on the news...what you possably didnt hear is 11,000 of those that died were clasified as jewish

so here is the deal..[why isnt my addendum spoken of in all the news reporting..[for the same reason,mosques arnt allowed to be built]the media is quick to count the 6 million jews that were hollow costed in this work camp...but 45,ooo wernt jews...at this one work camp[there were reportedly thousands

so the logic is..as one fifth of those who died were non jews...what of the 30 million..[pro rata]..non jews that died in the same hollow cost?..of www2..that seem to have simply disapeared in all the kerfuffle of 6 million jews dying..[as trajic as any death is]...

find that answer and you answer this question...seems some know how to get their due and others dont..[clearly all semites arnt equal..]

[one need only look at the hollow-cost of the recent west-bank genocide's/eugenics..with phospher and cluster bombs..[near 2000 dead in what 30 days?...an ongoing siege ever since..yet..[media silence]...one wonder how that death rate goes..if the war on the prison camp..[gulag]..of west bank hadnt ended?
Posted by one under god, Saturday, 6 June 2009 9:35:52 PM
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Relda,
I'm an 'outsider' to Catholicism. I feel revulsion at its past sins (without ignoring those of Protestantism and Orthodoxy) but I deeply respect the erudition and moral clarity of Pope Benedict. I admired his sermons to World Youth Day, and his Regensburg address.

Liberation theology as opposed by Ratzinger in the 1980s was extreme-Leftist in Latin America but now, as you quote, is "a dimension of mainstream theology, advocating justice for the poor, women, oppressed racial groups and other minorities". Within Protestantism, the Uniting Church fits in well here.

Islam certainly does not. Its supposed concern for the Umma (body of all Muslims) has been strikingly uncompassionate - what has it done to resettle or otherwise pratically help the Palestinians? How much did Saudi Arabia give to the victims of the Aceh tsunami? How much are racism, inequality of power and the mentality of slavery still endemic in Saudi Arabia – look at how it treats immigrant workers, even Muslims!

The Koran is full of oppression of women, violent intolerance and discrimination against religious minorities, murderous hostility toward gays. As a culture, Islam is suffused with violence. At the first disagreement over any issue, Muslims turn to violence. Even mosques are not safe. Islam seems to have no sense of the sacred, only of fear. "Fear Allah" is a dreadful opposite to "God is love". In practice, it means fear other Muslims!

There was a cerebral strand to Islam back in Cordoba a thousand years ago. No more. Since 'higher criticism' began a century ago, Christianity has been looking at its "handful of sand" and watching while, under rationalist scrutiny, one by one the grains trickle between the fingers leaving, for some people, nothing; but for more thoughtful people, posing the question asked by Spong, for example: What does Jesus mean for us today?

Islam today lives on a different planet. "Certainty" merchants like Abu Bakar Bashir are charlatans and killers. At least Christian preachers of "certainty" generally aren't homocidal maniacs.

Where are the Spongs and Richard Holloways and Rowan Williamses within contemporary Islam?
Posted by Glorfindel, Sunday, 7 June 2009 9:14:55 AM
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Glofindel,

It is interesting you note Spong who, interestingly, describes himself as a “believer in exile” – one can therefore quite easily place him in the Father Kennedy camp. He (Spong) describes himself as a man who is strolling along the path of quest, seeking the truth. All believers, he says, irrespective of their faith, are fellow seekers. Seeking is a process with no foreseeable end. I gather this metaphysical ‘process’ is the ‘certainty’ to which you refer.

As I wrote back in 2006, “Radicalising all Muslims only serves to force many to react forceably or some to retreat, mariginalised and ostracised - thus destabilising society further. This can only serve well for the purpose Bin Laden and his cohorts are striving.” Certain extremes within Islam certainly cannot be reasoned with but the moderates must be appealed to , such organisations as listed here: http://muslimvillage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12448

I too have some respect for the intellectual ability of Benedict but the argument runs far deeper than you have surmised (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4995&page=0#57605). As with all of us, his arguments are prone to the fallible.

Spong’s following statement can equally apply as a critique to any religion (including Islam), viz, “Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its own origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits.” I would also say that this "New View of Christianity" Bishop Spong presents is not likely to change the metaphysical stance of Humanists or atheists, but if successful, it would demolish the destructive influence of fundamentalism on Christianity that exists even within mainstream denominations.
Posted by relda, Sunday, 7 June 2009 12:30:39 PM
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On the contrary,to be a Christian accepts hierarchical authority which comes from Christ THROUGH the APOSTLES who in turn handed down authority to their successors to this present day. This is fact, not opinion. The contrary view is opinion and in matters of true religion one must follow truth not one's feelings/opinions.

So-called 'liberation theology' was already contained well within Catholic social doctrine years ago and is still true teaching. It is just that Marxists and liberals joined forces to create a bogus theology which has been qualified by the Magisterium.
Kennedy is not and never has been a threat to the Church and her Magisterium. Poor old Fr Kennedy jumped aboard many bandwagons of which liberation theology, invalid baptisms, lay homilies and other departures from the Sacred occured . All Catholics who go to different parishes for Mass expect and desrve and have a right to authentic Catholic liturgy and NOT to have to put up with Fr Kennedy and co's opinions.
Posted by Webby, Sunday, 7 June 2009 1:14:35 PM
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relda,
My reference to the pope's recent rapprochements towards Muslims was aimed at Constance whom I assumed had an overall positive attitude towards the Catholic Church, including the role of the pope. Where we might differ is only in the interpretation of the pope's words. I am quite aware you do not share our sentiments about the Catholic Church, and I respect them: It was certainly not my intention to inject into this thread Catholic-Protestant controversies, and I apologise if I sounded as if it was.

The Catholic Church is a centuries old institution, so are objections against its very existence, very seldom original - remember, I grew up in a Marx-Leninist country so I have had most of them shoved down my throat - as well as arguments in defense of her role in the West's cultural heritage. I do not think I need to repeat them here.

I fail to see the relevance of Peter Kennedy's rebellion to what the pope says - and aims at - about the Catholic-Muslim relationship. Besides, there was already a thread or two on this OLO, where I also contributed, so please excuse me if I do not repeat myself.

There are people - some of them Catholics - who applaud what he did, others are saddened, even offended, by his actions. Not because of what he is saying or doing - there are many evangelical and other Christian preachers and activists saying or doing similar things - but because of his intention (perhaps only subconscious) to disrupt instead of leaving the Church like many others did before, and still remained Christians respected also by those who remained Catholics.
Posted by George, Sunday, 7 June 2009 4:51:19 PM
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Glorfindel,
Please note that John Allen‘s article is indeed about “congruence” not identity, or even agreement in ultimate aims.

I do not think the pope wants to "(re)criminalize gays". Neither does Allen say this. When Benedict spoke of "bearing witness to all that is good and true, especially the common origin and dignity of all human persons” that Christians (and other decent people) can share with Islam, he had in mind more profound and centuries old values, than "gay rights" that nobody knew what they meant only half a century ago, as justified as they might be.

It was J.W. Goethe who said “Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be“. Perhaps the same is true about cultures, religions or world-views anchored in centuries of history.

It is probably true that Benedict wants to "join forces" with Islam against secularism. Secularism, however, differs from respectable secular humanism in the same sense that Christian literal fundamentalists or Islamists differ from mainstream Christians or Muslims respectively. Of course, Benedeict is against all three extremes (see e.g. his discussions with the secular humanists like Marcello Pera [http://www.amazon.com/Without-Roots-Relativism-Christianity-Islam/dp/B0010NYFK2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244310093&sr=8-2] or Jürgen Habermas [http://www.amazon.com/Dialectics-Secularization-Reason-Religion/dp/1586171666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244310601&sr=1-1]).

You should not be surprised that Ratzinger was very sensitive about liberation theology, objectiing not to “liberation” but to a marriage of (abstract, apolitical) Catholic theology to the political ideology of Marxist class struggle. Remember, he is a Central European, where the horror of Stalinism made some priests and even theologians too eager to support the other side that they saw as the lesser evil (after all, Stalin‘s atrocities preceded Hitler’s by a few years), until it was too late.
Posted by George, Sunday, 7 June 2009 5:01:12 PM
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George,
I bought and read the book by Ratzinger and Marcelo Pera "Without Roots: The West, Christianity, Islam, Relativism" in August 2007. It is a magnificent, sobering, cogent read. Postmodernist relativism is a spiritual and cultural equivalent of AIDS.

By the way, I have a strong empathy for what you say about growing up in a Marxist-Leninist country. I teach Russian stuff ...

Webby,
I can't resist pointing out that Orthodoxy regards *itself* as the preserver of the true belief about God and which glorifies Him with right worship, that is, as nothing less than THE Church of Christ on earth. It regards the western church, Catholic and Protestant strands, as having fallen into error from the true faith and practice as enshrined in church tradition from the earliest centuries of Christianity. Its ethos is extremely conservative and of course it sees itself as the vessel of apostolic succession!

Relda,
In your 2006 posting on the Regensburg Address, you wrote: "The Latin west owes its rediscovery of Greek philosophy, including the writings of Aristotle, partly to the work of medieval Muslim scholars."

Bernard Lewis (The Middle East: 200 years of history from the rise of Christianity to the present day), says in chapter 13:

"An important factor in the development of scholarship and more generally of science and learning was the work of the translators who, in the ninth century and after, produced a series of epoch-making Arabic versions of major Greek writings on mathematics and astronomy, physics and chemistry, medicine and pharmacology, geography and agronomy, and a wide range of other subjects including, notable, philosophy.

“Some of these works were preserved by the local non-Muslims; others were specially imported from Byzantium. … Many important Greek works which were … lost in the barbarous and for the most part uninterested West became known through Arabic translations, from which at a later date Latin versions were made. Most of the translators were NON-MUSLIMS – Christians, Jews, and above all members of the mysterious sect of the Sabians, since only they were likely to have the necessary knowledge of languages. …"
Posted by Glorfindel, Sunday, 7 June 2009 10:24:51 PM
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Glorfindel,
That is allright you don't have to resist. LOL. Yes I know about Orthodoxy and its claims. Whilst it says with much self confidence that it is the upholder of Chrsitiand truths of faith ( and it does for the most part), it has not a unified or single authority such as does the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Another point is that before the mutual excommunications , the Christians of the East even had a Pope in Rome and were a part of the Catholic Church. Before the break ( schism) the pre 'Orthodox' all accepted the authority of the Pope of Rome and the Greeks all played a part in this ( before the break).

Today they are divided yet many of the Orthodox say that they only dispute with the Catholic Church on Marian dogmas not because they disagree with them but rather 'because we were not consulted' ie a rather sulky way of saying we won;t rejoin you and end the Schism but we will act all cut up that we cannot have our cake and eat it too ie you Catholic bishops won't let us in on doctrinal determinations.
Posted by Webby, Sunday, 7 June 2009 10:49:59 PM
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George,

No need to apologise – if our conversation cannot offer a challenge without offense taken, there is little point to it. I understand your sensitivity to Marxist-Leninist politics with its failed system of government and class based ideology, supposed in its alien doctrine to ‘redeem’ mankind. A process of organic rejection of this ideology occurred – the Berlin Wall collapsed along with Soviet power.

Central to Catholicism is the primacy of conscience, the role of the faithful in defining legitimate laws and norms, and support for the separation of church and state – hence, despite any legitimate critique given, it will survive in some form or another.

I understand the Vatican may not impose teachings on an unwilling faithful for “she [Catholicism] needs public opinion in order to sustain a giving and taking between her members. Without this, she cannot advance in thought and action”(Communio Et Progressio, 1971). The popular notion that whatever the pope says on a serious topic is infallible is indeed an exaggeration of the principle of infallibility – even if I might disagree, in principal, with its very idea.

I’ll also say, and with some irony, the Enlightenment along with Western modernity could only have occurred as a consequence of the clash, military and ideological, between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps the conflict with Islam (not necessarily military) may also prove, in time, just as fruitful.
Posted by relda, Sunday, 7 June 2009 10:51:22 PM
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Glorfindel,
What Russian "stuff” do you teach? Are you in a Russian Department? Do you speak Russian? Russian was a compulsory foreign language at my school, and although the language and culture served as the “carrier” on which the totalitarian ideology was presented to us, I soon learned to separate the two, and gradually developed a sentimental liking of their culture and mentality, notably the poetry of Lermontov (the Russian Byron). Later I learned to appreciate also sobornost (Khomyakov), the spirit of Russian Orthodoxy as a model of religiosity that complements ours, traditionally more individual-based.

Probably also this experience makes it easier for me to seek what is respectable and acceptable to us in the message of Islam, as separate from its unfortunately too many totalitarian and violent manifestations during their “Middle Ages” that many of their adherents are still passing through. This is how I understand also Benedict‘s recent initiative.

relda,
Again, I must agree with everything you wrote, though I do not think it is an irony, but rather a basic trait of how our Christian culture developed, that the Catholic-Protestant conflicts and controversies were needed to give birth to Enlightenment, that I believe has a future as a positive and fruitful contribution to the whole of humanity only as a CORRECTION to Christianity, and not as a self-standing REPLACEMENT of Christian visions of reality and ethics.

I think it is also preferable for the West that Muslims see Western culture in this way, so that the more open-minded among them can conclude that some kind of their own "enlightenment" as a correction to "fundamentalist" Islam - and not a replacement of Islam as such - is also their way to go.

I also agree that conflicts, controversies followed by a dialogue between open-minded Christians and open-minded Muslims could be fruitful, although these fruits are still too far in the future for us to see.
Posted by George, Monday, 8 June 2009 5:39:47 PM
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Hi George,

My degrees are in Russian Language & Literature and history and I've spent about 18 months in Russia, starting with an academic year on postgraduate exchange at Moscow State University back in 1967-68, and most recently leading a cultural tour of Russia in 2006. My career wasn't as an academic but in "retirement" now I teach three classes at the University of the Third Age (U3A), in Russian language, Russian history and culture, and Russian literature.

Over the last few weeks I have taken my Literature students through Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I love Dostoyevsky, apart from his throwaway lines of antisemitism (grievously normal in Russia). He is a profoundly Christian writer. While I marvelled at the amount of theology in The Brothers Karamazov, I had tears in (re)reading parts of Crime and Punishment.

Khomyakov is interesting. Timothy Ware ("The Orthodox Church", Pelican 1963) writes:
"In 1846 the Russian theologian Aleksei Khomyakov wrote to an English friend: 'All Protestants are Crypto-Papists'. What he had in mind was that western Christians have a common background in the past, and have all been greatly influenced by the same events: by the Papal centralization and Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation."

Now, 163 years since Khomyakov made that comment, I could add the enormous impact of the Enlightenment, which produced a pervasive Western tradition of questioning and subjecting everything to Reason. The Orthodox Church – in Greece, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania – has known no Middle Ages in the western sense, no Reformations or Counter-Reformations. While the Russian Orthodox Church was racked by a schism in the seventeenth century, this had nothing to do with theological questioning of longstanding tradition and church practice: quite the reverse – it was an assertion of conservatism against any reform, even a restorative one.

One could posit a parallel between the western church (both Catholic and Protestant) on the one hand, and the eastern (Orthodox) church and Islam on the other: both of the latter have been virtually impervious to change for many hundreds of years.
Posted by Glorfindel, Monday, 8 June 2009 11:03:56 PM
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Hello Relda,

“The Enlightenment along with Western modernity could only have occurred as a consequence of the clash, military and ideological, between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps the conflict with Islam (not necessarily military) may also prove, in time, just as fruitful.” - R

Military development in the modern era certainly has benefitted from the Enlightenment and the Great Divergence. In “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) the opening remark about mathematicians winning the war (WWII) is certainty valid. Yet, before the Enlightenment, military pursuits were often tethered solely to technology, without any good knowledge of the underlying science involved. The Chinese, for example, throughout the dynastic periods were masters of the technology, but the Chinese were not scientific in their approach: Nor was the West, until Greek philosophy rediscovered (as you have noted).

On “Quantification in Medieval Physics” (1961) Crombie notes the importance of recognising between “qualified Procedures and “quantified concepts”. Herein,

“To be complete … a procedure must contain both mathematical techniques for operating the scale theoretically and measuring techniques for using it to explore the world. Technology need contain little more than procedures of these kinds, which provide for the measurements and calculations with which it is concerned. But most science aims to go beyond these at providing explanations by means of a theory of science. Thus, “quantified science” is distinct from “quantified technology”.

The modern way of thinking has led to science-in-warfare. Even as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in religious wars, no doubt mathematics was applied to the technology of war; yet, maybe not in the same way mathematics guides the theory of science as theory is employed to warfare today.

The Greeks gave us Aristotle. Aristotle distinguished between “quality” and “quantity”; wherein, when the Greek philosophy was rediscovered, medieval folk took on debate originally raised by Pythagoras and Plato regarding whether, “the physical concept that qualitative differences might be reducible to differences in geometric structure, number and movement, that is to differences in quantities and … mathematical concepts and procedures” (Crombie). Here we see the beginnings of science to later to be used in warfare.
Posted by Oliver, Tuesday, 9 June 2009 9:05:28 PM
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Glorfindel,
Thanks for “outing yourself”, so let me reciprocate by explaining that I grew up in what used to be post-war Czechoslovakia, and came to Australia in 1968. My insight into the “Russian soul” is certainly not as informed and professional as yours. Of course, in the West Dostoyevsky is much better known than Lermontov and rightly so. However, his sentimental poetry somehow contributed to my “spiritual sustenance“ during my formatting years at times that seemed (politically) so grim and futureless for us all (at 17 years of age I sincerely believed that Communisim had to take over the whole of the Western world before the West comes to its senses).

>>One could posit a parallel between the western church (both Catholic and Protestant) on the one hand, and the eastern (Orthodox) church and Islam on the other: both of the latter have been virtually impervious to change for many hundreds of years.<<

I agree to a point: Perhaps because Slavic mentality constitutes a part of my cultural make-up, I prefer to see Orthodox thinking - religion is as important to the traditional Russian philosophy and way of thinking as is logic and mathematics to the British - as COMPLEMENTARY to the Western (in the sense of the Yin-Yang complementarity), rather than as something that merely has been “virtually impervious to change”: To drive a car safely you need both the accelerator and the brakes pedal. So perhaps the Eastern “brakes“ are as important as the Western “accelerator“ to “drive” humanity forward. Within Christianity, Orthodoxy played the role of the brake, and within traditional Western Christianity it is probably the Catholic Church that plays this role, especially when the “vehicle“ seems to be rolling downhills.

Probably something along these lines can be said about the Christian-Muslim dialogue, or about the East-West complementarity approach to the global cultural scene, but I shall not elaborate. Perhaps you are familiar with Donald W. Treadgold’s two volumes “The West in Russia and China“ (CUP 1973), where he says something similar.
Posted by George, Tuesday, 9 June 2009 11:25:38 PM
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Oliver,

Where scientism is used in an approach giving the implication of having authority over all other interpretations of life (or death), such as the philosophical, religious, mythical or spiritual, it will explain very little.

The answers provided by a century of scientism have been shown as no longer adequate. The optimism of humanism has been shaken by two world wars, a devastating arms race, numerous famines and political crises demonstrating the practical failure in the idea humans can be autonomous from any external and absolute moral standards. It has begun to appear, autonomy is a myth - it has led not to freedom but anarchy or the arbitrariness of totalitarianism. Scientism does not and cannot address this. Materialism too has come to be questioned - more people begin to react to the impersonality of the machine/ computer age and to the dehumanisation of the individual.

There has been a growing realization (in physics at least) that the best understandings of the universe are indeed models or abstractions, and that ultimate reality is far more elusive than had once been thought. Gödel's work on logical systems, Einstein's on relativity, Heisenberg's on the uncertainty principle, and indeed the whole unsettling field of quantum mechanics. There is, as you suggest, quite a difference between technology and science, but it is a mute point.

The only recently elevated god of the secular and benevolent state, that could itself bring about a socialist utopia on Earth, has also become discredited. For, even if all the old gods are fragmented beyond repair, religion will continue to exist, along with our conflicts. People will continue to seek a meaning for being, a foundation for knowledge, an understanding for experience and a basis for human and other relationships - they will need, if not, want all these integrated into a comprehensive belief system by which to live.

A genteel intellectualism within religion, which abandons both an experiential and relational aspect of their source, has not filled the void. As ever, it is the ‘quality’ of ones belief that is important, not its ‘quantity’.
Posted by relda, Tuesday, 9 June 2009 11:45:50 PM
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That's rather a narrow view relda, if you don't mind my saying.

>>The optimism of humanism has been shaken by two world wars, a devastating arms race, numerous famines and political crises demonstrating the practical failure in the idea humans can be autonomous from any external and absolute moral standards.<<

The pain of twentieth century wars is particularly vivid due to two factors. The technology that allowed destruction of lives on such an unprecedented scale, and the technology that allowed it to be recorded for posterity in visual and audible form. This brings it into our modern lives in a way that was never previously possible.

But this does not absolve previous centuries from their own versions of constant warfare, that serially enriched and impoverished countries and peoples across the world.

And it most certainly does not indicate any failure of humanism over and above any other philosophy.

Including religion.

Europe was subject to any number of religion-based wars - the French, the English, the Dutch, the Spanish were all at loggerheads for centuries, for reasons based entirely on the supposed superiority of one version of God over another.

So it is more than a little precious to use the experiences of only one century as evidence to suggest that wars are caused by a failure of "external and absolute moral standards". By which, of course, you mean religious standards.

>>The only recently elevated god of the secular and benevolent state, that could itself bring about a socialist utopia on Earth, has also become discredited<<

Compared with the previous lengthy periods of religion-led states, the secular state can be said to be in its infancy. To leap to the conclusion that it has failed is to ignore the many centuries that religion had to achieve a benevolent result, only to founder in the the carnage of the twentieth century.
Posted by Pericles, Wednesday, 10 June 2009 9:04:16 AM
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George,
Thanks - interesting. I love Lermontov too, 'The Angel' but especially his novel A Hero of our Time. Good descriptive writing about the Caucasus – precursor to Tolstoy’s The Cossacks – as well as psychological portrait of a sociopathic and spiritually bankrupt outsider!

Your belief at 17 that "Communism had to take over the whole of the Western world before the West comes to its senses" has a parallel with Islam today in Europe. I wish far more people would come to their senses, forcing the mainstream parties to stop being politically correct, which leaves it to more or less fascist groups like the British National Party to raise the desperately important issue of creeping Islamization. I wouldn't wish communism on a dog, and I feel exactly the same about Islam, especially if it means that the priceless centres of western civilization (France, Britain, the Netherlands and others) disappear down the toilet.

I agree that the Orthodox and Russian "sobornost'" - sense of collective humanity - is grievously lacking in our atomistically individualistic western culture.

Relda,
Great posting to Oliver. I agree wholeheartedly. This is far from a "narrow” view. The postmodernist condition is a lonely, unsatisfying, cold place to be, although postmodernism has one good consequence in scepticism about fundamentalism. This leaves us open more honestly to ponder "how are we to live?" I was very impressed with someone’s quote from Dr John Dickson that “Only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity; any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism”.

Yes, "it is the ‘quality’ of one's belief that is important, not its ‘quantity’". The Kingdom of God is within you...

Of the dystopian literature, have you read Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1921)? Remarkably prescient, excellent read.
Posted by Glorfindel, Wednesday, 10 June 2009 7:06:00 PM
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Glorfindel, I suspect the obvious solution may have escaped you.

>>...which leaves it to more or less fascist groups like the British National Party to raise the desperately important issue of creeping Islamization.<<

The answer is right there, in front of you.

"Creeping Islamization" concerns you, and you clearly lack a Party in which to place your political trust.

Since we don't have a parallel organization to those UK Fascists here in Australia yet, here's a thought: why not start one yourself?

It would certainly be more constructive than bemoaning the fact that our present political parties haven't yet descended to the level of the British National Party, would it not?

>>I wouldn't wish communism on a dog, and I feel exactly the same about Islam, especially if it means that the priceless centres of western civilization (France, Britain, the Netherlands and others) disappear down the toilet.<<

There's your platform, right there.

Muslims are, what, 1.5% of the population here?

And there are, what, 4% in the UK, 5% in France and 6% in the Netherlands?

Worldwide, what, 25%?

There's plenty of scope there for fearmongering and rabble-rousing, Glorfindel. Go for it.

But I am just a little surprised that you can be so familiar with nineteenth-century Russian literature, and not see the path down which your necessarily mind-poisoning campaign will take you. As you would be only too aware, it was but a short step from Dostoevsky's virulent pro-Orthodox, "pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire" (per Joseph Frank), to his blind anti-Semitism.
Posted by Pericles, Thursday, 11 June 2009 9:24:31 AM
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not..sure..if many recall crystal nacht..[where hitler burned down the reighstad..as the excuse/media-distraction..to do autrocities upon many peoples]..why does this come to mind when i read
http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=2437

then i had a FLASHBACK:

Prof...at College..Found Guilty of STAGING Antisemitic Hate Crime
August 18,2004

On March 9th of this year,psychology Professor Kerri Dunn created a huge uproar..when she reported that her car parked on a campus parking lot had been vandalized...

She reported that her car windows had been broken,..the tires slashed and a“swastika”..as well as the words..“profanity-removed”..and..“PROFANITY-removed”..had been painted on the doors and hood.

It did not take long for the Jewish faculty,lesbian and homosexual students,..and the student organization Hillel of B’nai B’rith..to capitalize on the incident..and demand concessions..from the college administration.

Hillel representative D’ror Chankin-Gould..linked the incident to growing anti-Semitism worldwide..Swastikas and broken/glass[crystal/nacht]..trigger potent memories for..[PROFANITY REMOVED,”..he added...

The campus was closed for an entire day in order to,..''provide time and opportunity for our students and faculty to reflect..on the meaning and significance..of this horrible hate crime.”

The uproar suddenly subsided..when two students came forward to announce..that they had witnessed Professor Kerri Dunn..vandalize her own car

Antisemitic hate-crime hoaxes..are on the rise worldwide...Another occurred in France..just last month..when police announced the arrest of a woman..who alleged that she was the victim of a horrific anti-Jewish assault on a Paris train...reported that six men..had cut her clothes,..drew swastikas on her body and accused her of being Jewish..that..“the thugs also threatened her infant child in her baby carriage.”

The lurid attack had“stunned France”..and led to the usual outpouring of self-righteous fury and pro-Zionist hysteria.”.

The women later confessed that she had staged the whole thing.

Another occurred in New Zealand earlier this week when Jews desecrated..their own cemetery by painting swastikas on their tombs.

The incident was aimed at curving criticism..from New Zealanders after two Israeli MOSSAD agents were sentenced to prison for espionage and holding fake passports...

The..“hate crimes”..are used to instill guilt on gentiles..[goys]..and to scare their own community..into giving money to the Zionist leaders and to organizations such as the JDL,ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center
Posted by one under god, Thursday, 11 June 2009 10:28:12 AM
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Pericles,

I despise your selective vision, your political correctness, your deliberate twisting of words carefully chosen and profoundly tolerant in intent.

I am hostile to the shopfront of Islam because it doesn't want to share the world, it wants to BE the world, and wants to rocket us back to the 14th century. I won't tolerate people who want only to abuse my tolerance. Thomas Mann said rightly "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil." Think about it.

But then again, in your "superior" mindset, the word evil probably doesn't compute, does it? Just the same as when Jesus, taken before Pilate, tells him "for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" ... and then Pilate, the so urbane postmodernist, asks him "What is truth?"

Views like yours are disease of the intellectual and cultural immune system. They represent nihilism, carping cynicism and bankruptcy of values. Together, they are one of the two main reasons for the decline of Western civilization. (The other is the unbridled permissiveness and failure of so many people to take responsibility for their own life choices: a preparedness to let bogan values rule.) Your sneering, hypocritical bent doesn't recognize your own cultural roots and seems indifferent to the determination of CANAILLE (Sarkozy's word: RABBLE) to destroy Western civilization.

I identify with Jesus' AFFIRMATION of life: "I came that they might have life, and have it to the full." What do you identify with?

I have contempt for your attitudes. I'm not interested in prolonging discussion with you, because you are intellectually dishonest and stand for nothing.
Posted by Glorfindel, Thursday, 11 June 2009 1:18:44 PM
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Come now Glorfindel, stop beating around the bush and say what you really mean.

>>I despise your selective vision, your political correctness, your deliberate twisting of words... , in your "superior" mindset, the word evil probably doesn't compute... Views like yours are disease of the intellectual and cultural immune system. They represent nihilism, carping cynicism and bankruptcy of values... Your sneering, hypocritical bent doesn't recognize your own cultural roots... I have contempt for your attitudes. I'm not interested in prolonging discussion with you, because you are intellectually dishonest and stand for nothing.<<

So, with that off your chest, back to the point that you so carefully avoid mentioning.

You wrote, using "words carefully chosen and profoundly tolerant in intent" transcribed here verbatim:

>>I wish far more people would come to their senses, forcing the mainstream parties to stop being politically correct, which leaves it to more or less fascist groups like the British National Party to raise the desperately important issue of creeping Islamization.<<

How should this be interpreted?

It says quite clearly that you believe that our political parties should adopt policies closer to those of the British National Party.

Does it not?

This is not about being "politically correct", is it, Glorfindel?

It is all about being "religiously correct", isn't it?

>>I identify with Jesus' AFFIRMATION of life: "I came that they might have life, and have it to the full." What do you identify with?<<

Leave out the Jesus reference, and I'm right there alongside you.

As long as the "they" he refers to is an inclusive "they" and not exclusive.
Posted by Pericles, Thursday, 11 June 2009 2:20:18 PM
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Now Pericles, you really must stop being so despicably rational and tolerant.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Thursday, 11 June 2009 2:56:07 PM
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Thanks Relda.

Any problem with science is not within science itself. Science has brought many benefits and has led us away from ignorance. As I think we discussed before, in too many minds, science has somehow taken over the role of the arbiter of “all” knowledge from religion. The expectation is too high.

Render unto science that which is science’s… Render unto religion that which religion’s… And you we still have leftovers. Issues arise, where either party claims domain over the leftovers.

Science posits a methodology. Religion often claims to be intermediary between God and Humanity. The ascendancy of science comes about when science finds flaws in the intermediaries’ god-given knowledge. In earlier centuries, it was heresy to explain away the supernatural; e.g., the crystal spheres.

Nineteenth century science, which tended to reduce all things to mechanics, was deficient in a full appreciation of the abstract. Einstein really had one foot in the century of his birth, when he failed to recognize the significance of quantum mechanics. Moreover, what I have just stated is well know to science, wherein since the 1920s, science been far more willing to deal with the abstract. Modern science appreciates the abstract.

My previous post was meant to indicate that where quantification is driven by scientific theory, things tend happen more quickly, than applying mere numbers in technology. The invention the steam engine and the discovery of Pluto are examples of science.

Morality or immorality is the hands of the user; as such, we can have a CAT Scanner or a Hydrogen Bomb. Science is amoral. People and institutions impose vales. Science leads to efficiency and efficacy. Why? Because by the time of the Great Divergence “learned how to learn”.

I think sometimes Christians, who are scientists, because they have mastered abstract numbers, might feel scientific abstraction is analogous to their belief in an abstract god; perhaps, adding that others, who are less numerate, are tethered by the mundane, mechanical worldview, and by way of extrapolation, these unbelievers cannot conceive god: To do so is to confuse the abstract with the transcendental.
Posted by Oliver, Thursday, 11 June 2009 3:50:40 PM
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It's always a pleasure to hear from a true Christian, who has embraced the fundamental values of Christianity, such as loving one's enemies, and turning the other cheek...
Posted by Grim, Thursday, 11 June 2009 4:02:04 PM
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Glorfindel,
>> Communism ... has a parallel with Islam today in Europe. ... I feel exactly the same about Islam, especially if it means that the priceless centres of western civilization... disappear down the toilet.<<

I think one should be more carefull with these parallels: The Communist ideology represented the extreme wing of the Marxist political movements and parties (this includes also the social democrats), and though I still feel uneasy when I hear the word “comrades” I am quite aware of this distinction. And you will agree that an anti-Communist aversion should not be carried over to an anti-Russian aversion. I think the same distinction should be made between fanatical and violent islamists (some use the term jihadists) and Islam that is the religion giving meaning to the lives of over a billion, mostly decent, people.

For the last ten years I have been living in Cologne, where people of Turkish (hence Muslim) descent form about 10% of the population (in Berlin the situation is more complicated). It is true that they are culturally more “visible” here than the 10% in Melbourne of people of Geek descent, and I agree that this is mostly because of their Muslim religion which differs more from our Western tradition than the Orthodox religion of the Greeks. However, they are here to stay, whether we like it or not, mainly for demographic reason. The half-empty churches, reflecting a cultural/religious vacuum into which Islam can move, are not their fault, and it is certainly not them who e.g. supported and pushed through the removal of any reference to God in the preamble to EU’s proposed constitution.

During frequent TV discussions educated Muslims - imams, laymen, young women with or without a scarf - speak German and are familiar with German culture and history to an extent I can only envy, without hiding their Turkish ethnic, and Muslim religious, identity, their faith. Yes, they are aware that time is on their side, but as I said, it is not their fault that Europe created for them this demographic as well as religious vacuum. (ctd)
Posted by George, Friday, 12 June 2009 8:25:55 AM
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(ctd) So I think that rather than lament about our “priceless centres of western civilisation“, we should do all we can to make sure that decent Muslims - and not fanatical, even violent, islamists - as well as tolerant secular humanists - and not anti-religion, even arrogant, secularists - will co-inherit with us these “priceless centres” while moving into the vacuum that we had created for them. Of course, the same tolerance and fairness (as well as firmness when requests go beyond fair play) will be expected from us, Christians. I think something similar applies also to the Australian scene.

Oliver,
>>... scientific abstraction is analogous to their belief in an abstract god ... To do so is to confuse the abstract with the transcendental.<<

I can see your point, though I am not sure what you mean by “abstract god”. What is e.g. an abstract electron in distinction to a non-abstract one?

Christians believe in God as they believe in electrons: In both cases the less educated have a naive picture of what they believe in, whereas those who are more knowledgeable have a more sophisticated idea of the concepts involved. In case of electrons it is science whose authority you accept, even if you might not be a nuclear physicist and expert on QM, whereas in case of (the Abrahamic idea of) God the authority is more complicated (and dependent on your personal and cultural point of view) because in religion the subject is more intrinsically related to the object of the belief/knowledge than in physics. (You yourself used to refer to Polanyi’s indwelling.)

Richard Dawkins said that after Darwin it is easier to be an atheist, whereas I think that after relativity, QM, superstring theory, multiverses etc it is intellectually easier to be a believer into a Reality that is outside the reach of scientific investigations.

Apologies for drifting this far away from the topic of the article.
Posted by George, Friday, 12 June 2009 8:43:08 AM
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Glorfindel:

<< ("Islamization") means that the priceless centres of western civilization (France, Britain, the Netherlands and others) disappear down the toilet. >>

<< ...the determination of CANAILLE (Sarkozy's word: RABBLE) to destroy Western civilization. >>

James von Brunn, the 88-year-old American white supremacist charged with killing a security guard at Washington DC's US Holocaust Museum:

<< Europe, former fortress of the West, is now overrun by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels.

The same is true of Australia and Canada. >>

http://www.smh.com.au/world/overrun-by-hordes-of-nonwhites-and-mongrels-20090612-c5e6.html

Is the similarity just a coincidence?

While von Brunn is a homicidal, Antisemitic, racist nutter, Glorfindel is an Islamophobic Christian who claims not to be Antisemitic.

From where I stand, the distinction appears to be one of degree rather than substance.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Friday, 12 June 2009 3:22:19 PM
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CJ Morgan and Pericles.

Criminals eat breakfast. You eat breakfast. So you’re a criminal? I read Robert Thouless's "Straight and crooked thinking" back in the 1960s. You are using some of the techniques he unmasks.

Equating me with the nutter who shot a guard in the Holocaust Museum in the US impugns my sanity and the intelligence of all who read OLO. I loathe antisemitism and racism which judges only whole classes and not individuals. I have consistently talked about the "shopfront" of Islam, and defined what I mean by that.

I talked about the generally disgraceful British National Party not in approval but in sorrow that virtually *only* they had belled the cat of Islamization in the UK.

Hitler and Mussolini doubtless thought it was a good thing for the trains to run on time. I imagine you do too. Does that mean ... ? So stop being puerile.

I’m not a cultural relativist. I believe in UNIVERSAL human rights. That’s a key reason I am “Islamophobic”.

Nick Cohen's "What's left? How liberals lost their way" (Fourth Estate, 2007) documents well the selective pleading and dishonesty of the hard Left. He writes:

"The single standard that most on the liberal-left and moderate right said they accepted was universal human rights. But in the rubble of the far left … a rival standard developed that was anything but a principled call for universal freedom....

"Its adherents used the end of the Cold War to embrace a kind of nihilism. They could … endorse or excuse any foreign force as long as it was the enemy of Western democracy. … Many of those enemies were in the Middle East whose power structures were unaltered by the collapse of Soviet power and the Gulf War of 1991....

[continued]
Posted by Glorfindel, Friday, 12 June 2009 11:05:13 PM
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[continuation of quotes from Nick Cohen]

"The contempt for universal standards of judgment suited the liberalism of the late twentieth century which placed an inordinate emphasis on respecting cultural difference and opposing integration even if the culture in question was anti-liberal and integration would bring new freedoms and prosperity. It fitted neatly with a form of postcolonial guilt that held that not only we ‘wrong to force western rationality of western science down other people’s throats, but that their rationality or their science was every bit as good as ours.’...

"The Islamist dream of a Caliphate [is of a] sexist, homophobic, racist, imperialist theocracy that would oppress about a billion Muslims…

“In How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World, his dissection of modern delusions, Francis Wheen said that the claims of a portion of the Left to possess a sceptical intelligence had been destroyed by its inability to look squarely at a cult of death.

“Human rights are universal or they are nothing. Relativists have to diminish their importance and say they apply only to favoured groups, races or classes. …

“If the liberals and leftists are wrong, and there are good grounds for thinking that they are horribly wrong, history will judge them harshly. For they will have gazed on the face of a global fascist movement and shrugged and turned away, not only from an enemy that would happily have killed them but from an enemy which was already killing those who had every reason to expect their support.”
Posted by Glorfindel, Friday, 12 June 2009 11:07:28 PM
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TL;DR

The copypasta might have had more impact if you hadn't mentioned Hitler.

Dasvidania dudarina.
Posted by Bugsy, Friday, 12 June 2009 11:31:15 PM
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Pericles,

Rather than accusing technology of having “allowed destruction”, a far broader perspective will view man as the root cause. Oliver has pointed out that science is amoral - so too is technology. The USE to which it (science or technology) is put creates the ‘evil’ - our ‘human condition’, if you like, is the directing ‘force’.

The Secular Humanism you infer has its limitations, with its codes of behavior and morality created through reason alone. This philosophy generates a humanity which is the measure of all things. Karl Marx’s definition on humanism is interesting, “…This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully-developed humanism equals naturalism...” Humanism is understandable in reacting to ecclesiastical despotism, prejudice and superstition. However, as a rationale allied to the “scientific method”, individuals ultimately have no place in the scope of this mechanistic interpretation.

Religion is merely human expression. Intolerance breeds injustice – borne equally from both the religious and non-religious. Injustice invariably leads to rebellion and retaliation, generally, this leads to escalation where reconciliation becomes impossible - i.e. war.

Glorfindel,

Thanks for your comments. I haven’t read Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" but have read George Orwell’s well known 1984 (apparently strongly influenced by “We”). We are a far cry from Orwell's fictional totalitarian state of Oceania but the general proclivity of the modern state, with its almost unlimited powers of surveillance, threat to the individual and penchant for constant propaganda, were foreseen more accurately by George Orwell than almost anyone else. Perhaps our own ‘state’ offers sufficient threat here before we need worry about Islam. I’m sure, as George also suggests, decent Muslims would share our fears.

Hi Oliver,

Your allusion to abstraction hints on understanding the elusive – intuition is one such example, theology another - and sometimes best left alone. Voltaire said that the difficulty of ‘throwing a little light into so much obscurity often discouraged him’. Nevertheless, this theologian persisted, and finally “arrived at knowledge unknown to most of his confreres” The ‘queen of the sciences’ may indeed be a temptress who makes fools of those who fall for her.
Posted by relda, Friday, 12 June 2009 11:31:18 PM
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You can wriggle, Glorfindel, but it was you yourself who apply the tarred brush to yourself, not I.

>>I talked about the generally disgraceful British National Party not in approval but in sorrow that virtually *only* they had belled the cat of Islamization in the UK.<<

Your position remains the same.

You now claim to feel sorrow, that mainstream political parties, presumably including the one you support, does not include anti-Islamic policies in their platform, as do the "generally disgraceful" British National Party.

This is in no way different to my previous point, that "you believe that our political parties should adopt policies closer to those of the British National Party."

If there is a difference between feeling sorrow that these policies are not present, and wishing that they were, it is far too subtle for me.

For the sake of clarity, and to avoid giving you further offence,it might be handy if you were to clarify which of the BNP policies you approve of, and which you don't.

And this has nothing at all to do with "universal human rights", but more along the lines of "loving thy neighbour".
Posted by Pericles, Saturday, 13 June 2009 1:30:35 AM
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A shaggy dog tale.

Big Dog: (spoiling for a fight, spies Kelpie through the paling fence)
Woff! Woff!
>>One anal-retentive, selfish, dog-in-the-manger, fearful, comfort-loving miser<<

( Kelpie sniffing around Huntaway , who is followed by a string of puppies, and telling her that in the interests of sustainable population she should limit production to two puppies per litter , doesn’t respond to Big Dog)

(Big Dog tries again)
Woff !Woff!
>>Admit it, Banjo. You just don't like dem furriners, do you?<<

( Kelpie continues fraternising with Huntaway and is now dreaming of doing a bit of littering with her, again, ignores Big Dog)

Big Dog: (grits his teeth and wanders off to spray someone else, spots Relda howling to the pack across the way )
Woff! Woff !
>>That's rather a narrow view relda, if you don't mind my saying<<

Russian Wolf Hound: (of the very best pedigree, who just happened to be passing)
>>Great posting relda<<

Big Dog: (infuriated at RWHs having had the temerity to contradict him, & perhaps, a little envious of his fine pedigree)
>>There's plenty of scope there for fearmongering and rabble-rousing, Glorfindel. Go for it <<

(Enter Mad Dog, a mutt masquerading as a pure bred Pomeranian)

Mad Dog: (excited by all the barking coming from Big Dog, joins in)
Yap! Yap! Yap!
>> Now Pericles, you really must stop being so despicably rational and tolerant<<

( then he takes up his usual position, behind the hind legs of Big Dog,
only his head shows as he continues to growl & bare his teeth at RWH)

Conclusion: if you’ve got pedigree, be wary of mixing it with mutts.
Posted by Horus, Saturday, 13 June 2009 8:22:43 AM
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Why is it that so many of OLO's idiots are obsessed by dogs?
Posted by CJ Morgan, Saturday, 13 June 2009 8:31:08 AM
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Thanks for bringing up "1984", Relda; it has been on my mind.
I don't think the 3 protagonists of Orwell would be governments, or religions. Current evidence suggests they could well be corporations.
'Kulu' was kind enough to post an interesting piece on my site, about "Why The Peaceful Majority Is Irrelevant, by Paul E. Marek."
http://thecomensality.com/avasay/?p=109
This was first posted on Arutz Sheva, -Israel National News.com. It basically an expansion of Burke's sentiment that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
I think the sentiments expressed on this thread show the variations in approbation. Even Glorfindal makes a distinction between Islam and Islam 'shopfront'.
It seems the problem we need to address, is fanaticism. Why do some people of all pretty much all religious -and sometimes even non-religious- persuasion, become fanatics?
I have to say, America's interventionist policies must share some degree of culpability.
Posted by Grim, Saturday, 13 June 2009 9:01:19 AM
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Grim,

The article ‘Why The Peaceful Majority Is Irrelevant’ in your link is salient in many respects. I guess the fact that very few people were ‘true Nazis’ in Germany is quite significant. The return of national pride was created for many, and a general apathy (or ‘she’ll be right’) in the remaining majority created a vacuum – despite Germany’s deep religious heritage.

Nazism, at its core, had/has nothing redeeming about it – i.e. it was and is inherently ‘evil’ but not recognised as so before WWII through most of Western ‘sensibility’. True enough, Islam has more than its fair share of fanatics and that fanaticism is quite transferable, again, where a vacuum exists – but, I do not find a rotten core beneath its ugly skin.

“The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous… the only group that counts [are] the fanatics who threaten our way of life.” This is more a reflection of our weakness in the West - with many somewhat paralysed in being unable to recognise and act upon any real threat. Per se, it isn’t Islam.
Posted by relda, Sunday, 14 June 2009 10:08:52 AM
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Horus, and to anyone else it may concern :-)

Caught between fire and water, and seeing an Elf-lord revealed in his wrath, they were dismayed, and their horses were stricken with madness. Three were carried away by the first assault of the flood; the others were now hurled into the water by their horses and overwhelmed. [Lord of the Rings, 'Many meetings']

Probably not the end of the Black Riders, but we live in hope.
Posted by Glorfindel, Sunday, 14 June 2009 11:25:12 PM
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Relda,
"In the Muslim understanding, the Koran comes directly from God, unmediated. Muhammad simply wrote down God's eternal and immutable words as they were dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel. It cannot be changed, and to make the Koran the subject of critical analysis and reflection is either to assert human authority over divine revelation (a blasphemy), or question its divine character. The Bible, in contrast, is a product of human co-operation with divine inspiration. It arises from the encounter between God and man, an encounter characterised by reciprocity, which in Christianity is underscored by a Trinitarian understanding of God (an understanding Islam interprets as polytheism). This gives Christianity a logic or dynamic which not only favours the development of doctrine within strict limits, but also requires both critical analysis and the application of its principles to changed circumstances. It also requires a teaching authority."

"Do Muslims believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose Sharia law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats of violence?"
Posted by Constance, Monday, 15 June 2009 11:12:09 PM
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Relda,

"The history of relations between Muslims on the one hand and Christians and Jews on the other does not always offer reasons for optimism in the way that some people easily assume. The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic conquest and domination in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula and the Balkans makes abundantly clear. In the territory of modern-day Spain and Portugal, which was ruled by Muslims from 716 and not finally cleared of Muslim rule until the surrender of Granada in 1491 (although over half the peninsula had been reclaimed by 1150, and all of the peninsula except the region surrounding Granada by 1300), Christians and Jews were tolerated only as dhimmis[14], subject to punitive taxation, legal discrimination, and a range of minor and major humiliations. If a dhimmi harmed a Muslim, his entire community would forfeit protection and be freely subject to pillage, enslavement and murder. Harsh reprisals, including mutilations, deportations and crucifixions, were imposed on Christians who appealed for help to the Christian kings or who were suspected of having converted to Islam opportunistically. Raiding parties were sent out several times every year against the Spanish kingdoms in the north, and also against France and Italy, for loot and slaves. The caliph in Andalusia maintained an army of tens of thousand of Christian slaves from all over Europe, and also kept a harem of captured Christian women. The Jewish community in the Iberian peninsula suffered similar sorts of discriminations and penalties, including restrictions on how they could dress. A pogrom in Granada in 1066 annihilated the Jewish population there and killed over 5000 people. Over the course of its history Muslim rule in the peninsula was characterised by outbreaks of violence and fanaticism as different factions assumed power, and as the Spanish gradually reclaimed territory."

Islam is not a religion but it is a totalitarian ideology (Mohamad Cult). Muslims or Mohamadists/Mohamedims have no freedom of religion. And you know that, don't you?
Posted by Constance, Monday, 15 June 2009 11:14:47 PM
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Constance,

It is more a matter of metaphysics that pertain to our statements about what “comes directly from God.” Dogmatic statements, however, certainly draw differentiation in ‘belief’. The great 13th century mystic poet Jalal ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) expressed the metaphysical when he wrote, “The lovers of ritual are one group and those whose hearts and souls are aglow with love of God are another.” i.e. there are only two groups of religionist, and Egyptian-American imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, cites them:

1. Those who have seen the vision of God, and they are one group regardless of their nominal religious affiliation, and
2. Those who are exclusive, militant and hard-line in their religious interpretation; they too are also one group, regardless of their nominal religious affiliation.

Abdul Rauf also said religion is a powerful tool and if correctly used, it has led to a vision of God, “...but when usurped by violent men, religion has proven extremely effective in rousing the masses to violence and aggression.” Do you not agree?

In his book, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-'Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination, William Chittick rightly comments (with some resonance to Benedict’s Regensburg Address): "Somewhere along the line, the Western intellectual tradition took a wrong turn. Arguments arise over when and why this happened. Many important thinkers have concluded that the West never should have abandoned certain teachings about reality which it shared with the East... In putting complete faith in reason, the West forgot that imagination opens up the soul to certain possibilities of perceiving and understanding not available to the rational mind." Dialogue certainly does not begin by kissing either the Koran or our Bible.

Undoubtedly there are Muslims, as there are Christians or Jews, who stand over the carcass of a Western humanism with its deadly attachment and preference for materialism. The West, through gradually stripping herself of spirituality, has forgotten that man is not just composed of flesh and blood, but also, of the Quranic nafs (self) and ruh (spirit). Surely, if reflecting on New Testament theology, you would understand this basic perception?
Posted by relda, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 11:23:10 AM
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George,

By an abstract God, I meant something other worldly or super-mundane.Perhaps this term is not fully genuine because to animists the God of the Rock is tangible or, Ra is tangible to an Egyptian worshipper of the Sun. The Greeks and Romans did not see their gods as elusive, e.g., Priam sees* Hermes in The Iliad and to Romans the Idea of a divine emperor was not blasphemy. In the Classical Era, there was a lesser distance between Divinity and Humanity. That said, to the three major monotheist religions, especially Islam, God is something afar and intangible.

I appreciate that mathematics can offer separate realms/dimensions:

In matrix algebra, in general, the values of the determinants of matrices can range between minus-infinity and plus-infinity. Values for the determinant of a correlation matrix, however, range between 0 and 1.00. Perhaps, the theist-in-the-street might see the two-poled infinites in general matrix algebra analogous to god’s realm and a (two-poled) delimited range analogous to Humanity’s limited existence. The analogy is weak.

With much effort we can come to grips with hard mathematics or just trust the numbers.

While, say, Abraham’s faith in god was more akin to a modern day trust in numbers, the realm of the supernatural is transcendental. Abraham’s trust in god might be akin to a Primary School pupil’s trust in her understanding of an electron. One the other hand, Penrose’s or Gell-Mann’s equations defining an electron are complex, yet not transcendental. Likewise, manipulation of imaginery intergers is not transendental.

At a lower-order understanding, maybe, simple understanding of an electron and Abraham’s simple faith match on trust. Faith/Trust comes before understanding (Augustine concept). At the higher-order of understanding, the mathematics of alternative realities remains mundane (Earthly); whereas, the architecture of the transcendental would be super-mundane. Moreover, trust in the numbers** comes after understanding. (Supposed or Substitutionary)understanding of the transcendental comes after faith/trust (Augustine concept). Substitionary, because we cannot understand God from God's frame of reference.

O.

[*There are epiphanies in Christianity. The beholder being startled or not recognizing the divinity/messenger follows Greek themes.

[**One mightnot comprehend what the numbers represent.]
Posted by Oliver, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 4:05:11 PM
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Relda,

Karen Armstrong (The Battle for God) presents the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand as one of modernity. Spain was increasing her horizons. The Christian Church was not left behind. In fact, for a while, the two seemed conjoined. Granada had been conquered. The Muslims were “flushed out of Europe” and the Jews, who did not convert to Christianity, were killed or expelled. For the Christian Spaniards change was “empowering, liberating and enthralling”. For the vanquished the experience was, “coercive, invasive and destructive”. For me, Spain’s Medieval History reads not unlike The Thousand Year Reich, a new order for the fortunate some and oblivion for the unfortunate others. Both Medieval Spain and WWII Germany seem to have reasoned God is always “on the side of big battalions” (Voltaire).

The push towards modernity gave birth to a Counter-Reformation. “Ad fonts,” “back to the wellsprings !” (Erasmus). So, in the sixteenth century, there was tension between those whom would have logos before mythos, ridding the Church of centuries of doctrinaire accretions and ordodox others, like members of the Council Trent (1545-1563), whom established the Catholic Catechism.

Throughout the centuries the tension between logos and mythos has been sustained. Significantly, fundamentalism appears to rise out of this tension.

Armstrong suggests mythos is in the domain of the psyche and hidden. Logos is in the domain of conscious and pragmatic. When logos encroaches on mythos, there is a fundamental revolt. When mythos encroaches logos, remarks are strongly critiqued. Yet, logos and mythos are complementary, as presented by Armstrong.

Even if Moses Parting of The Waters is myth, the myth is unimportant, because the people of the period knew what parting of the water stories (there are several) symbolised, to the pyche. The people indwell (Polanyi) in this realisation. Likewise, if I might take the liberty to extrapolate, Creationism, as a fundamentalist response, is inappropriate, because Creationism tries to counter Logos – but the locus of the Biblical stories does not stem from logos: This fundamentalist response is outside science (logos) and counter-intuitively is also outside of mythos.
Posted by Oliver, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 6:08:18 PM
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Relda,
I must read up more on Sufiism. As a shopfront it is certainly more attractive than the present shrill contender in Islam. The gentle humour and poking fun at human frailty and deficiencies in human logic in tales of Mulla Nasreddin (eg in Idris Shah's books) is far indeed from the Taliban!

I was intrigued by Jalal ud-Din Rumi's division of the religious into two groups: lovers of ritual, and lovers of God. It's clear Sufiism is of the second group, contrasting with Islam seen as only a set of observances.

When I apply the dichotomy to Christianity, however, I get confused. A week ago, by invitation, I attended a High Mass at an Anglican church. It was all ritual, ceremony, vestments, incense, organ and choir - but spiritually dead: three scripture readings picked at random, totally unrelated, with no expository preaching. "Churchianity", not Christianity, I thought. No detectable element of "hunger and thirst for righteousness" which is the clear objective of more evangelical Protestantism.

I would put evangelical Protestantism in Jalal ud-Din Rumi's second group, with Sufiism. Would High Anglicans appreciate being included in the first group, with Wahhabi Islam? <Grin>

It's interesting that the West, while stripping itself of spirituality, nonetheless contains a fair number of people manifesting underlying spirituality, however anarchically they pursue it - the God meme, as Dawkins puts it. Many have abandoned traditional belief systems for "New Age", through a pick-and-mix bewildering variety of forms of self-obsession, in Eastern religions, Tarot, Astrology, channelling, numerology, Theosophy, Scientology, extraterrestrial fixations, "self-development" with as many varieties as cheese - and nature worship (Wicca and paganism). And they ask traditional Christians how can you be so gullible as to believe all that stuff?!

William James ('The Varieties of Religious Experience') said “Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is in the last analysis, the end of religion.” A plausible summary, but not all embracing: it surely doesn't apply to Jalal ud-Din Rumi's first group?!
Posted by Glorfindel, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 6:40:20 PM
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Thank you constance, relda (and Oliver, as far as I could understand you) for an interesting exchange of historical and biblical facts and interpretations.

Oliver,
>>By an abstract God, I meant something other worldly or super-mundane.<<

Again, if I understand you properly, you mean what others call the Divine, sometimes Godhead, or what Paul Tillich sees as the first (of three) meanings of the object of theism: "Theism can mean the unspecified affirmation of God. Theism in this sense does not say what it means if it uses the name of God..." (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 183). It is what any educated 21st century theist, e.g. Christian, has to believe in as a necessary presupposition for his/her particular faith (determined by his/her personal cultural, educational etc background).

You still did not say what you would call an “abstract electron”, however I gather from what you wrote that you agree that there are different understandings (including misunderstandings and “non-understandings“) of both “God” and “electron”, these differences being given by the historical, educational etc context of the subject trying to understand these concepts.

Excuse me if a do not comment on your excursions into mathematics. Mathematics is simply the third level (after sensual perception and instruments) that we need to contact, understand and interact with the material world around us. It is irrelevant to a belief in God, in whatever form you conceive Him, except as the vehicle for logical thinking.

Only on a very private level can mathematics serve as the repository of concepts and relations helping the subject to understand, to explain to himself/herself, metaphysical concepts. The ability to communicate these private insights to others presupposes a proper understanding of the mathematics involved.
Posted by George, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 7:24:11 PM
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It has been an interesting and educational thread.
Oliver, your earlier statement:
"The Greeks and Romans did not see their gods as elusive, e.g., Priam sees* Hermes in The Iliad and to Romans the Idea of a divine emperor was not blasphemy"
made me remember Julian Jaynes. I have often wondered if (and I mean no offence to any contributor to this thread) there are not more than a few bicameral minds still out there.
Posted by Grim, Tuesday, 16 June 2009 10:07:32 PM
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Oliver,

Karen Armstrong, as a former Catholic nun and now religious historian certainly gives insight and some provocation on “the long battle of mythos and logos”. Armstrong contends that the world's great belief systems - first, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy, thereafter Kabbalah, Christianity and Islam - spring from, then reject, the mythological element in the human imagination, preferring the abstract, the rational, the ethical - that which Armstrong defines as Logos. Despite his probable aversion toward Armstrong, Sells was perhaps attempting to get this point across when referring to the West’s loss in emphaisis on Eastern Christian mysticism and the Cappadocian Fathers (or Cappadocian philosophers), particularly Gregory of Nyssa.

I certainly agree with Armstong when she says, “...Muslims should be allowed to come to modernity on their own terms and make a distinctive Islamic contribution to it" – just as Christianity has.

The fundamentalist response (i.e. Creationism) is, I agree, what you term “inappropriate”. Logos, as Armstong contends, must correspond to facts, while mythos she says, is yoked to transformative ritual – so yes as you more or less suggest, Fundamentalists don’t tend to be all that deeply intuitive.

Glorfindel,

I think there a many nominal Christians who are indeed ‘confused’ by their own ritual and ceremony. ‘Churchianity’ seems only to further layer this confusion. As Karen Armstrong has been brought into the dialogue, it’s perhaps worthy to note her argument of myth as being inseparable from ritual, and that both are a kind of practical psychology. For her, myth is a symptom of our metaphysical anxiety, an unreciprocated appeal to god/s ‘who have let us down’.

Perhaps educated people from scientific cultures tend to think of myths as either upmarket fairy-stories, primitive attempts at history-writing or simple-minded efforts to explain why there are seasons and rainbows etc. – but they miss the point. Even if, “a myth”, as Thomas Mann once said, “is a lived fiction” they continue, in their combination with ritual, to give meaning and value in the face of death and suffering
Posted by relda, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 9:57:55 AM
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George,

My trek into mathematics was an endeavour to relate to your interests. I did so, on the assumption Christian mathematicians might feel that an atheist* would better understand God, if said atheist understood deep mathematical concepts. Here, as stated, I see abstract concepts in mathematics a weak metaphor for the transcendental. Yet, I agree, the simple understanding of God (Abraham) can be likened to seeing an electron as a small, solid ball.

As for an abstract concept of the electron, I might try the impossible and envisage an electron’s position and velocity at once or, as a buddle of quarks having bounded energy and charge, negative for matter or a positive charge for antimatter (positron).

It is very hard to conceive of an electron, without a (false) mental image. In my mind’s eye, I see a blurred white ellipsoid against a dull black background - Surely, an impoverished vision. The abstract electron might be described in terms of an internal truth, i.e., its constitution and its energies; or, alternatively, an external truth - its manifestations at the atomic level. Basil of Caesarea in describing God made a similar distinction between ousia (essence) and energeiai (operations). Mathematics objectifies the electron, yet its essence emerges from a quantum world and the Electron itself is a part of the Gestalt of a larger reality.

Envisaging the abstract electron might be compared with trying to see all surfaces of a cube at the same time or the Trinity of Gregory of Nazianizus:

“So sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of Him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am escapes me.” (Oration 29:6 – 10)”

In sum, contemplation (theoria) of either the Christian Trinity or the abstract election is challenging. Both have a reality in more than one realm.

[* I see myself as a sceptic rather than an atheist.]
Posted by Oliver, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 5:06:14 PM
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Relda,

Islamic scholarship has deep roots. The Islamic “House of Wisdom” was established in 830 CE to undertake universal research and make translations. Abbasid caliphs sponsored the translations of Aristotle, Plato and the Hellenistic sciences. Before the Christian invasion, “…it would be accurate to say that between the seventh and thirteen centuries … Islam not only experienced a “golden age” of science but also eclipsed anything found in Christian Europe. This Body of work influenced both content of medieval science and attitudes about the relationship between scientific ideas and theoretical concepts.” (Whitney) For much this time, the Christian West was in a Dark Ages. In fact, the Middle East, the Far East and India all made progress in areas of mathematics, astronomy and medicine exceeding the West’s knowledge. When logos (Armstrong’s meaning) is not encroached upon by mythos, significant progress is made.

On the other hand, the Muslims had translated works into Latin and, in later centuries the Chinese tried –unsuccessfully- to explain celestial mechanics to the Jesuits. So it seems the knowledge was available to be transferred, yet one wonders whether the Western Church and State(s) did not see the folly in subordinating logos to mythos?

Western modernity, especially from the Great Divergence, has separated logos from mythos, wherein episteme acts to guide techne (Crombie). Yet, in the wake of the West’s push forward, other societies have not countered with better science, rather by accentuating mythos and diminishing logos. Fundamentalism is nurtured. Even Western theists are touched: Sells would like to take us all back to pre-Enlightenment values.

Sells from my perspective is “lost in time,” living between 325 CE and 1760 CE. His perspective on the Christian Trinity could be tethered to Eastern mythos. The Cappadocian model of the ineffable ousia (internal to God, hidden) and the three prosopoi (external from God, revealed expressions) is powerful. Yet, perhaps, Sells’ tethers to Western orthodoxy are too strong to see Eastern mythos become Western kerygma.

Grim,

I believe Satre held that personal consciousness is benefitted by the existence of others: Presumably, he would have (invented?) God as the ultimate other.
Posted by Oliver, Wednesday, 17 June 2009 9:35:04 PM
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Oliver,

Without wishing to contradict you, mathematics does not help you “to understand God”. It is only the awareness of the fact that even physical reality cannot be understood without quite unintuitive conceptual models built on rather abstract mathematics - an awareness brought about only recently by Einstein, QM and the latest physical theories - that can help you to accept metaphysical models, built on rather unintuitive conceptual constructions, as corresponding to some reality.

Of course, these constructions/models are not based on mathematics. They are - at least in case of Christianity - based on a combination of mythological, scriptural, traditional and philosophical considerations. They are models of a reality that we have no direct approach to (in the sense of scientific investigation), and - in distinction to physical reality - we do not even have the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics to mediate our understanding.

It is not easy to comprehend what QM, superstring theory, etc are all about - you need a lot of non-trivial mathematics for that - but it is even more difficult to understand whether, why, and under what circumstances, do these theories adequately describe reality.

The same with the uncritical understanding of e.g. the Christian concepts of God and the numinous (sacred) as professed by the “philosophically unsophisticated“ believer: it is easier than to understand in what sense are these models of reality compatible with the understanding of physical reality provided by contemporary physics and biology.

In the first instance we speak of (uncritical) faith, in the second instance we speak of a critical faith becoming “post-critical“ (Polanyi, Dulles), about “faith seeking understanding” (St. Anselm) compatible with the findings of contemporary science.

This is only very marginally related to the article‘s topic, so perhaps we should leave it at that.
Posted by George, Thursday, 18 June 2009 12:21:32 AM
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Oliver,

It is not in dispute that, “..Islam not only experienced a “golden age” of science but also eclipsed anything found in Christian Europe..” What needs to be noted, however, is that after nearly a thousand years of unrivalled innovation, contribution and achievement in all spheres of human endeavour, the Muslim world experienced a serious decline and disintegration during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As most scholarship would contend (including Armstrong), the western mould of modernity has been superimposed on its worldview, and Islam has been unable to relate to the modern world except through its awkward and often painfully alien framework. Nursel Guzeldeniz seems also to have given this scant attention in her article – most people do not see Sufism, or that which is in sympathy with it, currently as a driving force within Islam.

Dr. M. Umer Chapra, an eminent economist, social scientist, Muslim scholar and the winner of the King Faisal International Prize said, “We Muslims have to change ourselves and change our institutions in order to become a blessing for mankind”, Chapra also pointed out, although Muslims represent 22 percent of world population, they contribute only eight percent of the global GDP – this is certainly an underlying ‘logos’ (or fact), rather than myth.

Undoubtedly, the world which Islam had built over the centuries, its civilization in the broadest sense of the word, has been seriously undermined. Islam as a spiritual force is alive and well (as with Christianity) but its external manifestation or practical dimension is currently suffering from an unprecedented crisis; as had occurred within Christianity, Islam’s ecclesiasticism is now being severely challenged. It is not Islam, a personal faith, which is our problem. It is Islamism, an ideology that is our problem, and this surely relates well to our topic - where we're in dire need of a “faith seeking understanding”.
Posted by relda, Thursday, 18 June 2009 9:11:47 PM
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Oliver,

How many Christian atrocities have there been compared to Islamic atrocities? Please give examples.

Your rabid anti-Christian stance is so tiresome. The founding father of genetics was actually a Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel. A Jesuit, Matteo Ricci brought Western cultural and scientific relations to China. The Jesuits also contributed greatly to seismology and astronomy. Irish monastaries and Charlemagne preserved much of western knowledge.

The so called Islamic Golden Age was not any product of Islamic scriptural knowledge, nor was it due to any degree of devoutness of religion Islam, rather it was due to short-lived opportunity of freethinking and rationalism induced by the famous Mu’tazillites and facilitated by the liberal minded Abbasid Kingdom.

The Quran emphatically forbade pursuance knowledge and learning that falls outside the scope of Quran and Sunnah for fear of going astray by emulating path of error and heresy. Quran directly contradicted the very principle of Mu’tazilies. Hence, Islamic theological knowledge had very little to contribute to the attainment of the Golden Age.

Today, almost 95% of world's leading scientists are the sons of Christians. Should we then consider that Christian religion/Bible are the storehouse of all science? Does the world history support this? Or, should we say that ancient Hindu Kafirs got science of mathematics (numerals) from Rada krishna?
Posted by Constance, Saturday, 20 June 2009 3:50:05 PM
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A French scholar, Sylvain Gouguenheim has challenged Islamic intellectual heritage to the West. He claims knowledge acquired by the West is the product of its own discoveries. The West benefited from the translations done at the request of abbots and bishops by clerics familiar with the Greek language, like Jacques de Venise who, after studying several years in Byzantium, spent the rest of his life translating Aristotle and other Greek philosophers at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, in Brittany. The West also benefited from a constant relationship with Byzantium, where Greek was the everyday language and Byzantine scholars were quite familiar with the Greek heritage. Thus, most of the knowledge discovered or transmitted throughout the period extending from the 8th to the 12th centuries resulted, not from Islam, but from the intellectual appetite of European Church elites. This explains the first Western Renaissance, known as the Carolingian Renaissance, which took place at the turn of the 9th Century.

“Greek knowledge became accessible to the Islamic world thanks to the work of Eastern Christian scholars who translated Greek works into their own Syriac language, and then from Syriac into Arabic. Islamic civilization is itself culturally indebted to early Christian scholars. For example, because the translation of Greek documents into Arabic raised major problems occasioned by the total absence of scientific terms in that language, it became incumbent on Christian Melkite translators to develop most of the Arabic scientific vocabulary. They were responsible in particular for translating into Arabic 139 medical books by Galen and Hippocratus and 43 books by Rufus of Ephesis. Also of interest is the fact, attested by several Muslim writers, that the Arabic “coufic” writing was developed by Christian missionaries in the 6th Century."
Posted by Constance, Saturday, 20 June 2009 4:43:46 PM
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Constance,

Your latest post was very interesting.

My mention of the Islamic achievements at a time when our civilization was young was meant to underline societies tend to ebb and flow. Comments made were not especially directed at Christianity beyond its domain over medieval Europe. Before the Western Roman Empire collapsed (476 CE), Vulgar Latin held ascendancy over Attic Greek, consequently much classical knowledge was lost. The West entered a Dark Ages and established Fiefdoms.

In the late fifteen century, (Catholic) Spain emerged strong and was “modern”. So, in a sense, we have been there before. Only then, the dawning in Spain was largely founded on economic success rooted in unification, colonisation and the slave trade. The Muslims and Jewry suffered as a result.

In the seventeenth century, Industrialisation and Democracy acted to supplant the Christian church in the West: A process that worked well, up until the beginning of the twentieth century, after-which there has been a revival in Christianity.

Today, with globalisation, “democratic values” encroach on the Middle East, as these values encroached on the West 250 years ago.
People burn Western flags in the Middle East and Western others are fearful of Islam, seeing “religiosity” at the crest of the wave of change, yet it is really secular waters which threaten to unseat Islam, as before, when Christianity was unseated. Moreover, those in the Middle East having tribal or religious credentials will bark “religion”, but it is loss of their sovereignty they fear most. On TV, how many times have you heard a Sheik, exclaim, “we will accept Democracy slowly, but it will be our kind of Democracy”?

I have no quarrel with history you present, especially Byzantium. Yet, the early Christian West, as a transmutation of the Holy Roman Empire, did borrow from the Orthodox East and the Middle East.
My comment about the Jesuits was to emphasise that they wouldn’t listen – mythos over logos. China’s main interest in the Jesuits was the West’s superiority in cartography. Mendel’s work was suppressed for some decades, if I recall. I consider the Bible an ancient scripture (mythos).
Posted by Oliver, Monday, 22 June 2009 12:15:30 PM
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cont...

"Today, almost 95% of world’s leading scientists are the sons of Christians. Should we then consider that Christian religion/Bible are the storehouse of all science? Does the world history support this? Or, should we say that ancient Hindu Kafirs got science of mathematics (numerals) from Rada krishna?" (Mirza in Constance)

The point here I believe is in the same vein as Relda and I have discussed. Religiosity is apt in the domain of mythos (Armstrong). Note, Mirza states earlier in the article you cite, Einstein didn't receive his scientific knowledge from the Torah. Scientific knowledge is logos. (not be confuses with logos the The Word, another meaning)

Science (logos) has struggled against religions (mythos)for centuries. Four hundred years ago the Christian Church would have seen itself the storehouse of all knowledge and also the storehouse of the firewood to burn those who disagreed.

Science involves theory and technology, but that relationship was not understood by the medieval Byzantine or Indus empires.

Armstong uses the word "mythos" in a descriptive sense and I doubt she sees myth, superstitition and mysticism, other than as a common state of human affairs and something highly significant to our history.

The Torah and the Bible are mythos.

There are several sites on the Internet which outline the religious atrocities you mention; both Christians and Muslims are cited. One major genecide that is rarely mentioned is that of the native populations of the Americias by Christians. If memory serves, North American native clans were given smallpox laced blankets, as gifts, by Christian settlers.

My readings of Joseph Needham would suggest the Chinese were quite knowledgeable in the areas of seismology and astronomy, before Marco Polo or the Jesuits. The Jesuits didn't want to drop the Ptolemic solar system and they thought the Chinese backgound for not believing in it. Why? Because space was the domain of the supernatural (mythos.
Posted by Oliver, Monday, 22 June 2009 6:11:35 PM
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from
http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=2720

On June 13th,..30000..“tweets”..begin to flood Twitter with live updates from Iran,..

Now,YouTube is providing a..“Breaking News”..link at the top of every page linking to the latest footage of the Iranian protests..

Welcome to Destabilization 2.0,..the latest version of a program that the western powers have..been running..for decades in order to overthrow foreign,..democratically elected governments..that don’t yield to the whims of western governments and multinational corporations.

Ironically,..Iran was also the birthplace of the original CIA program for destabilizing a foreign government.:..It’s 1953 and democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh..is following through on his election promises to nationalize industry for the Iranian people,..including the oil industry of Iran which was then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The CIA is sent into the country to bring an end to Mossadegh’s government...They begin a campaign of terror,staging bombings and attacks on Muslim targets in order to blame them on nationalist,secular Mossadegh.

They foster and fund an anti-Mossadegh campaign amongst the radical Islamist elements in the country...Finally,..they back the revolution that brings their favoured puppet,the Shah,into power...Within months,..their mission had been accomplished:..they had removed a democratically elected leader who threatened to build up an independent,..secular Persian nation and replaced him with a repressive tyrant whose secret police would brutally suppress all opposition.

The campaign was a success and the lead CIA agent wrote an after-action report describing...The pattern was to be repeated time and time again in country after country..(in Guatemala in 1954,in Afghanistan in the 1980s,..in Serbia in the 1990s),..but these operations leave the agency open to exposure.

What was..needed..was a different plan,..one where the western political/financial interests..puppeteering the revolution would be more difficult..to implicate in the overthrow.

Enter Destabilization..1.1...This version of the destabilization program is less messy,.offering plausible deniability..for the western powers/overthrowing a foreign government's...

It starts when the IMF moves in..to offer a bribe to a tinpot dictator in a third world country...to privatise

He gets 10%..in exchange for taking out an exorbitant loan..for an infrastructure project..that the country can’t afford...When the country inevitably defaults on the loan payments,..the IMF begins to take over..[continued at link]
Posted by one under god, Wednesday, 24 June 2009 8:59:07 AM
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Oliver,

I just wanted to make the point that Christianity (or Catholic Church) has not been anti-science etc. The Pope at the time of the instigation of the Spanish Inquisition did not support Isabel and Ferdinand’s practices. I do not wish to partake in frivolous dialogue of the very details of what or what not the Jesuits did – I just wished to make a point. You just seem to always highlight all the misdemeanours of Christianity and curiously without any criticism of Islam? You come across as another typical secular Islam apologist who has an agenda of de-valuing anything Christian. If you do not have a critical eye for Islam, you are colluding with Islamists in detering any reformation within Islam. I wish to speak of what some religions have influenced in the world we have today and the reality. Sufism seems to be the only religious part of Islam and they do not appear to have much influence in Islam's reality today.

Part of Pope Benedict’s response to the protest at La Sapienza Univeristy:-

"When a group of students and professors refused to hear the pope speak at their Roman university they were denying their own tradition.

"In a lecture intended for delivery at La Sapienza University in Rome earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI undertook to address this issue and to show that faith cannot exist without reason and that reason itself cannot flourish without the faith. His whole argument is based on the concept of the Western university, whose emergence in the Middle Ages was not some sheer historical fluke, but an outgrowth of the intellectual requirements of the Christian faith itself -- a point which suggests why universities did not develop in Asia, Africa or the Middle-East."
Posted by Constance, Thursday, 25 June 2009 11:21:26 PM
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Cont'd.. The pope first notes that "the true, intimate origin of the university lies in man's craving for knowledge". In this sense, "the Socratic questioning is the impulse that gave birth to the Western university". He then explains that it is precisely as a response to this kind of questioning that the Christians of the first centuries embraced the faith: "They accepted their faith as a way of dissolving the cloud that was mythological religion so as to discover the God that is creative Reason as well as Reason-as-Love."

"Moreover, while truth "pertains first and foremost to seeing and understanding theoria, as it is called in the Greek tradition", it is "not only theoretic." This is because "truth makes us good and goodness is true". The God that is "creative Reason" is also "Goodness itself". The knowledge that God gave us through his incarnation in Christ is thus both a theoretical and a practical knowledge. Revelation is not only about what we need to know, but also about what we need to do. “

Mythos versus Logos? And I'm pretty sure it was Karen Armstrong who Ayaan Hirsi Ali (terrific Somali woman who supports women and infidels) called "ridiculous".

‘The Catholic Church is the reminant of Constantine trying to keep the declining Roman Empire together. Likewise, Mohammed needed to unify the Arabs too, agsinst the encroachment of Christianity and the Persians.” By Oliver. Oh yeh, KKK – they’re everywhere representing Christians all over the world??

By the time the Crusades finally began, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world. Europe had been harassed by Muslims since the first few years following Muhammad’s death, as early as 652. The first Crusade began in 1095… 460 years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies, 457 years after Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies, etc etc. The Crusaders only invaded lands that were Christian. The period of Crusader “occupation” (of its own former land) was stretched over less than two centuries.
Posted by Constance, Thursday, 25 June 2009 11:38:10 PM
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Dear Constance,

Thank you. I will need a litte time before I can reply appropriately. Busy.

In the meantime, regarding knowledge extrapolating Armstrong (and others), the position wasn't so much the Christian Church was ani-science, rather it determined what knowledge -which includes science- must be.

Regarding Christianity, in relation to Islam, Christianity would seem to be the more advanced at coming terms with Western modernity. Both would seem to maintain the exclusivity and parochialism noted by my Toynbee cite. Toynbee sees having an uncompromising god makes a religion successful.

My position is not be an apologist for Islam (or Christianity) rather to underline both religions and Judaism act true to their mandate as monetheist religions, only that Islam does have the concept of "The People of the Book". My quote from the Koran merely noted that there is some accommodation by Islam of, Judaism and Christianity. Whether this acceptance is always put into practice is another matter.
Posted by Oliver, Monday, 29 June 2009 8:39:40 AM
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Constance,

1. “The Pope at the time of the instigation of the Spanish Inquisition did not support Isabel and Ferdinand’s practices.” – Constance.

Thank you. Can you please provide a valid citation?

My understanding is that Pope Alexander VI favoured Spanish modernity and further was happy to have the realms Catholic monarchs expand into the New World. Moreover, the forced conversion or exile of the Jews (especially) and Muslims ensured the cleansing of those not of the Catholic faith.

“When Granada fell the event was hailed by an eyewitness as 'the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain'; though a Muslim commentator in Egypt saw it as 'one of the most terrible catastrophes to befall Islam'. Ferdinand's triumphant message to Rome, that 'after so much travail, expense, death and bloodshed this kingdom of Granada, which for 780 years was occupied by infidels, has been won to the glory of God, the exaltation of our Holy Catholic Faith, and the honour of the Apostolic See', was echoed by acclamation throughout Europe. A grateful Alexander VI in 1494 (a year when he needed Spain's help against the French) bestowed on the sovereigns the title of Los Reyes Catálicos.” (Catholic Kings)

Reference: Spain, 1469-1714: A Society of Conflict. Contributors: Henry Kamen (1991).

The conquest of Granada allowed the “Catholic Kings” [Of Spain and Portugal] to divert their attention to exploration, although Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was financed by foreign bankers. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan) formally approved the division of the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which Spain and Portugal signed one year later, moved the line of division westward and allowed Portugal to claim Brazil.

Referenence: Spain - A Country Study. Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz (1988)

There was a counter-modernisation movement in the mid-sixteenth century which led to the Catholic Catechism and the codification of dogma. Amplifying dogma countered monarchical centres of power outside of Rome.

2. One would hardly call the history of the Jesuits trivial.

3. Ethnic cleansing is more than a misdemeanour.
Posted by Oliver, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 3:50:09 PM
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Constance,

1. “The Pope at the time of the instigation of the Spanish Inquisition did not support Isabel and Ferdinand’s practices.” – Constance.

Thank you. Can you please provide a valid citation?

My understanding is that Pope Alexander VI favoured Spanish modernity and further was happy to have the realms Catholic monarchs expand into the New World. Moreover, the forced conversion or exile of the Jews (especially) and Muslims ensured the cleansing of those not of the Catholic faith.

“When Granada fell the event was hailed by an eyewitness as 'the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain'; though a Muslim commentator in Egypt saw it as 'one of the most terrible catastrophes to befall Islam'. Ferdinand's triumphant message to Rome, that 'after so much travail, expense, death and bloodshed this kingdom of Granada, which for 780 years was occupied by infidels, has been won to the glory of God, the exaltation of our Holy Catholic Faith, and the honour of the Apostolic See', was echoed by acclamation throughout Europe. A grateful Alexander VI in 1494 (a year when he needed Spain's help against the French) bestowed on the sovereigns the title of Los Reyes Catálicos.” (Catholic Kings)

Reference: Spain, 1469-1714: A Society of Conflict. Contributors: Henry Kamen (1991)

The conquest of Granada allowed the “Catholic Kings” [Of Spain and Portugal] to divert their attention to exploration, although Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was financed by foreign bankers. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan) formally approved the division of the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which Spain and Portugal signed one year later, moved the line of division westward and allowed Portugal to claim Brazil.

Referenence: Spain - A Country Study. Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz (1988)

There was a counter-modernisation movement in the mid-sixteenth century which led to the Catholic Catechism and the codification of dogma. Amplifying dogma countered monarchical centres of power outside of Rome.

2. One would hardly call the history of the Jesuits trivial.

3. Ethnic cleansing is more than a misdemeanour.
Posted by Oliver, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 3:50:15 PM
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Constance,

Please see above. It would interesting to learn of your citation(s. My history books take the opposite view.

Thanks.

O.
Posted by Oliver, Saturday, 4 July 2009 6:20:49 PM
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I’ve been busy too, so sorry for my tardy response. I also had trouble finding this article. I’m only a recent subscriber.

Ethnic cleansing? What are you saying?

As I said before, I only wished to make a point as an example of Catholicism/Jesuits non-anti science etc. stance. No, I did not mean the Jesuits legacy was trivial at all. You just seem to have a tendency to getting into details of the more obscure historical traits and particularly go out of your way in looking for disparaging evidence in the case of Christians. I’m just reacting to your anti Catholic stance which is rather irrelevant in today’s world. Apart from the reformation, which should set an example for Muslims to ponder, as they need one desperately. It is matters Islamic which are more relevant in today’s world. You have heard of Christian charity haven’t you. Many Christians, especially the selfless nuns doing just that throughout the world who by the way also work with and for Muslims. And it seems many charities in Muslim countries with a small Christian minority are actually dominated and run by these very Christian nuns. But yet even they also get disparaged and chucked into the same wagon as Muslim women wearing hijabs, naqabs etc. - superficially placed in comparison. How dare they! Those anti-Christian secularists just can’t seem to ever see the forest from the trees. No, the history of Christianity hasn’t always been pretty but at least they are able to present today solid brotherhood to mankind in many ways, more than I can say for Islam. And by the way, it was the crusaders who invented chivalry.
Posted by Constance, Sunday, 5 July 2009 12:51:17 AM
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...Cont'd “The population of Aragón was obstinately opposed to the Inquisition. In addition, differences between Ferdinand and Pope Sixtus IV prompted the latter to promulgate a new bull categorically prohibiting the Inquisition's extension to Aragon. In this bull, the Pope unambiguously criticized the procedures of the Inquisitorial court, affirming that,
"many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other low people—and still less appropriate—without tests of any kind, have been locked up in secular prisons, tortured and condemned like relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.”[6] (Wikepaedia)
“Sixtus consented (1478) to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and then found the Spanish ignoring his rebukes for illegal procedure and jurisdiction and his demands for moderation. (Columbus Encylopedia.). A patron of arts and letters, he built the Sistine Chapel, which takes its name from him.”

"When Granada fell the event was hailed by an eyewitness as 'the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain'; though a Muslim commentator in Egypt saw it as 'one of the most terrible catastrophes to befall Islam" by Oliver. Hello, wasn’t it the Muslims who invaded a Christian country? How about the terrible onslught that befell Christianity. Your biased selectivesness is a worry.

“The Crusades were provoked by the harassment of Christian pilgrims from Europe to the Holy Land, in which many were kidnapped, molested, forcibly converted to Islam or even killed. (Compare this to Islam’s justification for slaughter on the basis of Muslims being denied access to the Meccan pilgrimage in Muhammad’s time).

Muslims (and secularists) who compare crime committed by people who happen to be nominal members of other religions to religious terror committed explicitly in the name of Islam are comparing apples to oranges. By contrast, Islamic terrorists staged nearly ten thousand deadly attacks in just the six years following September 11th, 2001.
Posted by Constance, Sunday, 5 July 2009 1:08:01 AM
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Hi Constance,

We are citing from different time lines. The persecution of the Muslims and Jews occurred between 1492 into the 1550s. Pope Sixtus IV was dead.

I am aware that during the Crusades Christians killed Christians, not only Muslims. France and the Pope also bumped-off the Knights Templar, for the money.

Moreover, Islam is just a bloodied as Christianity. Yet, for either to call their atrocities "misdeamenours", just doesn't sit with what happened.

I guess my stance in this thread is, "people in glass houses, shouldn't throw stones" and Christianity in power has been very different to Jesus on the ground. Also, identify Jesus with the first century and Christianity from 325 CE (Nicaea).

The Jesuits were excellent scholars and their missions were not only to China, being pioneers to the English colonies, now Canada and the US.

The thing with China missions was, the Jesuits put aside worthy Chinese knowledge, seemingly, because it contradicted the Vatican. Facts would not be entertained if these conflicted with Holy Writ.
Likewise, there have been upteen documentaries on the same theme, on Galilleo. Regarding the latter, The Vatican only acknowledged Galileo as correct in in 1990s.

Both Christianity and Islam are tribal, given their clan roots. Monotheism in the broader brush of history was seen as atheism. That is, atheism can be defined in context on the prevailing religious practice (Armstrong). It is hard for the monotheist religions to mix, except, perhaps, in a secular state recognizing freedom to choose on matters of faith. Each is sees themselves as correct and the "one and only," essentially by definition.

Muslims are meant to recognize, "The People of the Book" - most don't. Christians are meant love their (Muslim) enemies - most don't. Both religions have become assembleys of identification, rather than an ideology in good practise.

I check back in about a week.
Posted by Oliver, Sunday, 5 July 2009 1:30:34 PM
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Hello Oliver,

Your excuse of both religions (well I do not consider Islam a religion, anyway) of having tribal roots is slack. Yes we all have clan roots, even secularists. Are you now dismissing even your own ethnic clanish background?

I only cited Sixtus as I said before, he was the Pope around at the time of the beginning of the Spanish inquisition. Why have you distorted the only point I intended to make and have taken it somewhere unrelated. You have done this before. And you are still ignoring my statements on Christian clergy helping their fellow man.

Anyway, I understand why Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Karen Armstrong “ridiculous”. It is said she ignores all relevant details such as historical facts and inanely prances about in her Pollyanna ways. I can only admire people like Ayaan, Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji, all women and defenders of infidels and the female species, and also require bodyguards. Brave realists, not flakey Pollyanners, are my heroes.
“Muslims are meant to recognize, "The People of the Book" - most don't. Christians are meant love their (Muslim) enemies - most don't. Both religions have become assembleys of identification, rather than an ideology in good practise.”

The Koran lacks one of the golden rules “Love Thy Neighbour”. Christians do not punish those who wish to convert to other religions. Christians do not consider a woman to be half a man. Christian prayers are not tainted when a woman walks by. Christian family dishonour do not have violent consequences for their women. Unlike Islam. Yes, followers of either religion may not always love each other. I repeat, the Christian clergy have bucket loads of evidence of doing God’s work (particularly Catholic nuns) all over the world, even in Muslim dominated countries. Cont...
Posted by Constance, Thursday, 9 July 2009 11:47:21 PM
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... Cont. The roots of today’s charities have come from those terrible Christian clans and most of them still run by them. Even, recently on one thread that George presented on the Pope’s visit to Jordan, the only charity operating for disabled people in Jordan was run by Colombine Sisters. Sorry Oliver, actions speak louder than words. I didn’t seem to hear of any assistance coming from any of the oil rich Arab countries with their squillions donating to the Indonesian Tsunami – just leave it to the Western kafirs to look after.

Are you able to differentiate between the lives of Jesus and Mohamad (a sexual hedonistic egomaniac) for a start. Now if each of the named religions were in inspired by each of these men – Muslims and Christians would have to be poles apart as there could not be any stronger example of contrast. Muslims are on occasion are called Mohamadists which would actually be a more accurate name that reflects their truer ideology as a totalitarian cult. I recommend you check out the ex-Muslim sites and any ex-Christian sites if are able to find? – just google and swallow.

The anti-religious are incapable of any sincere analysis of religions because they just don’t do that do they? I’m not particularly religious, just defending my western heritage, which it’s civilisation has Christianity in its “clannish”! roots, which has given me freedom I appreciate today. I didn’t earn my freedom, I was lucky enough to inherit it. I’m no bigot, but consider myself broadminded and have travelled for over 3 years overall in a lot of different countries. I even got a ride while hitchhiking by a Muslim truck driver and stayed in his house overnight with his family. (I’m not against any Muslim decent individual.) Those days are gone in today’s world where fundamentalism is becoming more mainstream in Islam I’m afraid and which has become a Trojan horse in the West.
Posted by Constance, Thursday, 9 July 2009 11:51:52 PM
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Constance,

Thank you for your comment. I have replied on the wrong thread. Sorry.

Please refer:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2909&page=15

O.
Posted by Oliver, Saturday, 11 July 2009 7:07:26 PM
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