I have Just completed my Anthropological study on Zoroastrianism: Zarathustra, and about to embark on the Book of Enoch Second edit.
Dr Mary Boyce has a number of publications as she is considered to be the authority on this subject, Professor Revilo Oliver has some points also, thus in Chapter 9 above,” Slovak Enoch” and confirms some dates of the inception of Monotheism. With limited resources to link Egyptian Pharos Akhenaton to attempted monotheism and why. Dates are helpful.
Thus Ethiopic script of Ge’ez, are in Hieroglyphs. (Bit out of my league) just the English version. Will help understand what happened.
Cambridge Ancient Histories of the Middle East are exellent sources of infomation also. Publications are hard to come by.
All of this just to figuer out what happened.

The problem with the Qur'an is its historical authority. It was writen 600AD whereas records concerning David were recorded contemporary to his time. When you have stories being told 1600 years after the event not taken from original records the stories take on contemporary influences.

This is the position with the Qur'an, as it adopts the tribal warrior attitudes of its contemporaries. Being 550 years after Jesus answer to being servants rather than lords over people is the answer to human conflict. The religious Jews were in his day in conflict with Rome, and desired its overthrow with swords. Jesus teaching is the only amswer to human relationships.

For Mahomet servanthood showed weakness, while being a warrior showed strength. The only answer to conflict is resolved in servanthood. Our role in Pakistan is an act of goodwill and charity; a service to the distressed. Most Muslim websites see Western charity as an attempt to win religious converts. This identifies how they think, they cannot give charity unless it wins converts to Islam. We should do it because we love our neighbours as Jesus taught.

I spent an hour today trying to find out how many of the victims of the Bali blast were Muslims. I could'nt find any good statistics. It does appear, however, that most if not all the Indonesian nationals murdered by the Islamists were Hindu. This conclusion is from the fact that Bali is 90-95% Hindu, the papers mention that the victims were cremated and the services had to be completed before the Hindu Galungan holiday.

So much for the theory that the bombing was an attack against Islam. That is a rather strange idea, Irf. Muslims kill infidels to hurt Islam.

Like I said, radical Muslims kill, moderates make excuses. There will be more jihad killings and our Muslim friends here will continue to make excuses. Have you no shame?

Of course, it was the victims own fault because they were immoral.See
http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16865508%5E2702,00.html
So
bikinis = immoral and bad
killing + suffering + mutilation = the good work of Allah.

How disgusting these people are. Is there no end to this? Notice in the article how everybody has to respect Islam: "Afif said Muslims and Christians would only live side by side when Christians learned to respect Muslim culture."

Of course, Islam respects nothing. It is a licentious, corrupt religion that feeds on lies, illusions, hate and murder. Well, it does respect the torturer and murderer they call Mohammed.

Answers to questions: a. 50% of Egyptian Nobel prize winners (see above) murdered by Islamists - a record unmatched anywhere. b. The Saudis formally ended slavery in 1964 - well within my life time. Did anybody see the 'honor killing' done on the streets of Denmark by the 'Religion of Peace' in broad daylight last month?

An attack on Islam? Yeah, right! So then if Muslims killing infidels hurts Islam, would you argue that Muslims killing Muslims would promote Islam?

Philo,
A book you would enjoy would be, Ayn Rand, "The New Intellectual",
This is an excellent read and well presented, what you say above is true, in the context Rand writes, The Obvious answer is in abundance and well descriptive to a point you can put faces to the writings, and understand easily. There lay the missing link.
Islam is the Antitheses, along with modern religions of Marxism spurned on by Universal pantheistic Ideology, or to reinvent God in all forms as Philosophers had done.
Unlike all other religions, Islam was the only Cult to recruit by Murder and death, and was not the evolutionary progression as the pathological minds would convince us, it like Modern Socialism or Communism is a primitive Ideology of Psychopathic thinking, not much has changed in 1400 years. And that is courtesy of an Iranian Professor, and Islamic Scholar. On the run of course. He taught Komaine. And there was another with grand thoughts and the modern prophet of Islam, or so he said. Hmmmm, get the picture.
Read on about Mazdak religion, Islam and communism derives from that. Commonalities are awfully familiar.
Communism has dissidents, Islam has unbelievers or Infidels. Some of the Psychiatric patients are writing the medical Journals,and History me think.

Kaktuz,

You got a disturbing way of thinking yet you confirmed Irf and my opinion.

“Muslim peace prize winner was assassinated by extremists”.
Who was the so called Islamic Jihad blowing up in Egypt since 1970s till 1990s? Only other Muslims. Who was behind the assassination plots of presidents / rulers of Muslim countries to replace them with Taliban like governments?

Why is it then that most North African countries (namely Muslim countries) by early 90s had outlawed or had death warrants on the Bin Laden/ Al Qaeda when your US/European countries were protecting Ayman Zawahri (leaving happily in the UK and Switzerland) and Omar abdel Rahman (was happily living in the US until Oklahoma bombings).

The simple truth is: They just want extremists regimes in the Muslim countries, they could not care less about West or East, I lived in these countries for the first 29 years of my life and saw these groups preaching at uni and streets. Overwhelming majority of Muslims rejects them. Sorry but my conclusions are based on practical living experience and not google surf or a couple of websites.

Wish you find your inner peace (piece by piece :-))

Philo,

It is our belief that the Quran is God’s word revealed to Mohamed (PBUH).
We do not see it as a historical document since the prophet lived most of his life as a merchant not a historian (since he was illiterate) or ‘suddenly a swordsman at 53’ like some anti-muslim want people to believe.

As for charity I agree that Christians do a lot of charitable activities. I don’t agree with the “muslims aid only those who convert” statement because Muslims don’t have an equivalent to the millions of missionaries in your religion. A lot of missionary work in Africa by the way is “converts only charity”.

-All,

The ‘Islamic finance’ and compulsory charity is closest to ‘socially responsible capitalism’ (share the risk and reward, beyond the interest based economy).
Equity mate by commbank is a practical example of how it works.

All the best,

G'day All

Just found this site and it's my second post.

Mr Boaz, interesting what you say about the ICV removing that comment about Mohammed from their site, considering that........

'Faith or belief in the Oneness of God and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad;'

Is one of the five pillars of islam.

He's also mentioned in the adan or call to prayer.

He is mentioned in some the articles on the ICV's site but there is no link to an article dealing explicitly with him.

Watched Compass on Sunday. It was about Waleed Aly and his wife Susan. Strange. Mohammed or the prophet wasn't mentioned once either even though their daughter shares his favourite wife's (Aisha, his child bride) name.

Perhaps they're distancing themselves from this rather unsavoury individual's character, at least for the time being.

Wouldn't be at all surprised