//Suseoffline, it is a bit early to call this terrorist apologist an Australian, he is a long way from over being an Egyptian yet.//

He was born in Melbourne. That's Melbourne, Victoria, Australia - you seem to be under the misapprehension that Melbourne is in Egypt. As far as I know, there is no place called 'Melbourne' in Egypt. Maybe you're thinking of Memphis?

He attended Wesley College, a Uniting Church school in Melbourne (Australia) and the University of Melbourne (Australia).

You must have driven you geography teachers to despair, Leo.

Susie's belief system as a feminist is as repulsive as the death cult hence her inability to reason. The only thing she has learn't well as a feminist to do is to misrepresent. Islam and feminism have much in common. They don't mind lying for their cause.

To get back to topic [Christ, I'd hate to go fishing with some of you fellas, we'd end up way to buggery out to sea], after working through bin Warraq's brilliant expose of Islam, on

http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/books/Ibn%20Warraq%20-%20Why%20I%20Am%20Not%20a%20Muslim.pdf

I agree with John's sympathetic conclusion that any Muslim in the modern world, and particularly in such rampantly non-Muslim societies as ours, is placed in

"a difficult position the would-be reformers of Islam are in. They need to be able to reject parts of the doctrine as ancient and not applicable. But as soon as they say what they reject, they are labelled as traitors and infidels.

"However this is what they must do. They need to specify that verses like (8:12) are "contextual" and don't apply today; otherwise there will never be any "reform" of Islam. The next step, of course, is to realise that the whole concept of divine revelation is flawed, and abandon it altogether.

"What has given rise to the great global upsurge in Islamism is a much greater awareness, due to increased literacy, education and technology, of what the doctrines of Islam actually say. So they can't be ignored. We can't just pretend that the war verses don't exist, and engage in an endless game of selective quotation."

As an atheist, I'm forever thankful that Christianity had such a tendency to split, from the Nestorians, Arians, Manichaeans, not to mention the Catholic-Orthodox split a thousand years ago, the fracturing of Catholicism - even before the invention of the printing press, local-language literacies and the Reformation - into rival orders and sects, etc., laying the ground for its partial dissolution.

Perhaps Europe's very diverse history and broken geography helped, its myriad of different languages and local histories, whatever it was that forced many people across fractured Europe to think for themselves and learn, painfully, through trial and error.

[TBC]

[continued]

Perhaps the European foundation on Roman law, with its focus on the rights of the person; perhaps the agreement between Pope Gregory and the Emperor Frederick to at last split the Caesar-Pope roles and 'render unto Caesar etc.' and to recognise, each reluctantly, the initial separation of Church and State.

Perhaps the Magna Carta helped; perhaps they all indirectly contributed to the Renaissance and Reformation, with their bloody internecine wars; perhaps, finally, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 resolved many issues of Church and State, the rights of individuals - but out of all these forces, different aspects of what was to become the Enlightenment struggled into life.

All Utopias, religious and otherwise, lay their own traps: the more explanatory an ideology which justifies total power in the hands of a few, whether it is communism, Catholicism or Islam, the more painful and difficult it is - and will be - for adherents to question, criticise, 'reform' and to move forward. In Islam's case, from the deserts of 7th-century Arabia to the modern world in 2015-2016 and beyond.

I wish those questioners well, with all my heart. They are the great hope of a post-Muslim world. Waleed Aly's notion of an 18th-century 'Reformation', by the Wahhabis, is confusing Reformation, major transformation, with a reactive and an extremely reactionary Counter-Reformation, major retreat backwards to Islam's most repressive times. I hope that he will re-consider, thoroughly re-think that position, although I sympathise that it will be incredibly difficult for him to do. He would need to take teqqiya to new heights and in different directions.

Joe

Yes, Toni, three of the bombers in the terrorist attacks on London (7/7), were British born and educated, but never got over being Pakistani.
Information for Suseoffline, about the terrorist apologist. Waleed was asked on the Project, about Boko Haram, the terrorist muslim group which kidnapped 200 schoolgirls.
““So who is this group exactly?” he was asked.
Not once in his answer did “Muslim” or “Islamic” pass Aly’s lips.
“They are a really, really hard group to define because they are so splintered and so diverse,” he said.
“What we do know though is that the broader movement is a terrorist movement and they’ve been wanting to overthrow the Nigerian government and establish a government of their own.
“But beyond that, this particular group, who have done this particular thing, it’s hard to identify who they are and they might just be vigilantes.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/waleed-aly-avoiding-the-obvious-truth/story-fni0ffxg-1226909383829
Besides lying about the terrorists, Aly is a climate liar, asserting that global warming has not stopped.
Despite where he was born, it is difficult to identify anything Australian about his behaviour.

Perhaps, after an ordinary common-or-garden atrocity, purportedly in the name of Allah, we need to ask any 'spokesperson', in what way such an atrocity is NOT in accordance with Islam ?

Since Muslims must obey the Koran to the letter, since it is supposed to be the very words uttered, or written, by Allah himself/herself, and since it can never be altered in any way (except when scholars wish to abrogate inconvenient verses), then the terrible choices for any Muslim are to either accept and obey [Islam=surrender, submission, total obedience], or to cease being a Muslim. There are currently no other courses possible, not that ceasing to be a Muslim would be an easy course, since one could be murdered as an apostate, in accordance with the Koran.

So maybe courageous journalists could try that: ask any 'spokesperson', after the next atrocity in the name of Allah, today or tomorrow, whether or not that atrocity should be totally condemned as not being in accord with the Koran and hadiths.

Joe