Boaz,

You challenged me on women rights & slavery in the Quran and without being repetitive to whats on other threads, I proved to you that Quran position was the best in comparison to other scriptures.

Your approach towards the Hadith is where you become ‘vague’ on the truth. Islam to Muslims is the Quran. Hadith is taken only to what does not conflict with the Quran as for us religion is the message “God’s word’ and not the messenger.

The hadith you pick are believed only by those who are terrorists and are brainwashing material. But the remaining majority of Muslims rejects their existence as a truth.

To help you understand, let me simulate an example on your own religion:

- If I say there is a GOB (Gospel of Barnabos) that exists, banned by Pope Glacious I in the year 492 AD (78 years before Mohammed (PBUH) was born): that is a 'true statement'.
- If I say the contents of GOB talk about Jesus prophecies, Mohamed (PBUH) coming, why Jesus had to disappear and why and when he is coming back before the end of time: that is a ‘true’ statement.

- Now, if I claim that “All Christians believe in GOB” : that is a ‘false’ statement.

This is basic ‘logical processing’. You claim to be a 60 y.o. missionary with expertise on Islam. Your actions and the way you process logic simply conflicts with your claim.

Why occupy your mind with it? There is something metaphysical out there, but religion is a set of theories provided to the masses to keep order that differs according to culture, location and time of founding. It is like playing the pokies, none may win but there are at least billions of people who are wrong and are following a false theory supposing one was correct.

Lets take what you have been brainwashed with so far in your life. I have not had a specific religion, is this the reason I am one of the few who can take a step back and say, "hey there is something out there but until i know, or my future generations do, I am not conforming to another mans theory or way of living"?.

By subscribing to a theory, you are worshiping false gods/prophets to other religions.

Lets get this in perspective. The churches core role was order and governance of the masses by providing them with a belief structure back in the time when moral responsibility was far more powerful than the framgmented legal one. We needed it then to retain order. For those who are religious, not only do you have thousands of religions to choose (and who says the oldest or wealthiest or most popular is the correct one), but most people just subscribe to what they were born into, in essence having no choice at all. They all conflict in theme, theory and worship, so what is right and wrong?

For most on this topic i will be ridiculed for this. Why waste your time at this stage of our understanding worshiping a creator, we have to prove that intelligent design exists first. Then, who or what was it? if you need support ring lifeline, and put those hours of worship into something productive. We would have no basis for wars, hatred and terrorism.

We create these problems for ourselves. We have legal order now, leave the scriptures to the history books until we know for sure, then we can revisit and see who was backing the winner.

Dear Dawood,

Sorry did not ignore your posting. Although you need to know that all my insights, research, modernisation efforts and bloggs are self funded (sorry better to be open and set your expectations upfront).

If this is not an issue for you, please email me if you like on:

chess101@shinyfeet.com

Peace,

Dear All,

I just wanted to add a few words on poverty. I appreciated some of the points made about money not being everything. I don't think you need to be rich to be happy.

I think though when we are talking about poverty at a global level we have to be careful. There are so many people that live in really appaling conditions. People who don't have enough to eat, no access to safe drinking water, no basic health care, no shelter.

And just slightly above this, people who might have just enough to eat and maybe some basic form of shelter, but for whom any minor mishap, like a broken leg, can mean that they fall immediatley below even this basic level of subsistence.

And I don't even want to go into less basic goods, like education!

So, yes, of course, we don't all have to subscribe to a western understanding of what constitutes a decent job, or of the amount of things people need to be happy, but at this basic level, and we are talking huge numbers of poeple, I think it is not about a particular cultural understanding of what is a good life, we are talking about a level of deprivation that would be recognised as unacceptable by everybody, I think.

Schmuck

arjay, dispossesed Aboriginals who learnt to farm in the 1800's and 1900's were not allowed to own farms or land - their job was to make money for their white "owners".eventually white labour increased and the Aboriginals were shunted into town . they carried the bush for years and got nothing except whiteman's diseases and rubbish food in return .don't be so mean.
we and all immigrants owe them a huge debt- and john howard is too lousy even to say sorry .

Bronwyn, I was disgusted at the time of the Tampa by what appeared to me to be a completely one-eyed stance by both Bob Brown and Natasha Stott-Despoja.

They simply completely condemned Howard’s actions. They paid no credence at all to the following…..

1. Asylum-seeker movement to Australia had built up to a point where it was about to explode. We knew about many boats ready to leave Indonesia. Movement from Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries to this ‘halfway house’ had been in the news for months. The word had spread far and wide that Australia was clearly the most desirable destination for those who could get that far across the world. It was well and truly time to take real action.

2. If more boats had been allowed to come, hard action would most definitely have followed, and a larger number of people would have been caught up in the asylum-seeker / mandatory detention mess.

3. Asylum-seekers were taking the places of refugees. Those refugees who are brought to Australia as part of our immigration program are among the world’s most needy people.

4. Australia has every right to protect its borders and to make sure that immigration is under full control.

5. One of the main tenets of sustainability is a stable population, or at least, not a rapidly growing population. If the asylum-seeker issue had been allowed to escalate to the scale that is was about to, there would have been literally many thousands added to annual immigration numbers. I always thought that the Greens and Democrats were fundamentally concerned about sustainability. That’s why I joined the Greens. But expression about sustainability seemed to be next to non-existent.

I didn’t quit the greens because of Bob’s compassionate concerns for asylum seekers. I quit because his expression seemed to be so terribly lopsided, supported fully by Natasha, and with no dissent shown within either the Greens or Democrats.

I’m on the road for the next month, so my postings might be a few days apart, or at worst, cut off til first thing next year. Cheers