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The Forum > Article Comments > What’s good for the Islamic goose is clearly not good for the Catholic gander > Comments

What’s good for the Islamic goose is clearly not good for the Catholic gander : Comments

By Irfan Yusuf, published 8/6/2007

Ordinary Catholics have as little say in Cardinal Pell’s appointment or dismissal as ordinary Muslims do in Sheikh Hilali’s.

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Nice to see where this thread is going.

FH may I concur with others in saying that you are a welcome presence on the boards as you are prepared to argue a case rationally. You, however, are not the kind of Muslim I was referring to in my previous posts, although you still seem to have an issue about other's 'respecting' your religion/beliefs/faith - I would repeat that I do not.

Seems to me that though faith may be perceived as a virtue by many, it is also a powerful tool of manipulation that can be (mis)used to have others strap explosives to their bodies in the (I hope you agree) misguided belief that they will be rewarded for their actions.

THIS is the kind of Islam, that I (and I am sure 99% of Australians and though I do not claim to speak for you, I would assume you do not condone this sort of stuff) have a big problem with:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/cut-off-his-head/2007/06/22/1182019314903.html

Rabid intolerance of the freedoms of expression that we take for granted in the secular world does not sit well with secular humanists who:

1. know how hard these freedoms were to win, and
2. know the benefits of living in societies that embrace these liberties - open-ness and transparency and NO sacred cows (so to speak)

So my questions to you are:

1. what do you think when you see these sorts of reactions to Rushdie's knighthood (let alone the now-rescinded fatwa)?
2. what is the source of such intolerance?
3. don't such responses, particularly those after the Danish cartoons, simply prove the point that the cartoons were out to make?

cheers
Posted by stickman, Friday, 22 June 2007 11:25:38 AM
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Hi George,

Scientist with a degree in theology in my preferred option. I have seen lots of theologists trying to tailor science to religion while it should not be the case.

There are many Muslim scientists with degree in theology and the one that come to mind is Dr. Zaghloul El Naggar, a geologist, you can google him or visit his website.

Dr Naggar started from the basic assumption that we should consider all the elements (science, religion and nature) as ‘invitations to think and reflect. If the source is one then they should all be parallel and do not conflict or contradict each other.
The end game form him was proving theology through science and science through theology.
Unfortunately only part of his work is translated to English. I will dig out more and send you links. His work is viewed by over 30 million muslims and non-muslims around the world.

Hi Stickman,

Thanks I enjoy interacting and debating with you too.
Firt let me define intolerance: it’s the expression of anger out of frustration (frustration is the gap between expectations and the status quo).
So by default intolerance can only be the result of a socio-economical environment, religion can only be a catalyst at best but not a cause.

Except for few, majority of Muslims countries are governed by authoritarian regimes. These regimes are dysfunctional/corrupt management of resources and control over the media.

So lets go through a scenario:
- A government X is sitting on a wealth of natural resources, and the people of country X are poor, unemployed, frustrated.
- The people of country X can’t change the regime, the regime controls the police, defence and media.
- The media manipulate the masses to support the regime.
- Or blame the ‘western conspiracy on why the population of country x though have all the sources of wealth are poor.

Bottomline, the dilemma we have today is a result of the success of the authoritarian regimes to ‘sell their version’ of the truth. Their ‘incompetence’ is the westerners fault and they sold that to their own people
Posted by Fellow_Human, Friday, 22 June 2007 3:44:50 PM
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George,

Thank you for your comments: I was primarily addressing the sentences I quoted. That said, contrition would be a higher tier attrition [reward] and punishment on Kohlberg's scale, The OT Hewbrew gods, I think would not do very well. A related concept from Kolhberg [and Ekikson and Piaget]is empathy. Contrition requires empathy, and, attrition fear. Empathy requires representation thought. In my youth, recall that Missions coming to the local church were really big on eternal torment, consistent with early Christian histories.

Einstein, like Dawkins, had a tendency to comment outside his field. To the best of my knowledge Einstein nor Dawkins were/is a cultural-anthropologist nor developmental psychologist. Einstein was an agnostic if I recall.

Going back on topic, Jewish Messiahism was a response to occupation. Christianity was the institutionalisation of earlier Jesus groups. Islam, was an Arab unification move, against brewing threats. Messiashism looked backwards [House of David?], Christianity was constructionist, and Islam was a defensive move.
Posted by Oliver, Friday, 22 June 2007 6:03:31 PM
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'My counter-argument is this: religion and science are or should be parallel roads to the same direction (truth and good morality), with one is physical and the other is spiritual. We can’t see our souls but we know they are there. Right?'

Fellow-Human, I agree up to a point. If the Bible or Koran are read as philosophy then useful truths and insights to the 'meaning of life' can be gleaned. After all, there is no absolute rule that says we cannot learn valuable lessons from the lives of ancient men and women.

However, if the Bible or Koran are read literally, and the primitive tribalistic ideologies are not questioned, then delusional untruths can infect the reader.

So yes, the Bible and Koran does contain some truth and morality but we shouldn't make more of these books than logic and a sound mind dictate.

As for your other point about the soul. Well, your soul does exist but only within the many trillions of neural connections in your brain. Turn off your brain by death and your soul ceases to exist forever. The tangible brain and the intangible soul are inseparable. Lose one and you lose the other.
Posted by TR, Friday, 22 June 2007 9:12:47 PM
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Fellow_Human,
Thank you for your reference to Dr. Zaghloul El Naggar. I looked at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/769/profile.htm. I would not know how to understand many things written in the Koran, but I can certainly agree with practically everything El Naggar extracted from it about the relation between his belief in God “the compassionate the merciful” and his general scientific insights. I also agree with you that “science and religion do not contradict each other”, although one should not try “to tailor science to religion”. This I usually express as:

It is not true that religion and science are on a collision course.
It is not true that religion and science are mutually irrelevant.
It is true that some interpretations of religion and some interpretations of science are on a collision course.
It is true that "uninterpreted" religion and "uninterpreted" science are mutually irrelevant.

Oliver, thank you for calling my attention to Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. All I was concerned with was to point at some similarities between FH’s (and, as I see it, a general Muslims') approach and the Catholic approach. As I understand it, Kohlberg does not need the hypothesis of a God for his theory, the same as Laplace did not need it for his exposition of celestial mechanics to Napoleon. In both cases the existence of God behind the framework of the particular phenomena studied is neither proved nor disproved. Also, I am sorry for what the missionaries did to you but I do not think one should blame e.g. mathematics for having had a bad maths teacher.

“Christianity was the institutionalisation of earlier Jesus groups. Islam, was an Arab unification move, against brewing threats.” This might be true but does not nearly exhaust the essence of both religions (not the social movements underlying them) whose main purpose was to “point to Something higher”, beyond history and science. (ctd)
Posted by George, Friday, 22 June 2007 11:24:03 PM
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Oliver, you are right, Einstein was neither a cultural-anthropologist nor a developmental psychologist (I do not understand why this should be relevant), but that does not diminish his expertise as a cosmologist, and the following ability to have a technically better equipped insight than most of his contemporaries into what might exist beyond the material world. He believed in an Intelligence behind this world, though he did not subscribe to the Jewish (or Christian or Muslim) model of this Intelligence. Only in this sense may you call him an agnostic.

stickman, “… (faith) is also a powerful tool of manipulation that can be (mis)used to have others strap explosives to their bodies”. You are right, without Islam there would be no suicide bombers, without Christianity many other bad things would not have happened. Like without mathematics you would not have nuclear physics and without sex there would be no rapists. Nevertheless, one should not blame mathematics for the Hiroshima disaster nor sex for what some people do with it.

TR, this is a very tolerant description of an agnostic – I suppose – position, shared to a certain degree also by many Christians (or Muslims, but this is not for me to say) as a PART of their world view.

“Turn off your brain by death and your soul ceases to exist forever”
Destroy this computer on which I am writing this post, and my thoughts “cease to exist” forever. However, if I manage to send off the post before this computer is destroyed, they will continue to exist e.g. on your computer that I have no idea what it looks like. The Christian (and Muslim) believes, that the “software written and stored in my brain” is being sent off at death to a place (or embodiment) we have no idea of what it looks like. This, of course, is not a proof of afterlife, only an attempt to make the faith more palatable to a 21st century mind.
Posted by George, Saturday, 23 June 2007 12:49:55 AM
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