<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tom 6850 @ May 23 2007, 12:02 PM) [snapback]448389[/snapback]</div> Yeah I guess if they want to act like moderate christians and completely ignore all the really horrible stuff in the bible and not acknowledge abraham and muhammad as terrible beings then all is fair in a make believe world. Sorry if that is offensive to anyone here but that is basically how it all sounds to me. Lets take what we like out of "god's" book and pretend the rest doesn't exist or we can always interpret it differently to fit our lives.
The survey did show that American Muslims, for the most part, reject violence as being appropriate to usher in religious law. I did hear that the Washington Post reported on some of the individual questions and demographics, and about 25 - 30% of the young people under 30 said that suicide bombings are sometimes justified. So the Post led with that headline. On the surface, that's a pretty alarming statistic, given that most Islamic radicals are from the younger set. But I don't know what the question actually is, and if it specifies what the target is. For instance, if the question was if a Jihadist can use a suicide bomb to attack a military installation, that may be considered more acceptable than if you asked if a suicide bomb attack on a cafe at lunchtime was acceptable. F8L, its one thing to rail against religion, but to really make progress toward peace, you have to try and understand the philosophical underpinnings of the other person. All of the major world religions have diverse schools of theology at work within them, and your "pox on all your houses" sentiment might be attractive to fellow secularists, but it doesn't actually add anything towards a solution. Insulting people rarely gets them to calm down.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ May 23 2007, 11:08 PM) [snapback]448857[/snapback]</div> I'm fully aware of that. I will say that when it comes to religion insults or lack of insults rarely gets the religious to calm down. They believe what they believe if what you say doesn't fit in their frame then it gets tossed aside. I'm just sick to death of all the political corruption that religion has it's hand in. I will not appologize for my anger in that. Tip-toeing around the subject like we've been doing for centuries does not make things better. I do agree though that maybe some people can be weaned off religion completely or at least the majority of the negative thinking that it encourages and insulting them won't make it happen any sooner. I guess sometimes I just want to be angry.
