The Holy Ghost is older language. I believe that Holy Spirit is more modern.
To put a fine point on it. I want them to have knowledge of it not exposure. So for example I want to my daughter to know at the same time she is learning about Islam to also know that in that religion she has less rights than a man and some Islamic countries she could be put to death for committing what is not a crime in our society (like having sex with someone) or simply by being a woman (“honour killings”). I would also like her to know that her favourite uncle a lovely man who has never hurt a fly would be put to death in several Islamic countries because he is gay.
So yeah, I dont want exposure I want education.
Most of that stuff also applies to Christianity in the very recent past though. Hell, there are laws on the books right now in the US that outlaw things like gay sex.
Given that you are not going to be spending some extensive amount of time on Islam, i think it’s kind of ridiculous to focus on the most extent aspects of the religion. Most Muslims in America don’t believe in any of those extreme views just like most Christians don’t believe in dancing with poisonous snakes or lynching gay people.
The trinity, though, wasn’t doctrine until Nicaea around 325. It was forcibly “added” to Christianity to help sell it to a polytheistic Mediterranean world.
Nah. I’m Muslim, and the 5 pillars of Islam are:
- Belief in God
- Prayer
- Fasting during Ramadan
- Giving to Charity.
- Going to Mecca once in your life for the Hajj Pilgrimage.
Nowhere in there do you find major conflict with modern cultures and societies. All that is baggage that has been added through various cultures that Islam has spread through, including Arabs and Indians, etc. It becomes especially clear in the U.S. to American Muslims because we see people from Sudan, from Indonesia, from India, from the Middle East, from Bosnia, from Egypt, from Azerbaijani, from Iran, etc, and you realize just how much variety there is in traditions and how people practice and what they consider part of the religion that others don’t. The core is always down to those 5 pillars, and none of those are in conflict with Western values or culture.
A lot of people realizing this outside of America might be tough though. When you’re in an insular culture, you might not have an easy time differentiating what is the religion and what is culture outside the religion that you can shed while still being muslim.
Anyway, that’s my own personal perspective on it.
Sure, but what does this shit have to do with Hannity or Fox News?
Most muslims lived in states “dominated by others”: 1920-1950. (pre-1920 there’s the Ottoman Empire, post 1950ish there’s Indonesia, pakistan, and some states in the mideast).
Most Hindus lived in states “dominated by others”: 1580ish - 1720ish, 1765 - 1947 (EDIT: added Mughal empire (oh the irony))
Most Jews lived in states “dominated by others”: Classical era - modern day.
What was your point?
And a current Vice President that thinks those laws were a good thing.
It was? What laws exactly?
Fox News host Sean Hannity allegedly received help from the US Department for Housing and Urban Development to carry out multimillion dollar real estate deals, according to a report by The Guardian
This seemed potentially illegal to me.
IANAL. I apologize for reading potential illegality into potential impropriety. Seriously, it’s hard to keep up wtih this shit.
If all that’s gonna happen is he gets run off TV, great, but that already happened with O’Reilly and it didn’t matter.
Nothing matters.
It’s weird because Muslims in the United States tend to be more progressive than evangelical Christians in the US, with higher support for gay marriage, etc. That’s not true worldwide but it is true that for the country I live in.
I am sorry, you cannot compare evangelical christianity to extremist Islam. Obviously I dont like evangelicals but the very worst they want to do is take away womens rights and gay rights which is awful. But extremist Islam kills people for these things. There is a gulf between the two. All religions are not the same and Islam has the worst extremists out of any major religion. That is important. Those of us on the left who care about human rights should be far far louder about opposing the worst of Islam.
And again this is not some interesting historical comparison, Christianity used to do this kind of backward awful shit in the past, in some places in the Islamic world it happens today.
Not that big of a gulf. Evangelicals are fine with killing gay kids in conversion therapy after all. And a lot of them think that stoning should be allowed. The reason they aren’t as bad is because our secular nation and laws keep them in check. You know when they aren’t tying people to a fence and beating them to death.
Islamic nations are fucked up across the board when it comes to crime and punishment. Last I looked Turkey was an Islamic nation as was Indonesia and they aren’t killing people there for it. Meanwhile in Africa, the most practiced religion in Christianity and gay people have it pretty shitty.
So your example is crap. It’s not a matter of religion so much as a matter of shitty nations. Shitty theocracies tend to treat gay people really badly. And I’m not sure equating Islam and Wahhabism is a very good comparison, unless you want Christianity compared to Westboro, who would probably be in favor of stoning the queers like the Bible tells them to.
They might think it, but they dont. Thats the difference and in extremist Christian countries it isnt, you know, the actual law where they do kill people. Spot the commonality in places where they have the death penalty for being gay. Spoiler, its Islam.
The majority of Albanians and Bosnians are Muslim and you don’t see them going around jihad’ing everything in sight.
Sadly the real push in the Muslim world towards fundamentalism was the spread of Wahhabism and the formation of Israel. Those two events really laid the groundwork for the spread of this radical, anti western Islam.
If you look at pictures of the ME circa 1940 it looked a lot like Europe. In the 17th Century diplomats to Russia used to complain that the Muslim Turks were closer to Christians than the “barbarous” and alien Muscovites.
That said it probably would be hard for cohabitation with some of the crazier versions of Islam from Saudi or Afghanistan. The sort of existential problem of Islam is that it’s a political religion without a political philosophy — what it wants can’t be enforced without politics and government, and yet it has kind of no opinion about the setup of that government. That the fundamental split between religious divisions in Islam was essentially political has never been lost on me.
What you don’t realize, perhaps, is that Evangelicals in countries like Uganda are actively pushing for that though, and many evangelical churches are big in support of that movement.
So if they had their way that difference would disappear.
Can we agree that, while we don’t believe in religion, we hate extreme religion?
I am sure they are. But again, in one case it is a reality, in the other a potential desire. I share the late Christopher Hitchen’s frustration with my fellow lefties here. In a desire to be inclusive some on the left have become apologists at worst or silent at best for Islam’s awful extremists.
And sure of course most Muslims are perfectly awesome tolerant folks. But if you are going to be teaching someone about Islam in a school room (or any religion) I think there is an obligation to point out where they differ from “our” western democratic values. Less politely where they are murderous bigoted scumbags in todays modern world it should be said, plainly.
No we have to hate all of Islam because some of them are fuckheads, apparently.
So does Christianity and yet here we are.
All organized religion is generally terrible.