Posted on 06/16/2008 3:53:43 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Accurate info in the article, but someone is late to the party.
Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages and the last paragraph of this article is stuck on liberal stupidity.
“Those who make Islam responsible for kidnappings, suicide attacks, car bombs and beheadings carried out by a few blind extremists ought at the same time to condemn Christianity or Judaism for the barbarous maltreatment of prisoners, the air strikes and tank attacks carried out by the US Army - several 10,000 civilians have been murdered in Iraq alone - and the terrorism of the Israeli army of occupation in Palestine.”
More of Kung's outmoded moral equivalency at its most rancid. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideas of Sufism represent a possible evolutionary path for Islam, but they seem unlikely to catch on as a mass movement, and might not be that compatible with the modern world either.
But then, no religion with any real intellectual content is entirely compatible with the modern world.
I’m always amused to see two pages of ink wasted to make an argument that could be won with a bumper sticker.
I’m always amused to see two pages of ink wasted to make an argument that could be won with a bumper sticker.
“But he also outlines why he is hopeful that the present problems around radicalisation within Islam can be resolved”
solution: whack & stack
They actually had to get an expert to state the obvious.
Islam is stuck on stupid!
Through history Sufis have made Jihad. In Kashmir the Jihad and killing is done by Sufi Muslims.
How about if, instead of building bridges to islime, we just spend our energy eradicating it? We’re not trying to build bridges to cancer and syphillis, are we? We don’t try to mind-meld with cockroaches or rabid dogs, do we? So why would we waste our time with a murderous cult that endorses behavior so barbaric it fell out of favor among civilized people half a millennium ago?
Somebody is going to be receiving death threats from the Religion of Peace.
Prof. Kung misplaces the problem. Orthodox Christianity has not undergone any ‘reformation’, but is hardly laying about trying to demolish modernity.
(Much though we would like to resist forcible imposition of secular humanism a la George Soros’s “Open Society”.)
The potentially inerradicable problems with Islam stem from its adoption of a particular hermeneutics—the notion of abbrogation, in which later ‘revealed’ suras of the Quran (always the warlike ones) abbrogate the earler peaceable suras, and from its adoption of occasionalist ontology, in which every event (even, now that they know about such things, subatomic reactions) occurs by the direct will of Allah. The former justifies violent reaction against any critique or contradiction of the version of Islamic doctrine held by the particular Muslim, the later destroys any basis for science, any motivation for effort in commerce, or any other domain other than pursuit of Muslim piety, and leads to the fatalistically shrugged ‘Inshallah’.
I second IronJack’s motion!
All those in favor say AYE!
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