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Is Islam a pagan religion or ideology covered by a vaneer of monotheism?
Asia Times Online ^ | 24 August 2010 | The Complete Spengler

Posted on 08/24/2010 6:55:58 PM PDT by CharlesMartelsGhost

In a review of the book "The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis" by Robert R Reilly , Spengler raises some excellent theological questions about why Islam is a cultural wasteland.

Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice. In the normative Muslim view of things, Allah personally and immediately directs the motion of every molecule by his ineffable and incomprehensible will, according to the al-Ghazali synthesis, directly and without the mediation of natural law. Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes, that is, laws of nature, leaving great and small events to the caprice of the absolute tyrant of the universe.

In place of Hellenistic reasoning, Islam turned to a literal reading of the Koran. Robert Reilly recounts Islam's abandonment of Hellenistic reason, and blames it for the subsequent decline of Muslim civilization and the rise of radical Islam.

Reilly argues that Western civilization, is founded on reason, whereas normative Islam embraces irrationality.

(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: culture; groundzeromosque; ideology; islam; military; muslims; obama; theology
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To: arthurus

keyboard


41 posted on 08/24/2010 8:03:15 PM PDT by CharlesMartelsGhost
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost
Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes, that is, laws of nature, leaving great and small events to the caprice of the absolute tyrant of the universe.

Mohammedanism is anti-rational and fatalistic, explaining why Mohammedans are impervious to Christian evangalism and apologetics --they reject rationality altogether. We share no common, non-religious language. Mohammedanism is a particularly diabolical cult in this respect.

How Mohammedans can make any truth claims at all is beyond me. If Allah is free to contradict himself, why should any Mohammedan adhere to the Koran, if Allah could choose to contradict the Koran tomorrow?

-----------------------------------------------------------

Mohammedanism poses a unique threat to our country --one which I suspect the Founders didn't consider, and that is, the existence in America of a religion that doesn't tolerate other religions.

On a theoretical level, can a State that tolerates all religions tolerate a religion that is violently intolerant of other religions? Logically, there can only be one answer to this question. So what becomes of the First Amendment?

The Founders made two mistakes with respect to the First Amendment. First, they should not have prohibited an established national church. If the US gov't was officially, Baptist, Catholic, or Lutheran, the gov't could logically restrict immigration from Muslim countries.

Secondly, the Founders should have allowed for the suppression of violently intolerant religions.

42 posted on 08/24/2010 8:04:18 PM PDT by St_Thomas_Aquinas
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost

Spengler has been a longtime favorite of mine. The only thing is, reading his columns often prompt me to get a good, stiff drink - and I don’t drink! :-)


43 posted on 08/24/2010 8:04:38 PM PDT by Ted Grant
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To: Ted Grant

Same here Spengler and Greenfield of Sultan Knish are a daily read for me.


44 posted on 08/24/2010 8:08:41 PM PDT by CharlesMartelsGhost
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To: Fred Hayek

Hosni Mubarak’s name, Hosni, is the same name as our president’s middle name. In Arabic the consonant trigram HSN is the only thing that counts and determines the word or name. The different sounds and positions of the vowels are matters of local accent. Thus Hassan, Hosni, Hussein, etc, are all the same name just as Ian, John, Sean, Jan are all different renderings of the same name in Latin rooted languages.


45 posted on 08/24/2010 8:09:07 PM PDT by arthurus (Read Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson.")
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To: Artemis Webb
Islam is not a pagan religion.

Islam is a terror ideology. The war against Islam must be won.

Three Things About Islam

46 posted on 08/24/2010 8:12:27 PM PDT by FatherofFive (Islam is evil and must be eradicated)
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To: manc

0 going to church wont make him Christian any more than going into a garage will make him an automobile. If you really want to know if he’s Christian only one question will tell: “What think you of Christ?” The answer will out the truth.


47 posted on 08/24/2010 8:21:50 PM PDT by pankot
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost

“Robert Reilly recounts Islam’s abandonment of Hellenistic reason, and blames it for the subsequent decline of Muslim civilization and the rise of radical Islam.”

Oh c’mon. The light of Reason turned on Islam would reveal it for what it is: The usual crap perpetrated by the usual suspects for the same old reason. Anyone who applies Reason to Islam walks away from it, period.


48 posted on 08/24/2010 8:23:55 PM PDT by TalBlack
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To: pankot

It’s a primarily military, pseudo-religious, cult of death.


49 posted on 08/24/2010 8:24:38 PM PDT by airborne (Why is it we won't allow the Bible in school, but we will in prison? Think about it.)
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To: FatherofFive
"Islam is a terror ideology."

I agree. But the question wasn't, "Is Islam a terror ideology?". The question was "Is Islam a pagan religion or ideology covered by a vaneer of monotheism?". That was the question that I answered.

Look, you won't find a harsher critic of Islam than myself. I've called Mohammed a "baby raping sonofabitch" before. I called him that because the statement is true. The list of Islam's offenses to any sense of decency is myriad. However I see no purpose in making things up about Islam, i.e that Islam is a pagan religion when it clearly is not. Why make up something when the real horrors and sins of Islam are almost limitless?

50 posted on 08/24/2010 8:25:20 PM PDT by Artemis Webb (DeMint 2012...Barbour2012....I would be happy either way.)
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost
There is little doubt that Islam's god is the former chief deity of the polytheistic Arab pantheon, stripped of his consorts and offspring-a variation on the moon god common throughout the ancient Middle East, among the Babylonians known as Sin (the Sinai peninsula is probably named after him) and among the Sumerians as Nanna. Among the pagan Arabs, he was usually called simply "the god," al-ilah: Allah. The moon god Allah, whose crescent symbol today caps mosques the world over, headed a pantheon of over 300 lesser divinities, including three daughters called Lat, Uzza, and Manat. In fact, the controversy over The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie centers upon an embarrassing (and historically documented) episode during Muhammad's evolving "revelation" (after his death collected as his Koran-Qur'an, "recitation") in which he admitted the possibility of retaining the three daughter-goddesses under his new dispensation. He later rescinded this idea as having been of false-"satanic" inspiration. Muhammad (the son of Abdallah, "slave of Allah," a further attestation of the deity's pre-Islamic origin) was of the Quraysh tribe, the custodians of the Meccan shrine to the pantheon known as the Ka'bah ("cube"), which houses a black stone (probably a meteorite) that Muslim pilgrims continue to venerate. Pilgrims also perform other pre-Islamic pagan rites such as stoning the devil at Wadi Mina and partaking of the waters of the Zamzam well.
51 posted on 08/24/2010 8:29:21 PM PDT by MarMema
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost
I agree. We must get to the point where we deem that islam is not a religion.

Would we allow aztecs or mayans to perform human sacrifices on 1st Amendment grounds? Of course not.

But somehow we have been led to believe that a "cult" that commits human sacrifice as a requirement to enter paradise is worthy of Constitutional protection.

52 posted on 08/24/2010 8:31:52 PM PDT by Eagles6 ( Typical White Guy: Christian, Constitutionalist, Heterosexual, Redneck.)
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To: Goreknowshowtocheat

They almost took Europe last time around. This is a remake
of the new empire - attempt that is.


53 posted on 08/24/2010 8:33:21 PM PDT by MarMema
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost
Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice.

Al-Ghazali's book is called Tahafut al-Falasifa - "The Incoherence of the Philosophers". I agree with Reilly that it was the prime cause of Islam's abandonment of natural reason, and in the longer run an unmitigated disaster. You can buy an english translation from Brigham Young University (no surprise there, dear freepers). I strongly caution you not to do so.

54 posted on 08/24/2010 8:37:14 PM PDT by John Locke
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To: Apercu
Islam is a fascist political system under the guise of a religious cult.

Yep, they were big allies of Hitler, and is quite possible that the Final Solution was suggested by the Grand Mufti al Husseini, who set up shop in Berlin, in 1941, when he went on the run from the British in Palestine.

55 posted on 08/24/2010 8:57:20 PM PDT by SuziQ
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost
Scummy muslims sacrifice animals. That is very barbaric.
56 posted on 08/24/2010 9:09:13 PM PDT by GinaLolaB
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost

Heard some bigshot Muslim claiming on TV the other day that Islam “is more than a religion, it’s also a system of laws” - as such, by their own admission, Muslims should not be able to claim protection under the first amendment until and unless they get specific about what they consider religious elements of their credo, and then any Constitutional/legal protection they enjoy must be limited to those elements.....


57 posted on 08/24/2010 9:24:38 PM PDT by Intolerant in NJ
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost

Islam is the 21st centuries Nazism.

And it needs to be dealt with in the same manner.

Annihilated via total warfare.

Does anyone think if Hitler had gotten the Bomb and America had stayed out of the war, he would not have done as he said and used it to destroy and subjugate the world?

Iran and the Muslims will do the same.

Kill or BE killed.


58 posted on 08/24/2010 10:18:18 PM PDT by RachelFaith (2010 is going to be a 100 seat Tsunami - Unless the GOP Senate ruins it all...)
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To: livius

In any case, Islam has the ability to appropriate western technology for its own purposes. The Arabs sucked the life out of the Greco-Roman and Persian cultures to create a new sort of civilization. The Turks managed to do the same in the 14th-6th century, after which their “orientalism” led to their decay. Even now, they use western technology without contributing much to the sciences that made the new technology possible. I do think that their refusal to accept “secondary causes” is their problem. Ours. on the other hand, is to try to reduce everything to such causes.


59 posted on 08/24/2010 10:38:05 PM PDT by RobbyS (Pray with the suffering souls.)
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To: CharlesMartelsGhost

Islam is not a religion nor is it a cult. It is a complete system.

Islam has religious, legal, political, military, economic, and social components. The religious component is a beard for all the other components.


60 posted on 08/25/2010 5:07:21 AM PDT by Beckwith (A "natural born citizen" -- two American citizen parents and born in the USA.)
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