View Single Post
  #149  
Old September 14th, 2001, 12:30 AM

Baron Munchausen Baron Munchausen is offline
General
 
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: Ohio, USA
Posts: 4,323
Thanks: 0
Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts
Baron Munchausen is on a distinguished road
Default Re: War....

quote:

So, basically you are saying that Israel has no legal right to exist, that Jews have no historic claim to Palestine, that all of Israel was obtained entirely by conquest, and that the Israelis would love to kill all Palestinians. Do you really believe those things, or were you just a bit overwrought? Either way, I think you should study some more history.




No, dmm, I don't need to study any more history. You don't get a lease in perpetuity on a piece of land just because your ancestors lived there once. If that were the case then most of the nations of Europe could claim most of Europe rather than just their current borders. Hmm, many of them did actually. Which is why European history was so bloody. The European Jews who invaded Palestine had/have no more claim to the land than the Irish have to Spain (which is where the Gaels originated -- they are descended from Celts who fled Roman conquest and found Ireland) or the Germans have to the Ukraine (which is where ethnic Germans are first found in history). When someone else lives on the land for centuries you cannot just move in and evict them on some claim of 'prior right'. It was a terrible mistake on the part of the Western powers to allow this to happen in Palestine, but they had some underhanded motivations of their own (if those Jews had remained in Europe they would have asked many difficult questions about the lack of response to the Holocaust) and so another innocent people was sacrificed to political expediency. So, your simplification of my views, though indeed a simplification, is essentially correct. And my views are more informed by history than you realize.

quote:

So, what you are saying is that Muslims today are primitive? Should the West simply wait 500 years for their society to "grow up"? Wow! Sounds like I'm not the only arrogant Westerner!




Yes, so-called 'Muslims' who think that God condones the murder of anyone in their own countries who doesn't belong to their religion, or the mass-murder of innocent people in other countries as revenge for wrongs committed by their governments are primitive. Just as so-called 'Christians' who thought that God sanctioned their right to conquer and rape the peoples of the 'new' world because they weren't 'Christians' were primitive. As I pointed out and you conveniently skipped over, there are a few people who genuinely understand what both religions are about, but they were in the minority in Medieval Europe and are in the minority now in most contemporary 'Muslim' nations. Ergo, the societies were/are primitive. That doesn't mean that any given individual Muslim is automatically primitive. Actually, not very many contemporary Westerners are that much ahead of their Medieval ancestors, but at least they have (mostly) stopped pretending to be 'Christians', which is some sort of progress. It's funny, but the 'non-religious' people of the West have now become far more "Christian" in behavior since they gave up on formal religion. An interesting paradox. (The US is of course the exception in the Western world, we're still something like 70 or 80 percent self-declared religious people. But then we also retain more of the old European imperialistic attitude, too, so that figures. They seem to go together.)

I'm well aware of the hostility among the cruder "fundamentalist" types of each of these religions to the other. These are precisely the people who are FALSE 'Christians'/'Muslims'. They are merely tribal jingoists that have chosen to twist religion for their xenophobic purposes. And yes, this phenomenon is almost EXACTLY parallel in the Muslim world today to what it was in the Christian world in the past. Genuine Christians and Muslims know that their respective religions, as opposed to the political movements masquerading as religion, are nearly the same in message. It takes some pretty major nit-picking about doctrine to generate contradiction between them. I could quote something about "the letter" and "the spirit" of the scriptures here but I've not got the reference handy. And if the "fundamentalist" types would obey the FUNDAMENTAL rules of the religions they claim to represent, including rules like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", the strife we have in the world today could not exist.
Reply With Quote