Moslem sects
- Thread starter mathman
- Start date
They consider them traitors to Islam.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
My biggest bitch about the Abrahamic religions is that they reinforce our atavistic tribal instinct.
Since the Agricultural Revolution ushered in the Neolithic Era, we have been fighting to override the pack-social instinct of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors. Like all pack-social predatory species, they had to regard other clans as hated and feared competitors for scarce resources when there was a drought or any other reason for a famine. Agriculture created the first food surplus the world had ever seen, and suddenly it made sense for rival tribes to join together in larger communities, because economies of scale and division of labor increased the size of their surplus and allowed some of them to specialize in occupations not directly related to survival such as brewing wine, making music and inventing pottery.
But a few hundred generations is not long enough for our instincts to evolve, and there's still a caveman inside each of us. We bribe him with pizza, central heating and TV, but occasionally he has a bad day and goes Paleolithic on us, treating people outside his immediate family as outsiders who can be legitimately robbed and injured.
The problem with Abrahamism is that it tends to exacerbate this feeling of us vs. them. "They regard Jesus as the One True Prophet, not Mohammed." "They don't accept the authority of the Pope." "They drive ambulances on the Sabbath." "They don't believe in the Trinity." "They believe that our leaders must be chosen by Allah, not elections." "They let men and women dance together." Abrahamism accentuates the caveman instinct in its followers, and as regular as clockwork, every few generations an entire nation of them rise up in Paleolithic anger and make war on the nation next door because of minute differences in their customs which the rest of us could not even see without a guidebook.
While the rest of us are trying to build a single world civilization, these people highlight our differences and insist that they can't share a planet, much less a country, with those who believe differently.
And this is all over a bunch of fucking goddamned fairytales???
I hate all religion because it is all bullshit, but I especially hate the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. They are a cancer on this planet.
How can you tell?
But self defense is not a sin, is it?
Ah, but what if they claim that such actions are self defense or defense of their religion or defense of all future Muslims who they fear would have to live under an ungodly regime?
They say that you are following a falsehood. You have failed to recognize the final prophet of God on Earth, peace be unto Him.
If your religion is "true". why would you kill someone who doesn't agree with you? Shouldn't your "god" be able to take care of himself or herself?
The point of my original question was not to argue about truth in religion, but why kill others who disagree? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites or vice versa?
The point of my original question was not to argue about truth in religion, but why kill others who disagree? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites or vice versa?
To implement God's will and go to heaven. They think he's working through them.
I hope most Moslems don't feel this way.
Do Muslim have to be circumcised ?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
As I noted, Christianity and Islam come with an imperative that most other religions don't have: The members of both these sects of Abrahamism interpret the text in their own version of the same holy book to mean that God has ordered them to spread their religion (the one and only true religion) throughout the world. This is "evangelism," a directive that the Jews don't have, which is why there are so few of them.
The Sunnis and the Shiites believe that the other sect of Islam is apostasy and that they have an obligation to God to prevent it from being spread so that they can fulfill their duty to spread their own "one true religion" instead. The same is true of the Catholics and Protestants within Christianity, and even the various sub-sects of Protestantism. When you go up the paradigm to the point that you're looking at the Christians versus the Muslims, you're looking at some real Stone Age rivalry: they don't even believe in the same prophet!
Now of course all of the members of any sect don't take this mandate from God quite so literally as to actually require them to kill people--which is quite fortunate. In fact many of them don't even feel that they're obligated to evangelize at all. They take the position that by doing good deeds they're demonstrating to the whole human race that their religion is the best one, which is as good a way as any to convince other people to join them.
And of course many of the members don't even think about this stuff.
So the answer to your question, "Why kill others who disagree," is "Because they are thwarting your efforts to spread your own version of the Abrahamic mythology to all four corners of the world (I'm pretty sure these people think it's flat
), and that to stop them from fulfilling your commitment to God is to thwart God's own wishes. That is such a colossal sin that you are justified in acting as agents of God and killing these people."As I noted before, the Bible is chock full of asterisks that render the Commandment against killing more of a Suggestion only. This brings in situational ethics, a concept that all fundamentalists don't believe in, yet they practice it. If you have a choice between disappointing God by breaking his Commandment against killing, versus disappointing God by failing to bring His Word to the entire human race, which is the lesser of the two evils?
Don't ask an Abrahamist to rationalize this for you. He'll probably shoot you for committing blasphemy.
Is it Spearmint-corrupted, or more a Wintergreen sort of bid'ah?
One thing that I find unnerving is that they actually beiliev what they say they believe. They believe they would go to heaven for their deeds just as we believe the sun to be bigger than the moon. I mean, if our enterprising ancestors could see these people, they would be so disappointed that they would kill themselves out of shame.
For better or worse, all religions (as far as I know) are based on unprovable beliefs.