Q'ran or Bible is more reliable as the word of God?
- Thread starter Saint
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I'm OK with abandoning democracy and secularism if there is something that works better. Yeah. There are all sorts of other means of ruling. Maybe there are much much better ways. Who knows, with technology maybe we can have some sort of direct rule? Or maybe go the exact opposite way and have a Philosopher king sort of situation?
I think it's mentally easy to blame the west for "3rd world nations" but not accurate and probably not helpful. Chinese were dirt poor due to Communism - yeah, I suppose that was a Western idea, but I think the Chinese are really the reason, not the west.
India now has more people then ever in it's history. BILLIONS and growing by millions and millions more by the day. Sure Western technology has made thie possible for the first time in humanity. Is it Western people's fault when India implodes from too many people? no.
anyway...
Relevance... right. Lets face facts here SAM, quite a fair proportion of those billion are a little undereducated. A little less comfortable with their position in the world. Dirt poor is another description.. you know, those who traditionally hold out the greatest hope that there is something more than where they are. A little less exposed to any real alternative. Some of them live in countries where to say anything else is somewhat counterproductive.
A simple question for you SAM. Of those who hold religion dear, what percentage depart from that held by their parents and their home society?
Glory? So he has a hold over a few million poorly educated sheep. What a man.
Jesus had a fair amount of influence too, until people started to grow up and see religion for the crap it really is. But his influence is fading fast.
One might go so far as to say that while the Romans have helped shaped society into what it is today, Your jesus-come-after has only caused stagnation.
How sad for you, that you still need a hero.
Yeah some people still think the Roman model is the way to go. Keep the plebians poor and use them as a market. The fact that it failed for the Romans seems irrelevant somehow.
Its not helpful to point put when a social system causes global poverty and instability? Really?
I think its important to compare different systems rather than look at any one in isolation to figure out which one is better.
Here's the part you don't think needs to be looked at
http://www.globalissues.org/
I'll settle for them practising what they preach
Very little "creating" of the third world has been done by secular Western democracies.SAM said:
Certainly not as a "market" for labor and resources. Pillaging is not marketing. And the great wealth of the first world is not nearly as dependent on third world exploitation as the glib phrase suggests - most of the wealth of the US, to pick one, is an accumulation from the exploitation of its own resources and trade with other first world countries. As it depletes its own resources, that has become increasingly obvious.
Capability is not evil. And the roles of Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and various Islamic non-Western non-democracies in the creation of third world misery have been obvious and significant.
Not when you are wrong. The social systems of the distant perps are not much involved, outside of theistic missionary efforts. Neither was global poverty brought into being in the late 1800s with the rise of Western democracy.SAM said:
And the fact that a completely nonsensical, theater of the absurd, borderline meaningless question such as the OP can still be asked in the titular head of the Western Democracy faction, seriously, brings home the question of what, specifically, are the sources of those evils that are in fact perpetrated by these democracies. Because an explanation that fit all the evildoers, rather than just the Secular Western Democratic ones, would be more satisfactory - no?
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No, but that question is not why they are building 400 acre military bases in other peoples countries
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iQsdQAuKzZl3hMgVzG60jVJVgRiQ
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020302994.html
No I'm afraid the reasons are more materialistic than ideological.
And undermining - to the point of destruction - the former more secular and more Western governance in that place.SAM said:
With the strong material and political support of their least secular and least democratic fellow citizens at home.
The OP question remains, a possible source of information about this pattern.
Not the reasons of the actual doers. They are strongly ideological and predominantly theistic.SAM said:
These guys:
are not in to it with these guys:
because they are interested in changing the condition of these guys:
into anything resembling their own lifestyle.
That would increase the competition.
Note that they have not spared even their co-religionists in South America or Africa when it came to draining them off their resources.
Yeah right
I live in the "Third World". If nothing else, people can see through these stories here.
So far, no hint of comprehension on your part. You call Africans and South Americans "co-religionists" with each other and somebody else, you blame the doings of the worst enemies of secular democracy on secular democracy, you think the wealth of the first world was drained from the third, and so forth.SAM said:
And you persist in ignoring the OP, which has some relevance to your concerns and is the topic of this thread.
In that case, lets hear your POV. It should be interesting to hear your perspective on why secular countries are occupying religious ones. And how the OP is connected to the thid world.
Since no one has given the correct answer:
The exact translation of the verses:
i.e. no name
The whole controversy over which son it was is based on the Genesis 22:2, which states that God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, then mentions Isaac.
Since Ishmael was years older than Isaac, it makes no sense that 22:2 referred to Isaac, so it was believed the story was changed to benefit the self defined descendents of Isaac in some way.
You already have my perspective on how the US (among the least secular first world Western democracies) came to be occupying Iraq - the fundie US Christians being the major political force (with a key contribution from the Muslims in Florida), and the most overtly theistic federal administration the US has ever had rigging intelligence and pressuring allies and pushing as hard as possible to arrange the invasion.SAM said:
And you have my perspective on the "secular" nature of Israel.
But aside from the fact that the least secular people seem to tend to be poor, ignorant, technologically simple, and thus more easily victimized by the rich and powerful of any cultural state, there is no apparent "why" of that nature - and if there were, a careful consideration of the OP question seems as likely to address it as any of these irrelevancies.
When is "it believed" that change took place?SAM said:
So basically the least secular ignorant illiterate backward technologically simple and easily victimised people like the Afghanis are under threat from the most secular highly educated, knowedgeable and technologically advanced nations like NATO and the US.
No one knows. The Bible itself acknowledges Ishmael as the older son and he was at least a decade or more older than Isaac. The inconsistency is what people thought incongruous. There is no way Isaac could be the only son [or as is sometimes translated the first born son]. The Quran does not mention any of these details probably because it is irrelevant to the moral
No one knows. The Bible itself acknowledges Ishmael as the older son and he was at least a decade or more older than Isaac. The inconsistency is what people thought incongruous. There is no way Isaac could be the only son [or as is sometimes translated the first born son]. The Quran does not mention any of these details probably because it is irrelevant to the moral