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Post by Swampy on Dec 22, 2012 0:14:39 GMT -5
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Post by dontom on Dec 22, 2012 0:58:03 GMT -5
But let the discussion begin! You asked for it! ;D I feel that there is good in every religion. I feel there is evil in every religion!
IMAO, If there really is a devil, it must be running all the religions on earth!"To what great evils has religion been able to impel men!" -Lucretius
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -Blaise Pascal
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion." --Goncourt-Don Quoteman
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Post by Sir John on Dec 22, 2012 2:09:51 GMT -5
"everything I needed to know about islam, I learned on 911".
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Post by Swampy on Dec 22, 2012 2:36:06 GMT -5
The interesting thing about the article is that Muslim women are bearing fewer children even in regions where they are poor - this is contrary to the conventional wisdom that fertility rates decline as incomes rise.
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Post by dontom on Dec 22, 2012 4:48:28 GMT -5
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -Steven Weinberg
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2012 6:18:27 GMT -5
Excellent quote Don
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Post by Swampy on Dec 22, 2012 10:05:48 GMT -5
The communists didn't need religion to do what they did.
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Post by Swampy on Dec 22, 2012 11:00:14 GMT -5
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Post by boxcar on Dec 22, 2012 13:57:15 GMT -5
It is about 50-50 right now in Egypt, Swampy
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Post by Sir John on Dec 22, 2012 14:37:41 GMT -5
IMNHO, the Muslim Brotherhood is a certainty to end up filling the power vacuum in the entire Middle East.
The Oracle has spoken.
SJ
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2012 22:24:24 GMT -5
Swampy when the war in Bosnia was news and the reports of so called ethnic cleansing I was horrified and mentioned it to a friend who was born in Macedonia, to my surprise she did not condemn what was happening but told me that she understood how the people feel about the Muslims. That too surprised me because she is a very open minded and tolerant person. She explained that there would in time be a civil war in Macedonia for many of the same reasons.
Her explanation was that Macedonians once welcomed refugees into their country and tried to make them feel at home, and they gradually created Muslim communities that grew and when they became a strong community they demanded changes to the way the non-Muslim communities treat them. And that other religions respect Islam by changing their way of worshiping. And the Muslims made life unbearable until Macedonians left the homes they and their family had lived in for a very long time.
She was right, that civil war did take place, and having experienced the Sydney Muslim behaviour at close quarters over many years, I once lived at Lakemba as a young person and later in life worked in the Bankstown District in a manufacturing business. I have even experienced having a Muslim man in robe and cap threaten me with a knife after I honked my car horn when he cut me off with his Toyota bus with children passengers.
Mostly they go about their business like any other human being but they anger quickly and Lebanese Christians have explained to me why they dislike having the growing Muslim community in their new homeland.
In my opinion it is not so much about religion, Australians are very tolerant of all religious beliefs, the problem is about Islam attitudes towards Infidels.
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Post by bluejay77 on Dec 22, 2012 22:50:05 GMT -5
The communists didn't need religion to do what they did. There is the saying in Finland that the Communist/Socialist ideology is highly similar to a religion: it has its holy books whose authority is absolute; it has its priesthood whose prerogative it is to interpret the holy books; it has its escatology, ie. the beliefs about the world's end (capitalism's end and the everlasting Communist heaven); its dogma and dogmatics, everything. And heretics are harshly punished.
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Post by Swampy on Dec 22, 2012 22:58:54 GMT -5
Bluejay77, you're exactly right - communism is/was a religion.
Prem, as you rightly said, religion has nothing to do with it; civic virtues is what it's all about. Chinese can also be pretty rude, until Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore put us in our place.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2012 5:23:07 GMT -5
Lee Kwan Yew was tough Swampy but in my opinion he had to be tough.
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Post by dontom on Dec 23, 2012 5:33:07 GMT -5
The communists didn't need religion to do what they did. True, but at least they don't say they do their evil works because of some god (or other silly superstition) wants them to.
-Don-
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