Unbelievable

[nickydwuk]

This is religious fanaticism gone start, raving, bonkers.


BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Sudan demo over jailed UK teacher

This poor teacher was doing her job, the CHILDREN named the bear - not her- and they are demanding the death penalty. What about the real crimes being committed in their country and all over the world that get paltry sentences. There will never be world peace all the time people use religion to further their own causes.

Is this too political? Sorry if it is but I just can't believe this poor woman is being treated this way.

[kokopeli]

The thing I want to know is....

...If it's wrong to make an image of the prophet Mohammed, why is it okay for Muslims to name their sons Mohammed?

[MotherBear]

We've been following this with alarm and horror. In the past I've had to take hubster to task about his fondness for debating various issues of the religion with his Muslim work colleagues. He's been very lucky not to have been thrown out of several countries (or worse) because of arguing certain points with them that he thought were unworkable or unjust.

We often despair at the way the Koran and what Mohammed (*PBUH) is reputed to have said is interpreted. Very often it's not what has been laid down, but how man twists it to suit his own purposes. It's all so contradictory and one can pick enormous holes in the religion.

Why are they so strict about alcohol when the locals are plastered all over the hotel bars? Oman isn't quite so bad, but in places like Kuwait where it's a very serious offence to be caught with alcohol, the locals will find a way to get it or they will take a trip out of the country, maybe to Bahrain (which is almost next door) where alcohol is freely available in hotels. It's the same with the Saudis who beat a track across the causeway into Bahrain on weekends to binge drink. There's no consistency in the Muslim religion at all throughout the world. What goes in one country is a hanging offence in another. You'd think, if Muslims stuck strictly to what the Koran says and what was laid down by Mohammed (PBUH), as they all swear they do, they would all follow the same rules. After all, we're continually told that the Koran is their guidebook for living and they need nothing else.

And Kokopeli is quite right - nearly every man out here has Mohammed (PBUH)somewhere in his name.

We may have just been evicted from our home, so I hope we don't find we're also slung out of the country as well for daring to write this. I just hope this poor woman can find some peace soon. These people whip themselves up fanatically and there's no reasoning with them.



*PBUH = Praise be upon him, which immediately follows any written reference to Mohammed here. I thought I'd better insert it in case I, too, end up in a similar plight. They often monitor what we're doing on the Net, especially our emails.

[KiwiHopeful]

Let's not forget that Christianity suffers from the same hypocrisy that Islam does.

One could point to the way in which religious institutions in South Africa manipulated the Bible to support Apartheid. Hell, pretty much everything that's wrong in the US goes back to the religious right's screwy interpretations of the parts of the Bible they don't just ignore. Christians in the US supported segregation and Jim Crow laws, support the death penalty, oppose social programs and universal health care, are destroying the environment with their SUV's, and lock up more of their brothers and sisters than any other developed nation in the world. Hitler would never have been able to do what he did without the support of the Catholic Church.

This story has been getting all the right wing nutjobs riled up in the United States. I think they're all just secretly pissed off they can't do the same thing themselves to homosexuals, liberals, and anyone else they don't like.

I wonder how Christians would respond if I named my dog 'Jesus'? And these two controversies happened right here in the 'enlightened' West:

CITY, RELIGIOUS GROUPS LOCKED IN BATTLE WITH MUSEUM OVER ''BLASPHEMOUS" ART

Piss Christ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Islam isn't the problem. Christianity isn't the problem. Religion is the problem. Without religion good people would still do good things and bad people would still do bad things. Religion makes good people do bad things.

[KiwiHopeful]

Muslims in jailed teacher protest | UK Latest | Guardian Unlimited

British Muslims protested outside the Sudanese Embassy over the treatment of jailed teacher Gillian Gibbons.

The small but noisy group demanded the immediate release of Mrs Gibbons, who is currently serving a 15-day prison sentence in Sudan after her class of seven-year-olds named a teddy bear Mohammed.

Chanting "free, free Gillian" and "let her go, let her go", demonstrators attempted to hand over a "goodwill teddy" to the embassy, but a staff member refused to accept the gift.

Some 20 British Muslims, including MP for Tooting Sadiq Khan and chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission Massoud Shadjareh, gathered outside the Sudanese embassy in Piccadilly.

Leaders of the protest said they wanted to show that British Muslims supported Mrs Gibbons. Some arrived with their own teddy bears.

The protest followed angry scenes in Khartoum on Friday in which knife-wielding fundamentalists called for the execution of Mrs Gibbons.

At the London demonstration, Catherine Heseltine, a 28-year teacher and member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, condemned the action of hard-line Islamists.

She said: "They are dragging the name of Islam through the mud. The overwhelming feeling in the Muslim community in the UK is that it is really sad the way Gillian Gibbons has been treated. I haven't met a single British Muslim who has taken the naming of the teddy to be an insult."

Mr Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "I find it offensive that Islam is being used in this way by the Sudanese government and the media.

"It is totally unacceptable by the Sudanese government and the press are trying to make this into another cartoon or a Salmon Rushdie issue."

[KiwiHopeful]

Here's a perfect example of the way in which Christianity is manipulated in the US to keep the masses ignorant and the Church machine well oiled:

Texas just fired their state director of science curriculum for ... wait for it ... promoting science! Instead, she was supposed to remain 'officially neutral' with regard to the superstition of Intelligent Design (which is just plain old creationism to me) versus the testable hypotheses of Evolution. Yes, Texas wants its school children (and teachers, too, I suppose) to believe that witchcraft and science are one in the same, just two different opinions. (Well, to be fair, they don't want kids to know about the bad witchcraft like you find taught by those evil Harry Potter books, but the good kind like you find in the Bible.)

Evolution Debate Led to Ouster, Official Says - New York Times

Meanwhile, what are those wacky Muslims up to now? Oops ... wrong religion.

[MotherBear]

Originally Posted by KiwiHopeful

Let's not forget that Christianity suffers from the same hypocrisy that Islam does.

Yes, quite possibly, but Christians don't tend to stomp around waving knives and threatening to put non-believers to death. Not in this day and age, anyway. It's not such an intense religion, apart from a few zealots that take it a bit too far. With Islam, every little event seems to be blown up out of all proportion and becomes a life and death matter. Everything is black or white with no grey areas. I would say that not all Muslims, by any means, are like this and many are moderate in their beliefs and can see reason. However, Islam does seem to attract a larger than average number of fundamentalists who go over the top at the slightest provocation and one can't help but wonder what their true motives are.

Originally Posted by KiwiHopeful

Islam isn't the problem. Christianity isn't the problem. Religion is the problem. Without religion good people would still do good things and bad people would still do bad things. Religion makes good people do bad things.

I don't think it's necessarily religion that's the problem but people's interpretation and misuse of it. People are easily led when it comes to religious matters and this accounts for the firing up of the masses when someone strikes a match under them. People that are ordinary everyday folk, going about their lives, can suddenly turn into raving fanatics, baying for blood. We've seen it and also been caught up in it. It's really frightening that people can be whipped up this way.

[kokopeli]

I remember seeing enraged muslims protesting in the UK about Salman Rushdie. Although I would never condone a Fatwa, I had some sympathy with them - Rushdie writes worse books than Jeffrey Archer!

[MotherBear]

Originally Posted by kokopeli

Rushdie writes worse books than Jeffrey Archer!

Jeffrey Archer....... one of hubster's favourite authors . Whenever he's into one of his books I don't get a word out of him until he's finished it. Can't say I've been tempted into reading his stuff myself, yet.

[MotherBear]

Still on the subject of religion (sorry Nicky, we seemed to have veered away from the Sudan problem, but perhaps it will keep us thinking and debating until matters are resolved there).

The Golden Compass