Toto

Dear BotD: This sort of preaching is out of place in this forum. It is also a bit lacking in a factual basis (what was that about bearing false witness?) especially after youngalexander's outburst above.

This site maintains a page of Islamic Criticism. You will see that prominent atheists have attacked Islam.

I think that you are confusing atheists with liberal multi-cultural Christians and the sort of conservatives who insist that all religion is a good thing, who do insist that true Islam is a religion of peace (to quote George W. Bush.) Few atheists make that mistake.

And I don't think you will find many atheists who go out of their way to insult Jesus. Most would claim that Evangelical Christians are the ones betraying him.

Clivedurdle

It looks as if the Islamic criticism page needs updating. The article by Giron is fascinating, but comments in the thread did mo exist have updated much of that.

I think we are in a position to begin to sketch out a real history of Islam, and I get the strong impression it is a hundred years after 570, and some amalgamation of Jewish and Arabic beliefs in Jerusalem may be the starting point! The reality is that Arabic was not written around 570!

Could the Koran have been a reader for school children?

IIDB, come on, we have an opportunity to make history, Jesus Christ is a myth, uncle mo, your turn has come!

Clivedurdle

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=144674

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=142405

Amaleq13

This does not appear to be, in any rational way, connected to my post so you either drastically misunderstood it or are simply using it to push a personal agenda. If the former, I attempt to disabuse you of your misconceptions below. If the latter, please avoid this practice in the future.

What you should have obtained from my post is that the majority of participants in this forum tend to ignore Islam in favor of the religions with which they are most familiar (ie Christianity & Judaism).

aguy2

As I understand it the Islamic claim is that the Qur'an is not 'cobbled' together. The claim being that the 'messenger angel' Gabriel related the words to Mohammad and Mohammad had the words transcribed from his memory, due to his illiteracy.
aguy2

Jack the Bodiless

Good grief. For someone who uses the handle "BenefitOfTheDoubt", you seem to be making a LOT of baseless asumptions about us.
I'm not sure what alternative to "tolerating Islam" you are actually suggesting. We should chop their heads off, perhaps?

I don't "tolerate" Islam (or Catholicism) anymore than I "tolerate" Christianity.
I haven't actually decapitated any Christians either ("true" or otherwise). But, no, their most radical view is that I should be stoned to death: maybe you are unfamiliar with "theonomists"? A less radical view, but still fairly common in some circles, is that science shouldn't be taught to my children. Also, they should be compelled to pray in schools and taught to be Christians.
Nope. I KNOW that the Bible is false. But as for the Koran: it contains relatively few significant errors or internal contradictions that I know of, I merely have no reason to believe it's true.
The Christian "Old Testament" contains "pure racist murderism". The Koran also has some pretty unpleasant stuff in it, but it generally urges Muslims to fight against non-Muslims in self-defense (though I gather this qualifier is missing in certain hadiths). However, I strongly object to the Islamic habit of killing Muslims who abandon their faith (apostates).
I can imagine you foaming at the mouth when you typed that. But "Prophet" is Mohammed's title and profession. I'm fairly sure I've seen the name "Jesus Christ" in the "atheistic media" too.

BenefitOfTheDoubt

No--not having a board dedicated to bashing it like you do for the Bible. By not doing that, you prove that you know that God is the God of the Bible and that the Bible is the word of God and that the Koran is just a worthless role of toilet paper.

<insult removed>

It's quite the opposite, and you know it. Your actions prove. You are an atheist, which means you hate God. So, as a hater of God you will attack what you perceive to represent Him, and you attack the Bible, not the Koran, thus showing that you believe the Bible and not the Koran to represent God.

Or does it contain punishment of child-molesting pagans who raped their children and then burned them alive? That's who Amalakites and all those tribes that God had Saul wipe out were. I think that was a better system than the voluntary "Please Mr. Sex Offender, let us know if you plan on moving without telling us" system we have here in America.

So you say, but yet, they're running all over the globe killing each other and everyone else and the Jews aren't nor are Christians.

Toto

Mr. Benefit: please do not tell atheists what we believe. We don't hate god because we don't believe in him, her, them, or it. Some of us even think god is an ok fictional character.

And there are several places in the world where Christians have battled other Christians in the last few decades, not to mention centuries. Possibly the main reason Christians have given that practice up is that most Christians don't really believe in their doctrines any more. Isn't that a relief?

lao tzu

Greetings, BOTD,

Forgive my presumption in welcoming you to IIDB, as you don't seem to have what it takes to defend yourself properly in this environment. Still, you should be aware that many, if not most of us, certainly close to half, are former christians. That many, if not most of us, found it uncomfortable to give up on the beliefs we held. That for many of us, the process of opening our eyes to the nature of the primitive superstitions we'd been taught since we were young was wrenching.

Of course we know more about the aburdities of christianity than those of islam.

This board is not dedicated to bashing anything, but to enlightening ourselves and gathering the information we need to answer the close-minded defamations of atheism you've been fed and which you are now regurgitating. Believe me, I know how you came to spout these things, as I once spouted them myself. What you are experiencing is the view through the filter that allows only evil to be seen of your enemies, and only good to be seen of your friends.

The world is far more wondrous than anything that could be described by the bronze age civilization that created your sacred texts. There is a brighter world here in the light and I hope that you can gather the necessary courage to welcome it.

Do not take this personally. Most of us have at one time or another found our posts handled this way when we allowed our emotions to show through too much in our postings. It is not a special treatment of christians. It's happened to me, too.

We are atheists, which means we are not theists. The "with us or against us" view that one must either love or hate your god, accept him or accept his demigod, is entirely theistic. We are free of such a small-minded view of the world.

Here you will also find atheists who are former muslims, certainly not as many, but enough. And others such as myself, who have gone to the trouble to study the qur'an and hadith and the separate sects inside islam, in the interest of understanding who it was that attacked our country. In this thread, you will find links to criticism of islam which belie your thesis.

Your information about justification of the genocides of the Amalekites and Midianites is taken from a source that would have judged them evil whether they were evil or not. Because of this, there is no good reason to believe these accounts. Nor would the evil of these tribes be any justification for killing their cattle, goats and camels, let alone their babes and small children. Nor is it comprehensible that a creator of the universe would prove incapable of raising up prophets among these tribes to lead them away from the error of their ways. There's certainly no hint of such an attempt in your sacred texts.

Most of the muslims I've known, like most of the christians I've known, have never left the country of their birth. There is no reason other than misinformation for you to believe that muslims alone are wandering the globe killing others.

Because death comes in a personal form from those without helicopter gunships and smart weapons does not make that death any less a killing. We have killed well over a hundred thousand Iraqis in our current campaign, a campaign reported begun at the behest of George Bush's god, or so he reported to Abu Abbas.

I know how uncomfortable it is to deal with these facts. But truth is worth the price of discomfort. And, whatever else might be said of your spiritual leader, he was correct on many things. The truth will set you free.

As ever, in peace, Jesse

BenefitOfTheDoubt

George Bush is a Muslim pretending to be something else, as the port deal proves. He started the "war on terror" to line the pockets of his Jihadist friends in Saudi Arabia and is just pretending to be fighting terror while he funds it.