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Nobel Laureate Wiped From Pakistan's Textbooks As Heretic
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson. But that isn't the case in Pakistan, where Salam has been wiped from textbooks and history for not being fundamentalist enough. 'He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics,' says Sebastian Abbot. 'His grand unification theory of strong, weak and electromagnetic fields opened the gateway for the discovery of bosons and laid down the basis for this quantum electrodynamics project,' writes Anam Khalid Alvi for Pakistan's Express Tribune. But Pakistan can't celebrate his achievements, since Ahmadis like Salam are and were prevented from 'posing as Muslims,' and can be punished with prison and even death. By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who played a key role in developing the country's nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim."
Remember, it's all fine, carry on. They keep saying it's a religion of peace and all that. Don't forget that they scrubbed "muslim" off his grave. And other muslims in the region are expected to go out of their way to persecute them.
Om, nomnomnom...
It's coming soon to the U.S. Don't think they want this sort of thing to happen to Texas schoolbooks.
Rather a shame the way people can't respect one faith from another.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've always thought the Ahmadis (there's actually two Ahmadi sects) are appealing to Western converts. They talk a lot about pluralism, etc, and seem to mean it. Alas, they aren't quite as progressive as I'd like on LGBT rights. A lot of their commitment to pluralism probably comes from being persecuted in traditionally Muslim countries.
Spotted.
What kind of backwards country would modify their curriculum to fit religious ideals?
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/03/12/texas-removes-thomas-jefferson-from-teaching-standard/
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A group of idiots deprives themselves of an opportunity to feel some extra national pride in what can only be described as "shitting into one's own shoes", if I were to literally translate a proverb from my native tongue. Serves them right. I wouldn't want to be in their textbooks either, I'd feel dirty.
Ezekiel 23:20
"Religious" governments are ALWAYS a bad idea.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
It was electroweak unification. Important enough.
(So far, all attempts at grand unification have failed, including Einstein's.)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Dr. Sheldon Cooper jumped to the top of my head.
People can handle accidental, isolated deaths. Yes, someone dies, but there is no malicious force that caused it.
People can handle mass-death less easily, even when it's accidental (or not intentional). But things like the sinking of the Titantic, air disasters, bus accidents, and similar still disproportionately capture attention.
People cannot accept someone else who is out to kill them intentionally because of hatred or a belief system. Yes, foreign policy, resources, economics, geopolitics, and myriad other nuances are involved here, but it really is that simple at its core.
The reason there ever was a "war on terror" isn't to "funnel money to corporate buddies" — it's because, to be blunt, we don't put up with that shit, even if our response is imperfect — not to mention that Europe and the West has enjoyed US defense-by-proxy for over a half-century. The fact that war is an economic driver is incidental (even if it can be argued to be important in its own way). But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
But I know that you and many other readers here are cynical (and ignorant) enough to actually twist a story about Pakistan and Islam into, yet again in true topsy-turvy bizarro-world style, how the US is evil. (Same thing happened with the recent Syria Wikileaks story.) It might be amusing if it weren't so predictable, pathetic, and shameful.
It is nothing but ignorance to conflate Radical Islam with Evangelical Christianity.
Yeah, we get that it fits your "All Religion Is Evil / All Religion is Anti-Science" prejudiced screed, but it's just not a valid comparison. All you're doing is trying to rile people up and/or get them to march to the drumbeats of your own bigotry, like so many Evangelical Atheists enjoy doing.
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous. To do so means you either have an agenda, or lack education. Which is it with you?
Personally I am an atheist, but it seems that low-levels of religious belief seem to do most people little harm and some good and at least in smaller communities seem to provide a certain amount of greater good & charity which might otherwise go missing.
It would be nice if the people involved could just enjoy getting together for the sake of getting together and do charitable works because helping people is usually the right thing to do without shame-based moralizing and all the hocus pocus, but human experience seems to suggest a more Hobbesian outcome without some kind of organizational direction.
Look up Alan Turing and what he was prosecuted for by the SECULAR government.
Look up how the Catholic church has treated scientists throughout its history.
Look up the Protestants in the USofA right now to see how they are trying to hide parts of history that they don't like.
This is more about a party in power trying to re-write history LIKE MOST PARTIES IN POWER DO than it is about evil Muslims being all evil and Muslim.
Are you saying ALL Muslims follow the Taliban? Would any of you have a problem with saying ALL Atheists are baby killers?
You are setting up a nice straw man there. Not all Muslims follow the Taliban, but all Muslims follow a cdoctrine that says that non-Muslims must be killed or accept inferior status. Read the Qur'an.
Anything they can do to unwind the clock several hundreds of years is great for the rest of us. Hopefully they'll outlaw literacy soon and get to breeding out of all sense of control or reason.
Well, Romney would make things worse. He was against going after Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Khan is a Muslim.
Yes, and so was Dr. Abdus Salam.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Would any of you have a problem with saying ALL Atheists are baby killers?
I can only speak for myself, but ... Veal... delicious Veal Parmesagn... Oh you probably meant human babies. No, no they don't make good Parmesagn at all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Christians used to be this bad and they're getting worse again. They are becoming increasingly insulated from other ways of thinking and increasingly bigoted. This is in the US, of course, but I have no hope that it won't spread elsewhere
So yeah, Christianity is a lot better now, and Islam is still the worst, but the trend isn't good.
Play Command HQ online
The U.S. should invade Pakistan and never leave until they get their textbooks right.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
So bombing is different if the victims are abortion doctors?
The only difference is degree.
Both of these are groups that oppress women and support the use of violence to spread their own flavor of crazy.
And after you posted that, Rupert Sheldrake jumped to the top of mine!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
too easy for them to accuse original, true e-copies as being false works
There's always digital notary services to timestamp something, crypto signed documents to prove who signed it, etc.
VERY unpopular (intentionally?) but hardly technologically impossible or an inherent issue with the media. If everyone used pencils with erasers, and refused to use indelible ink, that doesn't mean paper technology is at fault.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The Bible has it's fair share of questionable text. So...to be fair, it all depends on who reads and teaches the document. If you read any book as the truth and fact, you are in for a very dark world. One thing I've learned about religion in general is that you have to take the words with a grain of skepticism to even start to be a rational person. (I've chosen to flow on the side of non-belief myself, but whatever.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Why current? He's been dead for almost 20 years after all.
Anyway: Feynman, Dyson, Penrose, Hawking, Preskill.
Or do they all need to be American, in which case remove those English pretenders and add Thorne and Guth
If dead doesn't count, then I don't care Feynman stays because he can't not be on any such list.
If dead does count then make some room for Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Einstein.
**NEWSFLASH**
A country that is subjugated by religious fundamentalism commits all manner of evil acts and promotes despicable bigotry and hatred.
More news at 11 !!
http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/lightning-rod/lightning-rod.php?cts=benfranklin-weather-electricity ...in addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity, Franklin began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. Franklin described an iron rod about 8 or 10 feet long that was sharpened to a point at the end. He wrote, "the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike..."
Wiped to finish difference and racism because everyone is noble.
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them.
But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark...
Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
How "current" are we talking about?
Steven Hawking (hasn't lifted a finger in physics for a few years... metaphorically), Carl Sagan (I was alive when he died), Niel deGrass Tyson (more of a pr guy), Abdus Salam, A.Q. Khan...
The last 2 happened to be mentioned on this page.
I would argue that on top of the sectarian issues in this particular case, there is a major lack scientific achievement in that region of the world. Dr. Abdus Salam is one of only two Nobel laureates from a Muslim country. Islamic Universities have a shockingly low output (only 300 out of the 1800 universities in the region have even _one_ faculty member who has ever published anything. Compare that to Western Universities where typically every faculty member will have publications.)
Part of the problem might be the rote learning paradigm that dominates in the middle east. Free inquiry and critical thinking are probably discouraged in a region dominated by so many authoritarian regimes. However, I would argue that one of the main reasons science has failed to flourish in Arab-Islamic countries is the legacy of one man: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali helped codify and unify several competing schools of Islamic thought, binding them around the central premise of rejecting outside influences to concentrate on spiritualism and devotion to God. While European philosophy focused on understanding the material world, al-Ghazali focused instead on the supernatural. After the Crusades destroyed the Islamic world's scientific Golden Age, al-Ghazadi's anti-scientific philosophy held sway and kept the region from experiencing the kind of Renaissance that moved Europe out of the dark ages.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Yeah, if you piss off the Muslims, they just kill you. The Scientologists are much worse. They'll sue you and ruin you financially!
[Note: I am not an apologist for Scientology. I'm being ironic. Scientology is a goofball religion just like all the rest of them.]
To add to that, I'll point out that while it is true that not all Muslims follow the Taliban, it is also true that all of the Taliban are Muslims. It is not true that all atheists are baby-killers, and it's also not true that all baby-killers are atheists. The Taliban is a subset of Muslims, but atheists and baby-killers are not subsets or supersets of each other.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Republic means the country is devided into states who have representatives involved in goverment. Large countries(empires) need some form of additional structure. Republic is on of the ways to structure an empire. Democracy is about how decisisons are made. Those representatives are selected by voters and they decide policy between each other by voting. Plus the president is selected by voters. Federalism means that the states each have their own goverments and those goverements have power. In each state those goverements are selected by voters. In some of the states policy is decided directly by voting. So the USA is a Democracy. The USA is a Republic. It is a Federation. It isn't Wigg, Communist, Socialist, or Green though.
It's really kind of easy to see who really has the agenda here with the ad hominem attack.
I got here through a series of tubes
... but those killed by lightning are also killed by religion! After all, isn't it Zeus (or was it Mercury) that throws the bolts down to earth when he's angry?
Would any of you have a problem with saying ALL Atheists are baby killers?
I can only speak for myself, but ... Veal... delicious Veal Parmesagn... Oh you probably meant human babies. No, no they don't make good Parmesagn at all.
Psst... I had an egg for breakfast...
Don't tell the Pontiff!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It was quite interesting. As an atheist, while his family wasn't comfortable with the idea of him opening a tech store with someone not of their faith, I was more welcome than someone convinced of another faith. When bored, we'd often discuss his faith, and his history with it. He had come to Canada as a refugee around age 14, and eventually acquired citizenship (He deserved it--he busted his balls when it came to work and spoke better English than many born Canadians I know). The primary focus of their faith is to teach that (basically) Jihad is wrong, and that the Muslim faith is one of complete peace. A good friend of his was a long standing member of their mosque and would affirm this, as would anyone else I questioned of their faith. None of them would ever be pushy and, frankly, were a hell of a lot more fun to be around than Christians.
I, of course, never converted, but I did gain some insight into the problems of the Muslim religion and exactly why countries like Pakistan are screwed up.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them. But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark... Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
Wish I could have given you a nudge with this... thank for posting.
Imagine: trying to bring in Boolean logic and set math into an argument like that one. What WERE you thinking?
This is about prejudice! Falsehoods! Blasphemy!
You can't fight that shit with math.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If dead does count then make some room for Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Einstein.
That's where I would have gone (subbing Hawking for Fermi), with the addition of Neil DeGrasse Tyson - the rock star of astrophysics.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Clearly you have never read the Bible or the KKK's hate literature. There's considerable overlap - look up the Heresy of Peor, for example. God rewards Phinehas and all his seed for the extrajudicial murder of Zimri, who has committed miscegenation. Or check out the Prophet Ezra's viewpoint on race-mixing - the KKK is right in line.
At some points in US history, the KKK has run governments - such as the Indiana state government in 1925, for instance.
The only "crazy" they invented on their own was the curious idea that Christianity wasn't founded by Jews.
Amen to that, brother.
There is a difference between tongue in cheek statements and people that burn down embassies because of cartoons.
Tell that to the Albanians.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
A small correction. This is supposed to be from Hadith, and not the Quran. Though every sect follows both Quran and Hadith (even though Hadith does not contain words of the prophet). So it is just a technicality.
Large chunks of the Muslim world *has* followed suit. Unfortunately, other chunks of the Muslim world haven't.
in WWII, which saw the worst mass genocide in human history.
I think it is partially just people who are very self centered. They need everything to be about their lives. So when there is a story about things happening in other nations, they have to try to find a way to spin it around to be about the US, so it is about them. There is a story about something, good or bad, in another nation and they have to start up with how it is or is not like that in the US and so on and so forth. They continually steer the discussion back to themselves.
The other part is for some people, many of whom hang out on Slashdot, it is trendy to hate the US and to feel like they are "oppressed". So everything needs to become about how bad the US is. Another country does something bad? Try to find a way to say the US does the same thing. Another country does something good? Whine about how the US does not do that. Everything is turned in to how the US is bad because that is what they wish it to be.
All in all it equals a situation where any story about another country has people making posts to try and show the Us in a bad light, rather than discussing the story.
Remember that next time you eat your soybean sprouts. If you can't tell a cow apart from a human you are an idiot.
The most important difference between say, christians and muslims is one of those groups still reads it to the letter today. Christianity started getting over that after the crusades. Islam is still living in what, the 600's or so?
Most religions started with tenants built around conquering other religious groups. Back then it was simply a matter of survival. Most religions either did it or were conquered and destroyed as a result. What we have left now are the "winners", but a few of them are still fighting, with Islam containing the most public, radical, and fundamental batch of nuts of the bunch. And they aren't the least bit concerned about behaving like 600AD barbarians to do it. And the rest of the world tends to frown on that now. These "fundamentalist clerics" have a lot in common with vile little dictators that are using religion as a means of creating power and influence. I can't help but wonder what percentage of them is a real religious leader and what percentage are just taking advantage of their religion and their influence.
And most of these religions' holy books flat out say that the world belongs to them and everyone else can either join or it's ok to kill them. That wasn't meant for the modern world. I have zero respect for that attitude now. Anyone that agrees with a book that says it's their god-given right to force me to do something or kill me for not doing it deserves that Hellfire comin' down their cave.
Unfortunately it gives the rest of the more modern/moderate/reasonable followers a really bad rep. I think right now the fastest way to get discriminated against in the US would be to make your Islamic religion known. Moreso than race etc. A lot of that is the govt P.R. engine at work, but you can't place all the blame on them. You're just going to get a lot of bad bias when you're associated with nuts that like to blow up large groups of uninvolved innocents, particularly from the part of that pool of innocents that would prefer to keep breathing. The moderates need to do something about their fundamentalist relations. Either smack some sense into them or split. The extremists are the one to blame for the bias, not the extremists' targets. All I hear are the moderates complaining about the public grouping them together. They are a group. They are a part of the group, and they either need to do something, affect change within the group, or leave it. "Guilt-by-association" is impossible to dodge. So far of all the religious conversations I've had with followers of Islam, every one of them still thinks the bad light that shines on them is 100% the fault of the world, they don't see the root of the problem, and aren't in any hurry to do anything about it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You are obviously making a gross generalization and know nothing about it really. That's like saying all Christians agree on what the Bible means which is obviously not true.
Try actually reading the Bible. It's not hard to find passages where the Christian God is calling for the extermination of people. Try Deuteronomy 20:16. Then shut your xenophobic mouth.
Meanwhile a delegation of American Christian Fundamentalists are said to be going on a fact finding mission to Pakistan to see how they did it.So that they can repeat the process in the United States only for Darwin and his book The Origin OF Species.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It's hard enough to imagine bringing any logic to the situation. You'd have to start with this one:
10 - The Bible is the word of God
20 - How do you know the Bible is the word of God
30 - I have faith. Goto 10
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous
So, let's not learn anything from the past then? And by the past I mean of course the Crusades and the Dark Ages. Fundamentalist anything is detrimental to the growth of a peaceful, progressive society.
Error in Line 10: undeclared variable.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Having been raised Christian, I would like to agree that my inherited religion is the nobler one, but I feel it is necessary to point out that a) there is a lot of equally ludicrous effort in the United States [q.v. young-earth creationism, Sarah Palin who does the speaking-in-tongues bit, anti-evolution activities, etc.] and b) supposedly Christian nations have perpetrated warfare and genocide on other people at the behest of their holiest teachings [q.v. Deuteronomy chapters 7 and 20, The Crusades, and the invasion of Iraq]. Conflating the two is not ridiculous at all. On the contrary. As an exercise in introspection, it should trigger some soul searching in terms of teaching and foreign policy.
Mod parent up.
OH right! Which variable do we define first? God or His Word?
Good example! Yeah, we Christians HATE Canaanites! Hittites SUCK! This is totally exactly the same thing!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Totally! Thank God we put them to the sword. Had we not done such a good job, they might still plague us today -- like those pesky frogs and locusts and stuff.
Undefined loop in 30.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Germany = Catholic, Russia = Orthodox.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Alexander Abad-Santos writes that in any other country, the late Dr. Abdus Salam would be a national hero: he's the Nobel laureate in physics who laid the groundwork for the biggest physics discovery in the past 30 years--the Higgs boson.
Seriously? ANY OTHER country? There are American Nobel laureates every year, and they are not typically considered national heroes. I bet 98% of Americans can't name a single US Nobel laureate from the last ten years (without the aid of reference materials). I can't.
-- QED
I'm not sure I would be able to tell the difference. I've never knowingly dined on human flesh before.
Just wait until a US political leader announces that he or she is an atheist, then watch how quickly that person gets erased from political life.
But those crazy religious people over there in Oogaboogastan are totally worse than our crazy religious people. Totally.
The only difference is degree.
Incorrect, Hater.
The guys (or is it guy? seriously, this has happened... how many times in your lifetime?) who blow up abortion clinics are nutjobs who, if they weren't exploding an abortion clinic "for Christ" would be blowing up a Stop-N-Shop for Thor or setting fire to a Civil War statue because it's Tuesday. And at those few-and-far-between times when it DOES happen, the leaders of every Christian denomination typically condemn it, distancing themselves and their sects as far as possible from the psycho. Look it up.
Islamist Extremists blow up buildings, torture women, and stone gays not *despite* their leaders' teachings, but *because* of them. These are not crazies who took a verse or two from a holy book and twisted its meaning, these are jihadists participating in a campaign of institutionalized violence. And when they do, as the body count grows, the silence from the kinder, gentler Muslim community is almost as deafening as the rants from the Wahabi mullahs.
Christianity and Islam went through a despicable and barbarous period of religious violence in the Middle Ages. Christianity grew out of it. The world is still waiting on Islam. To equate in any qualitative or quantitative way the violence from the "extremist" wings of these religions in the modern era is to admit to bigotry or ignorance.
Germany = statist ersatz-religion, Russia = statist ersatz-religion
But in fact, the WW2 is mostly remarkable for the death rate (i.e. deaths per unit time). By raw body count, the most bloodthirsty regime in history was China under Mao.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Quantum electrodynamics came first, you can hardly unify QED, QCD and the weak force, before QED been inverted. Actually Dr Adbus Salam with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon_Glashow , unified QED with the weak force. Grand unification hasn't been done correctly, although alams model with Jogesh Pati, SU(4) by SU(2)_left by SU(2)_right by U(1), is still very well regarded as a potential grand unification model.
Large chunks? I'm assuming you mean large in terms of population? Which large chunks are you talking about? Perhaps you should read about Islam in the world's biggest Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, and large Muslim minorities like India? Have you read about the growing Islamist power in the Middle East due to the Arab Spring?
You're right that OP was generalizing and exaggerating, but you're being misleading by drawing a false equivalence between Islam and Christianity.
You can't deny that most Christians value Jesus and most Muslim value Mohammed. Then you just have to look at the differences between Jesus and Mohammed to get an idea of where that value will lead. Jesus was the son of God, pure good, so good that nobody can possibly be as good as him. He forgave people of their sins, cured sick people, etc.
Mohammed wasn't like that. He's supposed to be human. Calling him the son of God, or a representation of God, is actually against Islam. Worship of Mohammed is prohibited (thought Muslims revere him). He's a soldier of Allah, a general. He committed atrocities. He tells his soldiers it's okay to rape prisoners. He's a *practical* leader.
Please, name a few atrocities that Jesus personally committed or ordered and that are widely celebrated by Christians. Jesus was an impractical person. Nobody can be like him. Your typical Christian doesn't even aspire to be like Jesus. How many Christians support the death penalty for instance? Plenty. If you ask a Christian who supports the death penalty whether Jesus would support the death penalty, they'd say "No probably not but he's the son of God" or something like that.
Compare that to Muslim contemporary politics. Calling someone an infidel, a bad Muslim, a traitor to Islam, etc is a huge deal. People get killed for doing un-Islamic things. If they are called on doing something un-Islamic, they don't say "So what? This is the law, not religion" or something like that. They rephrase their argument in Islamic terms. If they are supporting girls' education, and their opponent says girls' education is un-Islamic, their argument becomes that Mohammed believed in education for girls. They would never say something like "Yeah Mohammed would do it differently but guess what I'm not Mohammed."
I don't know.. it's like people like you live in a fantasy world where the reality of the Muslim world escapes them. You really should read about it before making these silly arguments about finding a "bad" verse in the Bible and showing that Christianity and Islam are equal. Also, believing that most Muslims are secretly super liberal and really laid back about religion is just dumb.
Haven't you heard that America is controlled by the Religious Right?
And that the vast majority of Muslims are good peaceful people?
By that logic America is more in the grip of extremists than any Muslim country. So there's some problem somewhere...
"I'm all about preserving culture"
If a culture is toxic, then it has only entertainment value.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Set aside the religious fundamentalist aspect of the thing, and what you see is totalitarianism in action. Indoctrination is so deep that the people fully sanction their own oppression. It's a nationalistic form of Stockholm Syndrome. Every powerful regime uses religious and nationalistic pretenses to make heretics, infidels, and apostates out of the most rational, individualistic, and liberal people in the society. Under the hypnosis of a culture that promotes alienation and fear, the mob gleefully hunts down and tears apart all independent-minded individuals.
Westerners forget that for much of the world it is nearly impossible to cultivate a modern, rational, humanist intellect.
-- thinkyhead software and media
An apparently Pakistani news site for one (which is actually mentioned in the summary)
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/12579/an-achievement-we-cant-call-our-own-higgs-boson-done-erum/
Pure nonsense. You're cherrypicking from history and the positions of extremists. Most Muslims do not hold these positions and consider themselves devout followers of the creed. Who are you to say they are wrong?
We don't need to say they're wrong. The Muslim clerics and scholars do that. How many Muslim clerics do you hear saying that it is wrong to prevent non-Muslims from building places of worship, or to engage in violent jihad, etc?
Um. Actually, Germany = Lutheran, for the most part.
Pirate Party UK
Jon Stewart beat you to this a long time ago.
There's nothing like $HOME
I had always though that Stalin had a lock on the most murdered... however there are a lot of different ways to account for those killed including direct genocide and policies directly resulting in the deaths of millions. Stalin rates in from 6-60 million depending on how you measure and Mao rates at a truly whopping 49-78 million. That is some busy little yellow guy (I can say that, I was born in Taipei :-)
Slashdot is for 'tech' stuff. We shouldn't rubbish religions, even if we agree they are rubbish. Why do some communities evolve some religions? What happens when incompatible beliefs clash? Why do new religions keep starting, just as the old ones get sensible? Might fundamentalist religions have value in post-meltdown communities? If all these were (defective) operating systems, we might make more sense of things.
So No true scotsman is how you choose to respond? Pretty telling, when you can't even come up with a better line than that.
In the middles ages islam was new, and actually far ahead of being civilized of european christianity. Where do you think we got 0?
Wow I was totally wrong. Republic means so much less than I thought it did. Why anyone say the united states is a republic and not a democracy is wierd. By their very nature most democracies would be republics.
Have they really?
Perhaps they just tend to make a different sort of mistake in the media these days, or maybe they're better at covering it up.
I suppose it's a lucky thing that other religious groups aren't causing problems.
Thankfully, they're tackling the problem at the source by ensuring people get a proper education around such issues, all around the world.
Which large chunks am I talking about? The ones that live in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, etc. The ones that live on my block. The ones that live down the street from you.
Well, somebody had to say it...
http://www.acetonestudio.com
To "clock" Stalin at 60 million, you have to do various kinds of tricks like counting "demographic losses" from Holodomor (i.e. not counting just the people who died directly, but also their unborn children that would have been born otherwise).
Your typical Christian doesn't even aspire to be like Jesus.
That says it all to me really. To paraphrase, "your typical Christian doesn't even pay any attention to the New Testament."
My finding of "bad" verse in the Bible is hardly any more silly than assuming that Christians are better people than Muslims. I'd be willing to bet that wars initiated by predominantly Christian nations have killed far, far more people than wars initiated by Islamic nations. Let's consider a few:
* The Crusades
* The Napoleonic Wars
* The United States Civil War
* World War I
* World War II
http://sueliz1.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/catholic-church-no-longer-swears-by-truth-of-the-bible/
Casteism
YAAAAAAWN
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This may help:
The estimates of the deaths caused by communism are staggering indeed: 65 million in China, 20 million in the former Soviet Union, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 in Africa, one million each in Vietnam and Eastern Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. -- Human Events review of The Black Book of Communism
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Tears of Jihad
This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.
By my recollection / estimate, 270 million is far, far more than were killed in all of the above wars.
Other than the Crusades, which were a defensive reaction against Islamic invasion and conquest, none of those wars was motivated by religion. On the other hand, Jihad is still with us.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
They are becoming increasingly insulated from other ways of thinking and increasingly bigoted
Pot, meet kettle.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That is your source? Did you even read it? Interestingly, it doesn't even bother to try and attribute the deaths to actual Jihad and instead gets most of its 270 million from the African Slave Trade. As I recall, the Dutch (an ostensibly Christian nation at the time) were the real slave traffickers. More importantly, the entire population of Africa in 1950 (according to UN estimates) was only 250 million. I seriously doubt there were even 100 million people in all of Africa 100 years earlier. And, if we are including death by slave trade on the Jihad side, we have to assume some death by "Christian" nations as well. I glanced at the rest. I think it's pretty clear that there is an anti-islamic agenda going on at that particular site. Facts, on the other hand, seem conspicuously absent.
How do you figure? It doesn't take a bigot to recognize a bigot.
Play Command HQ online
So by "large chunks of the Muslim world" you mean "small populations of Muslims in countries where Islam is not dominant."
I agree with you in that context but calling it large is not correct.
Well, as I'm sure you know, the Crusades were not initiated by Christian nations.
Anyway, you might be right on the total death tally if only because there are more Christians than Muslims and the religion is older. And Christian societies are far more technologically advanced, which unfortunately enables large scale warfare and destruction -- seriously, in the early 20th century what Muslim country could even contemplate a world-wide war?
I don't see the point though since we're not talking about death tolls. I was talking about extremism and how much weight religion carries in different societies today. You didn't even try to dispute my point, just bring up stuff about war.