What are your qualifications for debating Islamic jurisprudence, especially the implied claim that Muslims give no weight to the hadith?
Scientology was begun as a fraud, and hasn't added any science to justify its name. If you took away its fraudulent tactics and its criminal means of sustaining itself against its critics, it would cease to exist. The light of full disclosure would destroy it utterly. What sort of chance does it deserve? If the RCC can be held liable for allowing priests to molest children, shouldn't Scientology be held to account also?
The people you need to tell this to are the terrorists, Muslim supremacists, and other threats to the life, liberty and safety of non-Muslims. Ultimately, Islam is not what's in the books, it's what's practiced. I've heard of moderates being attacked, but I've never heard of a terrorist being declared apostate and anything coming of it. I've never heard of an imam being declared apostate for preaching death to infidels.
I do see Muslim solidarity whenever one of their own is criticized for such statements or acts. You're doing it.
If you believe what you say, let's see you go to Gaza and convince Hamas that they're wrong to kill Jews. Let me know how it goes.
(aside: why the hell don't my italic tags work inside blockquotes?)
The United States of America were more of less founded by people who were persucted because they dared to disagree with the established churches in their home countries, weren't they?
Muslims, just like Christians are simply people, and just like with Christians, most are tolerant, kind and open-minded, unlike you.
Yes, and so are most other people. The problems are usually (but not always) caused by a minority, and the effect of that minority depends on the ethos of the majority. If the majority opposes and restrains the minority, things can remain peaceful and tolerant; if the majority supports or even merely tolerates the minority, the violent and intolerant determine the result.
The violent and intolerant Muslims have scripture on their side. They have been known to label their tolerant opponents as apostates and kill them. Can you show me a Muslim-dominated society which does not have blatant discrimination against non-Muslims?
And don't start quoting the Qur`an at me either
Why not? Its commandments are the eternal, unchanging word of Allah. It is used as the moral justification for acts of terrorism, religious cleansing and genocide. When the terrorists themselves are quoting it, what allows YOU to say it is irrelevant to the issue?
The morale of all this is that it is not what your religious book says that counts, it is what you choose to do in your life.
Reason says, and experience proves, that the people who accept a religious book which preaches violence and intolerance are likely to be bad neighbors.
how will anyone even know if you have left a religion, unless you claim free-speech, FREE-SPEECH, and run around the streets claiming to have left a religion.
Are you saying that anyone who's left Islam should have to stay closeted, and risk their life if outed?
that rule doesn't apply to non-Islamic countries - not living by the Sharia law.
Tell that to the Muslims in the Netherlands who attacked Ehsan Jami (the head of the ex-Muslims committee). Tell that to the daughters in England and Germany who risk being killed for "the family honor" if they adopt the norms of their country.
basically Jews used to claim to have reverted to Islam, then leave the religion at night, so that they could cause mischief, split the believers, and generally cause chaos / disorder.
Given the atrocity perpetrated by Mohammed at the Khaybar oasis, this was justified. Would that they had been more successful.
any Human (whether Muslim or not) who kills another Human (unjustly), then Qur'an states that it's like he has killed all of mankind in the sight of God!
You are misquoting that. That appears, not as a general commandment, but in the context of a warning to the Jews that they will be punished if they reject Muhammad. Also, the very definition of "justice" is in play here. Muslims are allowed and even commanded to kill to promote Islam.
I have no desire to defend Islam.... My interest is only in defending Muslims.
I notice that you don't defend, or even mention, a right to convert to a religion which has no such problematic commandments. Why are you defending Muslims as if Islam is some immutable trait? Indeed, is not defending Muslims qua Muslims equivalent to defending Islam?
... saying "Islam tries to get you killed for disagreeing" muddies the actual situation, and creates resentment among moderate Muslims.
What sort of decent, rational person would withhold judgement against the murderers inside his own religion while resenting outsiders for raising the violence and oppression as an issue? That's blatant bigotry. Where's the internal debate in Islam where these things are being rejected? You're debasing the very concept of moderation by applying it to such people.
What you've posted here looks a lot like taqiyya. Maybe you're doing it deliberately or maybe you've not understood the sort of deceit advanced for the sake of Islam, but people are getting wise to it. I'm an infidel, but it looks like I know Islam better than you do:
[4.34] Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.
Now you'll accuse me of "creating resentment". This resentment needs to be aimed where it belongs, at the 7th-century tyrant and murderer who created this mess and the people who insist that his every word and action be revered and emulated to this very day (because he is "the perfect man" and "an excellent example of conduct").
Islam has a lot of prominent defectors, including Walid Shoebat and Ibn Warraq. There appears to be a very small group of people who reject the intolerant, sexist, oppressive and inhuman elements of Islam and yet still desire to call themselves Muslims. I wish them luck, in staying alive if nothing else. But their success can only be measured in the next generation, to see if the tolerance continues and grows or if the children return to scripture and become jihadis.
Now, imagine your most dumbest, most back-water Virginia or Georgia redneck, time-wrap him back a hundred years, reduce his level of education and income by an order of magnitude, and you have the sort of dumb Bengali villager that is willing to whip a women because some mufti told him to. Do you honestly believe you even need to bring Islam into the discussion to explain the behavior?
That's not the question. The question is whether you can get anyone, from that dumb Bengali villager up to university-educated Saudis, to reject what the Koran explicitly sanctions.
Like Saudis keeping slaves in the USA. They call this a "cultural thing", as if this excuses it. Do you? Are you like al-Turki's defense and put this prosecution down to "islamophobia"?
It's time to hold Muslims morally accountable for the crimes they abet by defending the totalitarian system of Islam.
"Islam" is not an entity, like say the Church of Scientology or the Catholic Church. Like "Protestantism", Islam is decentralized religion with many sects.
Which allows anyone with a grudge to get an authority figure to pronounce takfir on another sect (declare them apostates), which creates an obligation* (not just an option) to kill them. This happens a lot; all the Sunni/Shi'a violence stems from this.
* see Bukhari, which is accepted as authoritative by all major Islamic schools of jurisprudence.
Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to 'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn 'Abbas who said, "If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostle forbade it, saying, 'Do not punish anybody with Allah's punishment (fire).' I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'"
The migrant workers themselves use lots of energy for heating and cooling (they usually live in very poorly-constructed housing). Often their biggest asset is a maxi-size pickup truck, which also consumes large amounts of fuel.
What's the daily fuel requirement for an apple-picking machine (which may be possible to electrify) vs. a full crew of field hands who commute 100 miles one-way to work every day? We are far, far better off feeding the machine and the occasional visit from the repair company's work truck.
It's estimated that about 10% of the current US population is illegal aliens. If they left, they would consume considerably less energy back in their home countries. (This is quite practical; make it very hard to get work and most will self-deport, like the illegal Pakistanis when things got hot after 9/11.) This would give the world a bit of breathing room on both oil supplies and carbon emissions.
And so the poor should just go to school somehow and learn how to be geeks that fix robots?
If they're smart enough, why not? Of course, we'd have fewer poor people because we would stop importing millions of them.
Remember, this topic is not just about illegal immigrants or even legal immigrants, but people in general.
It would be good to have fewer people in make-work degree programs like "communications" and have them do something which boosts productivity across the economy instead.
The ag lobby has been claiming that we need "guest workers" (or illegals, or others) to pick these crops.
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Suppose that the car's fuel system has juice to cruise for 6 hours before refueling; in other words it holds 36 kWh worth of energy.
Way out of line with the first generation of PHEVs. The Chevy Volt's battery was recently specced at 16 kWh; the VentureOne, 3 kWh.
In order to transfer this amount of energy into the cell in 5 minutes (1/12th of an hour) requires a sustained power output of 432 kW.
36 to 192 kW, for those vehicles being fast-charged (most will be charged overnight, and may even supply excess energy to the grid for people who want to charge immediately).
Multiply with the amount of vechiles being reloaded simultaneously.
This will be limited to the number of vehicles on long-distance trips. If they are Tesla Roadsters or the equivalent with ~60 kWh of battery and 3+ hours range, the average load will be about 20 kW per vehicle, less than 1/20 your naïve figure.
You can't run out of water either, but you sure can run well short of water at the rate you need it. Water tomorrow doesn't flush your toilet, water your crops and keep your salmon run alive today.
If you don't have the ability to capture all that non-hydrocarbon energy and convert it to hydrocarbons as fast as Business As Usual consumes them, we have at least begun to "run out" for all intents and purposes. Trying to continue using hydrocarbons made from other energy supplies just adds conversion losses to the list of problems. The solution is the same: convert from hydrocarbons as the preferred medium to something more efficient. That something is almost certainly electricity (and almost certainly not hydrogen).
The anti-trust laws are just acts of Congress. This is a later act of Congress, and implicitly supercedes any contrary provisions of the anti-trust acts.
If you want to get rid of this, you need a Constitutional challenge. Unfortunately, the damned Supreme Court has allowed the Commerce clause to be so horribly over-extended there may not be any room left to assert a right to netcast one's own music.
that would kinda defeat the point of using a non-breaking space, wouldn't it?
Not for sentence breaks. All I want is to guarantee that if the line doesn't split, I get a sentence-space bigger than a word-space. Requiring a (regular) space on one side or the other of a non-breaking space does that, and does not create problems with page-widening, etc.
It would be trivial to require non-breaking spaces to have a regular space on one side or the other. I can write the regular expression substitution without even thinking hard:
s/\([^ ]\)\([^ ]\)/\1 \2/g
Don't tell me that a bunch of expert Perl hackers can't come up with something that simple.
In the print world, a sentence break is wider than a word break, for superior legibility. Standard HTML rendering compresses any string of spaces down to a single en-space sized blank. But there are ways around that. When I write for the web, I always add an extra space after a full-stop using the non-breaking space escape:
But I can't do that here. Slashdot prevents posters from using non-breaking spaces, among many other things (I can't use standard physics or trigonometric notation, because Slashdot blocks the Greek characters Δ, θ, etc. I can't even use π).
What's truly sad is that non-breaking spaces USED to work here, but they got filtered out sometime in the past few years. And, despite my complaints, nobody ever put the capability back.
Slashdot Mirror
What are your qualifications for debating Islamic jurisprudence, especially the implied claim that Muslims give no weight to the hadith?
Scientology was begun as a fraud, and hasn't added any science to justify its name. If you took away its fraudulent tactics and its criminal means of sustaining itself against its critics, it would cease to exist. The light of full disclosure would destroy it utterly. What sort of chance does it deserve? If the RCC can be held liable for allowing priests to molest children, shouldn't Scientology be held to account also?
The people you need to tell this to are the terrorists, Muslim supremacists, and other threats to the life, liberty and safety of non-Muslims. Ultimately, Islam is not what's in the books, it's what's practiced. I've heard of moderates being attacked, but I've never heard of a terrorist being declared apostate and anything coming of it. I've never heard of an imam being declared apostate for preaching death to infidels.
I do see Muslim solidarity whenever one of their own is criticized for such statements or acts. You're doing it.
If you believe what you say, let's see you go to Gaza and convince Hamas that they're wrong to kill Jews. Let me know how it goes.
The violent and intolerant Muslims have scripture on their side. They have been known to label their tolerant opponents as apostates and kill them. Can you show me a Muslim-dominated society which does not have blatant discrimination against non-Muslims?Why not? Its commandments are the eternal, unchanging word of Allah. It is used as the moral justification for acts of terrorism, religious cleansing and genocide. When the terrorists themselves are quoting it, what allows YOU to say it is irrelevant to the issue?Reason says, and experience proves, that the people who accept a religious book which preaches violence and intolerance are likely to be bad neighbors.
What sort of decent, rational person would withhold judgement against the murderers inside his own religion while resenting outsiders for raising the violence and oppression as an issue? That's blatant bigotry. Where's the internal debate in Islam where these things are being rejected? You're debasing the very concept of moderation by applying it to such people.
What you've posted here looks a lot like taqiyya. Maybe you're doing it deliberately or maybe you've not understood the sort of deceit advanced for the sake of Islam, but people are getting wise to it. I'm an infidel, but it looks like I know Islam better than you do:Koran 4:34, The Women:Now you'll accuse me of "creating resentment". This resentment needs to be aimed where it belongs, at the 7th-century tyrant and murderer who created this mess and the people who insist that his every word and action be revered and emulated to this very day (because he is "the perfect man" and "an excellent example of conduct").
Islam has a lot of prominent defectors, including Walid Shoebat and Ibn Warraq. There appears to be a very small group of people who reject the intolerant, sexist, oppressive and inhuman elements of Islam and yet still desire to call themselves Muslims. I wish them luck, in staying alive if nothing else. But their success can only be measured in the next generation, to see if the tolerance continues and grows or if the children return to scripture and become jihadis.That's not the question. The question is whether you can get anyone, from that dumb Bengali villager up to university-educated Saudis, to reject what the Koran explicitly sanctions.
Like Saudis keeping slaves in the USA. They call this a "cultural thing", as if this excuses it. Do you? Are you like al-Turki's defense and put this prosecution down to "islamophobia"?
It's time to hold Muslims morally accountable for the crimes they abet by defending the totalitarian system of Islam.
* see Bukhari, which is accepted as authoritative by all major Islamic schools of jurisprudence.
Of course, it is very un-PC to point this out. Watch the replies to this comment for gratuitous attacks.
Scientology is a racket, but they have a ways to go before they catch up to "mainstream" religion.
This thing couldn't even get started on an uphill, or with more than a light breeze for a headwind. Forget climbing out of a pothole.
It's a very clever toy, nothing more.
The migrant workers themselves use lots of energy for heating and cooling (they usually live in very poorly-constructed housing). Often their biggest asset is a maxi-size pickup truck, which also consumes large amounts of fuel.
What's the daily fuel requirement for an apple-picking machine (which may be possible to electrify) vs. a full crew of field hands who commute 100 miles one-way to work every day? We are far, far better off feeding the machine and the occasional visit from the repair company's work truck.
It's estimated that about 10% of the current US population is illegal aliens. If they left, they would consume considerably less energy back in their home countries. (This is quite practical; make it very hard to get work and most will self-deport, like the illegal Pakistanis when things got hot after 9/11.) This would give the world a bit of breathing room on both oil supplies and carbon emissions.
1. I think they'll be happy to be settled somewhere. I and many others would prefer that the illegal immigrants do this in their home countries.
2. When automation can create and execute new concepts, humanity itself will have created its successor. Think of it as evolution in action.
This one is worth a few "Funny" points, if not something else for the thought behind the sarcasm.
The ag lobby has been claiming that we need "guest workers" (or illegals, or others) to pick these crops.
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Vehicles parked at home will be charged overnight. A Tesla Roadster will charge overnight from a 220 V, 30 A dryer outlet; the VentureOne will charge in a few hours from an extension cord, and the Chevy Volt will come to full charge in ~12 hours from the same. These loads are countercyclical, offsetting the normal daytime load peak; somewhere between 73% and 84% of the vehicle fleet could be supported by the current electrical generators as PHEV's.
You can't run out of water either, but you sure can run well short of water at the rate you need it. Water tomorrow doesn't flush your toilet, water your crops and keep your salmon run alive today.
If you don't have the ability to capture all that non-hydrocarbon energy and convert it to hydrocarbons as fast as Business As Usual consumes them, we have at least begun to "run out" for all intents and purposes. Trying to continue using hydrocarbons made from other energy supplies just adds conversion losses to the list of problems. The solution is the same: convert from hydrocarbons as the preferred medium to something more efficient. That something is almost certainly electricity (and almost certainly not hydrogen).
He's making an academic point without the academic caveats, just to yank people's chains.
In other words, he's a troll.
A123Systems' cells can be recharged in as little as 5 minutes. AltairNano claims a cell which can be charged to over 90% in 6 minutes.
The world is changing fast, try to keep up.
The anti-trust laws are just acts of Congress. This is a later act of Congress, and implicitly supercedes any contrary provisions of the anti-trust acts.
If you want to get rid of this, you need a Constitutional challenge. Unfortunately, the damned Supreme Court has allowed the Commerce clause to be so horribly over-extended there may not be any room left to assert a right to netcast one's own music.
The USA is one place where truth is an absolute defense to a charge of libel. In the UK, it is not.
That expression was supposed to read s/\([^ ]\) \([^ ]\)/\1 \2/g
It would be trivial to require non-breaking spaces to have a regular space on one side or the other. I can write the regular expression substitution without even thinking hard:
s/\([^ ]\)\([^ ]\)/\1 \2/g
Don't tell me that a bunch of expert Perl hackers can't come up with something that simple.
In the print world, a sentence break is wider than a word break, for superior legibility. Standard HTML rendering compresses any string of spaces down to a single en-space sized blank. But there are ways around that. When I write for the web, I always add an extra space after a full-stop using the non-breaking space escape:
But I can't do that here. Slashdot prevents posters from using non-breaking spaces, among many other things (I can't use standard physics or trigonometric notation, because Slashdot blocks the Greek characters Δ, θ, etc. I can't even use π).
What's truly sad is that non-breaking spaces USED to work here, but they got filtered out sometime in the past few years. And, despite my complaints, nobody ever put the capability back.
The performance isn't quite as good, but Tesla Motors was already taking orders last year.
The Killacycle used to be powered by spiral-wound AGM cells, but the producer went out of business.
Since then, it was repowered with A123Systems' LiFePO4 cells. It now does 0-60 in 1.5 seconds and the quarter mile in 8.16.
Electrics need not be slow, and their range is growing by leaps and bounds. The ICE has received its terminal diagnosis; the future is electric.