Terror attack in Paris

[Dan H]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... /21417461/

Ridiculous

So, what do you think? Is he doing it for Allah, or is he just spinning? Like I said above, when all you have available is what you're told, don't you at some point have to pay attention?

Another interesting article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ayaan-hir ... 33260.html

The author is a former Muslim turned atheist. She quite obviously has some very interesting things to say and has been banned from speaking at several American colleges. I guess her life experiences make her bigoted and/or racist somehow. All I know is some of the things she went through as a child made me quite nearly physically ill while reading about them. I do recommend it highly though, and you can get a used copy quite cheap on Amazon:

[Zeratul]

I think Indy is right: religious leaders are very important for muslims because the Coran is complex and can have many different interpretations. Therefore many muslims choose to follow blindly what the Imam says...

[Indy]

And as you said Zeratul, the culture in France is not very welcoming of Muslims. It breeds a "me against the world" attitude to begin with, and then it becomes much easier to accept the crazy preaching of an Imam. It is kind of like inner-city gang culture, or even neo-nazi and white supremacy. It becomes very easy to recruit when the people you are recruiting already feel like outcasts.

[Dan H]

In a sense that's a result of the fact that Islam doesn't necessarily have a prevailing central authority. An imam need merely to have read the Koran and completed the hajj. It is quite comparable to the way the Christian church was before the Bible was widely translated and available. Particularly considering the Arabic translations of the Koran are the ones that are regarded as most faithful, many Islamics can't even read their own holy book without someone to interpret it for them.

[Indy]

I think there is resistance to translate it for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that you lose the true meaning if you translate it away from its natural tongue. You don't hear too much about that in the US or Europe for the Bible, but really it can't be very close to the original meaning when you considered the differences in the languages and cultures between the Middle East nearly 2000 years ago and then Europe, and then the US. I can't imagine how many specific texts are used to tell Christians what God said/meant when they aren't anything like what was originally in the books. That even leaves out the hundreds (at least) of years of verbal story telling before it was ever written down. It has to be bastardized just by human nature.

With all of that history, I would be hesitant to try and make my Holy book less Holy by translating it away from the original.

[Dan H]

"I can't imagine how many specific texts are used to tell Christians what God said/meant when they aren't anything like what was originally in the books. "

You would be surprised, a great deal of scholarship has gone into ensuring accurate translation as well as retaining cultural context to maintain contemporary relevancy.

[Indy]

You just can't do that Dan. Nobody knows what was originally said in the stories that after hundreds of years of playing the telephone game from village to village were eventually written down in a dead language.

[Dan H]

You just can't do that Dan. Nobody knows what was originally said in the stories that after hundreds of years of playing the telephone game from village to village were eventually written down in a dead language.

http://irr.org/todays-bible-real-bible

In 1948, some Old Testament manuscripts (along with some non-biblical writings) were found in caves near the Dead Sea which dated as early as 250 B.C.E., about a thousand years before the Masoretic text. These are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead of being anywhere from 1000-3000 years from the original, these are as close as a few hundred. In the case of one of these scrolls – a copy of the book of Isaiah – the only difference between its text and the Masoretic text, was three words, and these only differed in spelling

[Indy]

I don't think you understood my criticism. I get that once they are written down, any monkey can copy the shapes on the page over and over again. That doesn't mean the translations of what was originally said (in one language) to what was written in another, after hundreds of years of playing telephone were accurate to begin with.

[Indy]

Although we are probably getting off-track. Maybe we need a bible thread.

[Mori Chu]

I'll make a Religion area of the board to go along with this Politics one.

[Zeratul]

The 2 terrorists that did the attack are surrounded in some farm right now.

[Nodack]

And as you said Zeratul, the culture in France is not very welcoming of Muslims. It breeds a "me against the world" attitude to begin with, and then it becomes much easier to accept the crazy preaching of an Imam. It is kind of like inner-city gang culture, or even neo-nazi and white supremacy. It becomes very easy to recruit when the people you are recruiting already feel like outcasts.

The world is filled with propaganda. What's the difference between a crazy Iman and FOX News or MSNBC? In Russia they have their state news which is propaganda. In NK they have their own propaganda. Propaganda is everywhere. We get our version of events here from our "crazy Imans" called news. It's different, but the same. We are good and right and everybody else is evil and wrong. It's the same message no matter where you are.

[Ghost]

I'm with Dan on this (I hope that doesn't trigger Armageddon ). Yes, I'll throw in the disclaimer that the majority of Muslims aren't blowing people up, and don't want to...but even among the "moderate" Muslims, there are polls that show a truly frightening level of acceptance for what everyone else in the world would call terrorist acts.

Nodack, you point out that in the west, we have free speech, but that you consider it extremely offensive to deliberately offend Muslims by creating those cartoons (I am paraphrasing, so my apologies if I didn't capture that correctly). Well...I wish I could say I didn't want to say this, but the subset of Islam that will murder you for drawing a cartoon DESERVES AND SHOULD BE ridiculed. Because I don't really care what the little book says or how offended someone gets by a cartoon; the offensive thing here is that a lot of people died this week because of a goddamn cartoon.

The tenets of Islam that justify the actions of terrorists are not very different from the horrifying things that appear in the Bible, and while some will argue that the New Testament wipes all that out, the fact is that Christianity is still based on some pretty awful stories. But, for the most part, it truly is a small minority of Christians who act on those ideas. And the vast majority of Christians then oppose those actions. And, we can ridicule those extremists like Westboro, and not have to worry about them killing us. And they deserve to be ridiculed, and we should continue to do so, even if it offends their deeply-held belief in an outdated concept of God.

Same thing goes with Islam. Frankly, there wouldn't be any political cartoons about Mohammed if there weren't crazy ass terrorist whack jobs and horrific human rights violations going on in his name. We can't NOT call it crazy and ridicule it, because that's giving them exactly what they want. And we aren't talking about the lukewarm moderates, but the crazies. Offend them. Call out their backwards, antiquated, awful way of thinking for what it is.

Every news outlet that refused to show the cartoons after the attacks should clean house and start over, with real journalists this time. They are complicit as far as I'm concerned.

[Indy]

I'm with Dan on this

What does that mean, exactly (besides Armageddon)? With which point are you agreeing?

[Indy]

Every news outlet that refused to show the cartoons after the attacks should clean house and start over, with real journalists this time. They are complicit as far as I'm concerned.

Complicit in what? The terrorist act?

[Dan H]

Every news outlet that refused to show the cartoons after the attacks should clean house and start over, with real journalists this time. They are complicit as far as I'm concerned.

Complicit in what? The terrorist act?

I would interpret this as saying that the position of the fourth estate is to speak truth to power - even and perhaps especially uncomfortable truths.

When the vast majority of the press accedes to the ridiculous demands of one particular group or subset of society, it shoves those who did not accede to those demands to the forefront. Where the press could have stood in a unified line, they glanced at one another and took a step back, and left the cartoonists to stand alone. In such context the whole "Je Suis" campaign is kind of laughable. They certainly weren't "Je Suis'ing" before the worst happened; they were casting aspersions on their judgement as recently as two years ago for publishing the cartoons.

In this sense they've essentially enabled bad behavior on the part of the aggrieved because they've limited the focus of their actions. Had the press stood firm, the reaction to the cartoons would have been universally regarded as the nonsense that it is.

It's akin to Beyonce demanding that picture of her performing at the Super Bowl be deleted off of the Internet. (Story here if you haven't heard it - http://gawker.com/5981957/beyonces-publ ... e-internet). It's idiotic, deserving of scorn, and it got it.

Of course in the case of Beyonce all there is to fear is a lawsuit. RIF's have a decidedly more violent track record.

[Dan H]

And thank you, Ghost. For the record the uber-majority of Christians do mock WBC . . . although sometimes they're so over the top cray-cray I can't help but wonder if they're some sort of long-form elaborate prank orchestrated by Ashton Kutcher. I think people like Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, and Joyce Meyer are if anything worse because they're at least semi-appealing to those who don't know enough to recognize their chicanery.

[Ghost]

I wrote that post rather hastily, so I apologize for being unclear. As to the specific points Dan made that I agreed with, I also read hastily and need to go back. I'm on the way out right now, so bear with me a bit and I'll update later.

No, not the attack itself. But they have effectively told the terrorists "Hey, if you don't like what we're doing...this is a good way to stop us from doing it in the future." They have essentially accepted that attack and, while they cover it, are damn near endorsing the tactics of those terrorists as being valid. It's disgusting.

[Zeratul]

The writers and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo have made it clear they wanted to ridicule every religion and a lot of catholics were very upset with drawings about Jesus or the Pope that would come out regularly. They would manifest in front of the journal's HQ and it's insane to think that now Charlie receives public condolences from the Pope and that they rang Notre Dame's bells for them.

Other newspapers do not share this need to shock the religious folks so I get that they did not want to publish the caricatures at the time and I'm not surprised they still express their support now. I do agree they should've done more at the time, though.

That said I really don't recall "there is a good way to stop us" bit, maybe one of the cartoonists said something like "We'd rather die than be told what to publish" but I think that's about it...

And it's not propaganda, France is becoming more and more racist: the extreme right party is becoming bigger by the hour and could possibly win the next presidential elections. There is a huge gap between between the arabics and non arabics right now and it does not seem much can be done about it... This news story won't help either.