In Reply to: Ahhhh, the religion of peace, yes posted by Jim Thorpe on Friday, 7. October 2005 at 09:59 Bali Time:
I don't know what source/website you copied this from, but lists like these are exactly the sort of thing that causes more confusion and misunderstanding.
This site: www.skepticsannotatedbible.com has a list of violent events in the bible, as well as a section on the Koran. There is a long list of thousands of violent acts (including animal sacrifices, which beefs up the list a bit).
The Bhagavad Gita was a poem to encourage a pacifist to go to war, wasn't it?
Does this mean that Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Vishnu, and all the other prophets and Gods are evil and encourage violence? And that all their followers must therefore be evil and violent?
Religious texts are not simple documents. That's why we have people whose only job is to interpret them for us. The problem is, every now and again one of these interpreters turns out to be a knob-end who leads people down the wrong path. Every religion has these knob-ends.
What I'm saying that by focussing on the religion of the knob-ends, there is a tendency to set up those following the same religion as those knob-ends as our enemies. In general, almost exclusively, they are not our enemies. They are our allies in the struggle between good people and knob-ends.
In relation to Bashir, it bothers me that the media is portraying him as some kind of mad man. He isn't. He has a very solid and sound ideology which he wholeheartedly believes in. It just happens to conflict with the ideals of the Western world and moderate Islamic countries like Indonesia.
Bashir advocates violence only in self defense. The problem with that is that when America decided that pre-emptive self defense was legitimate, it opened the door for those with conflicting ideologies to adopt the same spurious morality and justification, as well as greatly broadening the definition of what constitutes being attacked.
We have to weed out the knob-ends in all religions, and all countries. And we have to stand together with the good people of all religions, in all countries. If we let the knob-ends divide us, the knob-ends win.