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| Middle East |
| Jordan FM calls Palestinians to stop suicide attacks |
| 2002-11-09 |
| The Jordanian foreign minister has called on Palestinians to halt suicide bombing attacks during the upcoming Israeli election period. Marwan Muasher warned Palestinians that suicide attacks during the election period could contribute to the election of a far right-wing government in Israel. Speaking to the London-based Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, the Jordanian minister stressed that the collapse of Sharon's government was a result of domestic issues and not of the peace process. A hundred years from now, when the world is mostly divided between agnostics and atheists, an historian will analyze why religion died en masse. Here's the reason: this man, an educated Muslim, cannot come out and say that killing innocents is wrong. The reason Christianity is on the edge of disappearing is exactly the same — Unitarians, Episcopalians, United Methodists, and the like cannot bring themselves to say "this is an abomination in the eyes of God." Even more fundamentalist branches of Protestantism spend much, much more time evoking the Glory of God than they do examining right and wrong. I put that down to ecumenism, which is fine in theory, but which ends up looking for the similarities among religions while ignoring or downplaying the differences. The resulting thin gruel is devoid of both flavor and sustenance. Chris Johnson and Mark Byron know much more about the subject than I do, but it seems to me that Islam's appeal is that it does present that "right-wrong" aspect; it just draws it out to the point of absurdity, with fatwas on everything down to how to pee correctly (Muslims are supposed to squat because The Prophet did) and how to pack the pork to the Little Woman. The one will die because it's bloodless, and the other because it's bloodthirsty. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 Quite right about the Protestant mainline which has effectively reduced the number of sins down to four: racism, sexism, homophobia and not ratifying Kyoto. Most of these will dissolve or be kept around by kind of a historical force of habit, like the British monarchy. Pentecostalism, which is not the same as fundamentalism, does seem to spend a lot of time on the glory of God and not much on confronting sin. Although it should be said that my experience with it mainly comes through watching TBN; I don't attend a Pentecostal church. I think a great many Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants like the Southern Baptists do spend quite a bit of their time on what's right and what's wrong. This is the main reason they are regularly cast as intolerent bigots by the culture at large and have been ever since Mencken. And it's mainly been the Southern Baptists and similar groups who have made a point of highlighting the differences between Christianity and Islam. Which earned them the wrath of the Episcopalians and other |
| Posted by: Chris Johnson 2002-11-12 10:32:10 |
| #1 I have no major problem with Islam nor do most of my friends. However, if the East keeps pushing this jihad/fatwa crap, we (the West) will have to turn Mecca and Medina into a sheet of glass. We are capable (although not liable; just yet) of doing that. Church creeps who think it's okay to cornhole altarboys hold no sway over me. Rabbis who think they can talk their way outta the Islamofascist gas chamber are also in for a big surprise. Human beings know instinctively the difference between right and wrong despite what our "moral leaders" say! |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2002-11-10 02:03:56 |