SKILMATIC said:
But the problem with this whole argument is that you dont see christians these days running commercial boeing 737 into building and caling it an act and a praise for God. So that argument although valid in its foundation isnt necassary to this thread becasue thats not what this thread is about. Its about why muslims have a profound problem with the interpretatio of their own word. Please explain this to me?
Please, allow me....
In the decaying Arab world, Islam is the problem—because of the way bitter old men interpret and deform its more humane precepts while embracing its cruelest injunctions. Hatred taught to the young seems a lingering cancer of the human condition. And the accusations leveled against us by terrified, embittered men fall upon the ears of those anxious for someone to blame for the ruin of their societies, for the local extermination of opportunities, and for the poverty guaranteed by the brute corruption of their compatriots and the selfish choices of their own leaders to remain in power. This is the Middle East. Violence between Muslims and Israelis has become routine and acceptable to Western society. Being aware of decades of hate speech from mosques in many countries around the world and numerous terrorist attacks, when we noticed anything at all, we dismissed it as no more than an annoyance, our attitude drifting between the “Politically Correct” notion that everyone is entitled to his or her own form of religion (no matter if it preaches hatred and praises mass murder).
Our focus on the Middle East over the decades has been so exclusive that the majority has come to see Islam as defined by the Arab. But the Islam of the Middle East is as fixed, as unreflective, and ultimately as brittle as concrete. People don’t realize that Islam is the youngest of the world’s great religions, that it is still very much a work-in-progress on its vast frontiers, and that its forms are at least as various as the countless confessions and sects of Christendom. Islam is a vivid, dynamic, and vibrant religion of changing shape and potential. But Islam’s local identities are far from decided in its struggling borderlands, and, in times of tumult, any religion can turn toward the darkness as easily as toward the light. Religious intolerance always returns in times of doubt and disorder. This struggle between religious forms and between prescriptive and repressive doctrine of faiths, is one of the two great strategic issues of our time—along with the redefinition of the socio-economic roles of women, their transition from being the property of men to being equal partners with men (which is the most profound social development in human history).
The ease with which today’s Americans of diverse faiths interact in social settings has allowed us to forget that our ancestors, in their homelands, massacred one another over the contents of the communion cup, or slaughtered Jews and called it God’s desire, or delivered their faith to their colonies with Bibles and breech-loading rifles. Some even brought their hatreds to our shores, but America conquered their bigotries over the generations—although even we have not vanquished intolerance completely. Still, for most contemporary Americans, religion has become as comfortable as it remains comforting. But human history is largely a violent contest of gods and the men who served them, and our age is the latest, intense serial in a saga that shaped our earliest myths.
Religions change, because men change them. Fundamentalists insist upon an historical stasis, but evolution in the architecture of faith has always been essential to, and reflective of, human progress. Certainty is comforting, but a religion’s capacity for adaptive behavior unleashes the energies necessary to renew both the faith and the society in which it flourishes. On its frontiers, Islam remains capable of the changes necessary to make it, once again, a healthy, luminous faith whose followers can compete globally on its own terms. But the hard men from that religion’s ancient homelands are determined to frustrate every exploratory effort they can. The Muslim extremist from the Middle East has one consistent message: Return to the past, for that is what God wants. Beware, no matter his faith, of the man who presumes to tell you what God wants. It cannot be accomplished, of course, this longed-for return to a golden age of sanctity and success, that is mostly myth, is gone. But the bloody-handed terrorists, their mentors, and the millions of supporters are determined to pay any price to frustrate those Muslims who believe that God is capable of smiling, or that it is possible to change the earth without challenging Heaven. What we are witnessing is a struggle for the soul of Islam. The result will be a religion of peace or a hangman's vision of a noose.
