Have you never read John Irving?
Sciforums Muslim/Arab Bias
- Thread starter nirakar
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Ditto here. If he had a leftist phase, I totally missed it. I've known him as a supporter of the Iraq and Afghan wars, an antireligionist who writes polemics and a relatively superficial writer. A lot of style but very little substance and perhaps also very little imagination, considering his turn around re:waterboarding after a few seconds of having water poured on his face
Fundie religions organize and entrench what should be merely socio-political matters (and thus employing compromise, negotiation, civil liberties, limitations of authority, etc) as religious ones, matters of fundamental faith and community of believers. That's one reason they are viewed with extreme wariness by those desiring freedom and liberty - they provide tyranny too many and too ripe opportunities to divide and conquer, too easy a path to setting the community at itself.ja'far said:
When the Irish famine refugees landed on the shores of the US in the 1840s, a disaster that did not happen is worth noticing: the religious conflict even then regaining strength in Ireland was not lit in the US. That is at least partly due to the separation of church and state in the US. And the threat to that separation from Islam, a threat on occasion explicit and overt, is a reasonable ground (among others) for "bias".
Fundies endanger community, common trust, common sense.
He he. No, he writes like this. :m:who? a book? is he online? is he the second opinion?
more to the point.......what of hitchen's tale of The War Within Islam - The growing danger of the Sunni-Shiite rivalry? that would have never be written? are we now relatively assured of the peaceful coexistence between the sects given their history?
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The ME cauldron of war, lit, fueled and stirred by US&NATO/PNAC/ETC military colonialism, is sustaining and propagating Sunni/Shiite division. Remove the heat, and peace will, in time, return. :m:
and the basis for that polemical assurance is....?
Ismail I initiated a religious policy to recognize Shī‘ism as the official religion of the Safavid Empire, and the fact that modern Iran remains an officially Shī‘ī state is a direct result of Ismail's actions. Unfortunately for Ismail, most of his subjects were Sunni. He thus had to enforce official Shī‘ism violently, putting to death those who opposed him. Under this pressure, Safavid subjects either converted or pretended to convert, but it is safe to say that the majority of the population was probably genuinely Shī‘ī by the end of the Safavid period in the 18th century, and most Iranians today are Shī‘ī, although there is still a Sunni minority (wiki)
nothing like that i presume
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Again, notwithstanding history, extremist Jundullah is a (Sunni/CIA) minority employed to destabilize Shiite Iran via bloodshed. Divide and conquer. :m:
Its interesting that for the first 600 years Iran was a Sunni nation, but that just the action of a few political figures led to a massive leaning towards Shiite beliefs. Nothing to do with the fact that while Sunnis do not recognise any human authority as divine, the Shias recognise clerical authority above that of civil government.
pardon straw, but in this alternate universe there is no cia involvement. i was thinking more in the lines of ....
Last month, violent confrontations between Shia pilgrims and the Saudi religious police and security forces occurred at the entrance to the Prophet Muhammad's mosque in Medina. The timing and location of the clashes may have serious repercussions for domestic security, if not for the regime itself.
Some 2,000 Shia pilgrims gathered near the mosque that houses the prophet's tomb for the commemoration of Muhammad's death, an act of worship that the ruling Saudi Wahhabi sect considers heretical and idolatrous. Thus, the mutaween, the religious police of the Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice, armed with sticks and backed by police firing into the air, tried to disperse the pilgrims. The pilgrims resisted. Three pilgrims died and hundreds were injured in the ensuing stampede. A large number of pilgrims remain in detention, among them 15 teenage boy (link)
...that. would problems like this still exist?Some 2,000 Shia pilgrims gathered near the mosque that houses the prophet's tomb for the commemoration of Muhammad's death, an act of worship that the ruling Saudi Wahhabi sect considers heretical and idolatrous. Thus, the mutaween, the religious police of the Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice, armed with sticks and backed by police firing into the air, tried to disperse the pilgrims. The pilgrims resisted. Three pilgrims died and hundreds were injured in the ensuing stampede. A large number of pilgrims remain in detention, among them 15 teenage boy (link)
Disagreements and clashes would - its the nature of the beast. Would people be killed wholesale for being on one side of the spectrum or the other? Before the invasion of Iraq, there were intermarriages between Sunnis and Shias, now Sunnis live in enclaves and American troops live in the empty houses that the Shias left while fleeing.
Anyway, isn't this site feedback? What does all this have to do with the bias at sciforums?
heh
if i were a devout muslim, i'd takfir all the twelvers and behead their sorry asses
They consider themselves devout Muslims too and it was only in the 1950s that Sunnis unbent far enough to officially allow them their idiosyncrasies.
Took them long enough. Ne c'est pas?
I consider myself beyond such labels.
indeed
what does bias have to do with the site itself....
gustav said:
as far as this particular discussion goes.....who knows.
/smirk
Why did this incident occur?
Its the rise and fall of the tide caused by outside meddling that upsets the status quo. This can be traced right back to drawing
But to answer your question. IMO, where there is religion, and where there is dogma, division is sure to follow. So problems like this would still occur. :m:
you are asserting that the islamic revolution in iran would had never happened had the west not meddled in its affairs. is that correct?
are you sunni? if so, are the shia heretics in your eyes?
oh my!
thanks! :m:
And what has changed, other than the political orientation of certain of his opinions? Or was he a shill all along, just for some other cause(s)?
Is anyone who disagrees with you on certain political questions necessarily a shill, or do you have some evidence that he is a paid propagandist?
And do you have the slightest whiff of evidence for this charge? Ignoring, of course, the fact that all professional opinion writers are, by definition, paid to voice their opinions - you are, of course, implying that some political faction pays him (presumably secretly) to forward their opinions.
Otherwise, if we're just going to fling shit, I'll add that it seems to me that you did/do perhaps eat live human babies for breakfast.
Really? You refuse to even respect anyone who thinks the war in Afghanistan is justified, for any reason?
Because if that's the case, it follows that you are incapable of having a respectful discussion on that subject with anyone who disagrees with you.
Where? What has he said or done that would indicate such disregard?
Because I can think of several things he's written expressing apparently-sincere regard for such things.
It is possible for reasonable people to disagree about what course of action will harm Afghans the least, in the long run, no? If not, where is the basis for any respectful adult discussion on the subject?
The premise that anyone who disagrees with you is immoral (and dissembling, to the extent that they portray themselves as otherwise) is incompatible with respectful adult discourse. It is nothing other than fundamentalism.
Your average Afghan doesn't have much clout, but you walk a slippery slope when you give an entire nation a free pass on the affairs of their country. A lack of responsibility implies an absence of sovereignty - are you sure you want to infantilize Afghans in that way?
Right, you just go around making unsubstantiated accusations about him being a paid hypocrit and amoral imperialist warmonger, and insisting that he doesn't deserve any respect. It's not like you hate the guy...
Again, I have noticed a striking pattern amongst Hitchens detractors, in that they uniformly have never encountered him before (and since) he said something they strongly disagreed with.
Anyway, go ahead and write the guy off if you don't like him. I just wish people could do that without having to insist that everyone else pretend they're doing it out of some high-minded principles or penetrating insight into his character. Just say "he's a polemecist, and I don't find him helpful" or even "he just pisses me off." There are plenty of valid reasons to not like somebody, short of them being a villain or a shill or whatever.
Which, again, tells us more about the detractor than Hitchens. Specifically, it tells us that said detractors have some need to dress up their dislike as serious criticism, and need everyone else to validate this charade.
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