Re: (politics) Muslim cartoons


mikesgruv@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

The funny thing is, up until this paragraph I thought you were making a
lot of sense on this thread. Cartoonists draw things they think are
funny or provacative. I don't know that portraying the prophet
Mohammed with a turban shaped like a bomb is particularly funny or
witty, but people running around protesting or making death threats
over some idiotic drawing, or about Salman Rushdie's book for that
matter, is a vast overreaction. As is saying that everyone who HAS
that overreaction is an extremist. These muslim protestors are no more
ridiculous in my view than the conservative christians here freaking
out over gay marriage or claiming that hurricanes are divine
retribution.

I agree 110 percent. As I said, it is definitely an overreaction, but
when you know that the overreaction exists, I would think that you
wouldn't want to provoke it.


And incidentally, saying that "they" only use treaties to delude us is
a pretty sweeping statement that has nothing to back it up. Who is
this "they" you're referring to? Anwar Sadat, who died because he
signed a peace treaty? What peace treaty are you saying "they" have
abrogated?

Look -- the moslem people of the middle east have some very different
ways of looking at the world, and I disagree with many of their
priorities, particularly when it prioritizes showing respect for
someone who died 1300 years ago over the life of a person living today.
But their screwed up priorities aren't all that different from the
screwed up priorities of fundamentalists in this country, but you don't
tell us that we should abandon all hope of reasoning with christian
fundamentalists.

Arabs have spent millenia being fucked over by one group after another
-- Greeks, Romans, turks, persians, northern europeans, coming in wave
after wave to take over the holy lands. Western minds are the ones
that have screwed up the middle east as bad as it is, creating
artificial national borders and propping up corrupt mideaval monarchies
and dictatorships. Considering that Europeans have been waging war on
moslems for thousands of years, it isn't all that surprising that they
feel picked on and sensitive about it.

Thank you for succinctly conveying the idea that I have been trying to
portray throughout this thread. I do not agree with the overreaction,
but to deny it exists because you don't have a similar reaction to
equivalent things does not make it go away. And I definitely agree
with what you said. I have a feeling that Christians would be more
than a little sensitive about being picked on for being Christians if
it were the Moslems that killed Christians during the conquests, the
inquisition...etc.

We would also be pretty upset if the world decided that all of the
Muslims in the world were relocated to Kansas/Nebraska against the
wishes of the American people.

Muslims are very culturally sensitive, with good reason.

And I think it is quite hard to deny that laughing at someone for their
cultural beliefs is very sixth grade and childish. That is what makes
faith and beliefs so inspiring to me. It takes a lot of guts to put
your faith in something that might defy logic and reason. People that
think that religion is the way of the weak operate under the assumption
that religious people are simply ignorant of the lack of logic in their
position, and in my experience, often times the opposite is true.
Often times the faith of the religious openly defies logic in such a
powerful way that I can do nothing but stand in awe of them.

For example, take Buddha. He was a rich gentleman. Was it logical for
him to decide to leave his riches to live as a pauper? No. Did that
decision hinder his life? I think it actually propelled his life into
a richer existance. He openly defied rational logic, and lived a more
fulfilling life because of it. That is faith.

That said, I find suicide bombing to be very a very disgusting thing.

I try to avoid provoking suicide bombers.

Just a little rule I have for my life ;)
matt

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