I'm not against peace loving muslims, I'm against the pretend muslims, why do they talk about peace but then blow themselves up on buses, trains, shopping centers etc. Do they honestly belive they will go to paradise?
Be against murderers, not Muslims. The suicide bombers aren't really killing for any religious viewpoint, they're just murderous criminals.
so you don't think they actually belive they will go to paradise. P.S. Im so pleased they havent thought about leaving bombs and getting out the way
oh right thanks peace phoenix, my bad. but they do call themselves muslims, and muslims holy book, the Qu'ran talks of peace and tolerance
I personally think anyone who's religious is a bit of a nutter, but that's just my belief. I know some lovely, normal, and well-rounded religious people though, so it just goes to show that you should never be too judgemental of others.
Yes there is a belief in paradise for martyrdom. And the trouble with religious books, like the Qur'an and the Bible, is that they are incredibly open to interpretation. Followers can use them to justify messages of peace, or they can use them to justify war and killing. George Bush frequently talks of God and Christianity, and messages of peace, whilst he is responsible for great atrocities in war on a scale larger than any terrorist attack. In part this fuels the actions of terrorists, taking their twisted vision of martyrdom and holy struggle and combining them with the injustices that they or other Muslims have experienced at the hands of America and other Western nations. The terrorists responsible for the 7/7 attacks cited the Iraq war as their primary motivation. Combine this with a belief that if you kill yourself in fighting back you will gain paradise, and you have a pretty deadly concoction....
Religion is more than just your beliefs, it is a totalising belief system which relies, to varying degrees, on faith in the supernatural. It is especially dangerous when such beliefs become more than personal and when otherworldy ends are deemed more important than worldly ones. If no terrorists believed in heaven, you would still have terrorists - people fighting oppressive states for better material conditions - but a lot of the fervour and irrationality would, I think, be gone. You might, for example, be able to solve the terrorist problem by removing conditions of state oppression. This is less the case where strong religious ideals are in play....
This is a very good point Islamic extremists do certainly believe that they will go to paradise for blowing themselves up. But their actions are often motivated by factors other than their faith like Peace says, factors which drive them towards this fanatical ideology. Suicide bombers are usually in very tightly knit small groups where their allegiance to each other is probably more strong than their allegiance even to their faith. In a twisted way they may be trying to prove themselves to their peers by doing what they do. It's quite telling that the 7/7 bombers went on team-building away-days! It would require some very heavily twisted logic to get people to behave in the way suicide bombers do when they blow themselves up amongst crowds of innocents. Political injustice and desperation isn't the whole story, neither is sick religion. Both factors play a part.
Answering a few points in one here: On what grounds do you label them as "pretend" Muslims? You seem to be making certain assumptions (wishful thinking) about how a Muslim is supposed to be. And yes, they certainly do believe they will go to paradise. That has to be the biggest load of nonsense I've heard this week. Without a religious viewpoint, what possible benefit could there be to killing yourself? It also talks of Jihad and Dhimmitude. I suggest you read it yourself rather than take anyone else's word for what's in it. It can be argued that anything is open to interpretation, but it's self-evident that some interpretations make more sense than others. Mein Kampf could be interpreted as an early vision of European unity.
Religious texts, however, have a habit of contradicting themselves quite directly. Also, in the case of the Qur'an, it is far more liberal and tolerant than the hadiths which followed it. Some Muslims, choose to accepts only the Qur'an, and others, generally the more fundamentalist element, choose to incorporate the hadiths. It is not true to say that the Qur'an preaches dhimmitude, in fact the Qur'an does not generally concern itself with laws, how states should be governed or the individual's relation to the state. It is the hadiths that introduce Shari'ah and the concept of dhimmitude. The hadiths were written by rulers of the Islamic world in the centuries after the death of Muhammad and used to legimise their oppressive rule by supposed reference to his life. This is not a defence of the Qur'an, as such, as generally I'm opposed to all religion, but it is important to make the distinction between the Qur'an, which all Muslims follow as the 'word of God', and the hadiths, which are not considered the word of God and which many more moderate Muslims who do not believe in Shari'ah choose to reject....
