Political tensions, rather than religious differences, are the source of the rift between the West and the Muslim world, and any resolution must include an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday.
"We should start by reaffirming and demonstrating that the problem is not the Quran or the Torah or the Bible," Annan said after receiving a report by an international group of scholars that proposes ways to overcome the divide. "The problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave toward each other."
The problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave toward each other.
semantics
Interesting that you would discount that Tikker. It's basically saying that Islam is at the heart a peacful religion and it is the perversion by man toward a belief system condoning or promoting violence which is the problem.
Generaly I find it more of a "conservative" viewpoint that says it is the religion it's self that is at the core, and the "liberal" viewpoint that says it's an extremest perverted view. On this issue I lean toward the liberal side.
Raymond S. Kraft wrote:The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.
Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.
Tikker wrote:both of us thinks our idea is the "right way" to do it
Politics or religion, it's the same in that respect. Context can't ever be rigorously defined, presence can't be absolute, semantics can never communicate an actualized intention, so you have the rise of the 'body politic'. Contextual violence.
Political tensions, rather than religious differences, are the source of the rift between the West and the Muslim world, and any resolution must include an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday.
"We should start by reaffirming and demonstrating that the problem is not the Quran or the Torah or the Bible," Annan said after receiving a report by an international group of scholars that proposes ways to overcome the divide. "The problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave toward each other."
Bullshit.
There are political causes for sure to a lot of the turmoil going on (ie, US foreign policy), but it's cheap intellectual dishonesty to say that Islam itself isn't an enormous factor in how its all playing out.
