Why do I say that Islam is an evil religion?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Just to pick a particular nit, no ‘witches’ were burned at Salem.

Boru

What do you mean?

Quote (Wikipedia): "The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, 19 of whom were executed by hanging (14 women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in jail."

I mean just that - those persecuted innocents at Salem were hanged, not burned.

Boru

[Leonardo17]

Still there were similar witch-hunts in Europe etc. in which women were tortured, burned or thrown into lake. If these women drowned in the lakes, there were presumed to be innocent. If they didn’t, the devil was behind it and the woman had to be burned.
What I am emphasizing is that these women were mostly picked for resorting to herbal remedies, looking a little weird or different, not being liked by their neighbors who were gossiping about them. Just to give the populace the chance of shouting “burn witch burn” on some “heretic” scapegoat.
And the same thing is happening today. They just pick people. Put them in jail for 5 days. Tell them they will be in trial for what they did so they cannot leave the country. I am saying that the behavior is basically the same. But I think everybody understood me

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Still there were similar witch-hunts in Europe etc. in which women were tortured, burned or thrown into lake. If these women drowned in the lakes, there were presumed to be innocent. If they didn’t, the devil was behind it and the woman had to be burned.
  What I am emphasizing is that these women were mostly picked for resorting to herbal remedies, looking a little weird or different, not being liked by their neighbors who were gossiping about them. Just to give the populace the chance of shouting “burn witch burn” on some “heretic” scapegoat.
And the same thing is happening today. They just pick people. Put them in jail for 5 days. Tell them they will be in trial for what they did so they cannot leave the country. I am saying that the behavior is basically the same. But I think everybody understood me

I don’t disagree with any of that. As I said, I was just nit-picking.

More nits:

-The overwhelming majority of people accused of witchery in New England were acquitted.

-The witch hysteria in (and around) Salem lasted about a year. The same phenomenon in Europe went on for centuries.

-In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, many places had laws against accusing people of witchcraft.

-A few popes went so far as to declare the belief that witches existed was a sin.

Boru

[Leonardo17]

Since we went deep into the subject I am going to make these quotations too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchcraft_Act_1735

“The Witchcraft Act 1735 (9 Geo. 2 c. 5) was an Act of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1735 which made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. With this, the law abolished the hunting and executions of witches in Great Britain. The maximum penalty set out by the Act was a year's imprisonment.”
(…)
“In September 1943, Helen Duncan was jailed under the Witchcraft Act 1735 on the grounds that she had claimed to summon spirits. Her followers often contend that her imprisonment was in fact at the behest of superstitious military intelligence officers, who feared that she would reveal the secret plans for D-Day. She came to the attention of the authorities after supposedly contacting the spirit of a sailor of HMS Barham, whose sinking was hidden from the general public at the time.”
(…)
“In 1951, the Witchcraft Act 1735 was repealed with the enactment of the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951”
- I quoted this just to show you that what we call “modern societies, can sometimes not be so modern after all.
Having gone through some sociology books I know that what we call “masses” may have far less intelligence than human beings as individuals. Some primal tendencies tend to take over the capacities of reasoning and intelligent thinking when individuals are in group. A good read on this is Gustave LeBon’s “Psychology of the Masses”. So what I am saying is that in such events (modern or past events) there needs not be a “logical” explanation for anything. Some sort of emotional speech with some religious elements in it was all it took in the middle ages. You didn’t even need for it to be institutionalized. All you had to do was a “someone” to agitate the group, and voila, the job was done.
So this makes it even sadder to see “governments” resorting to similar methods just to be able to reassert their own political power.

[Leonardo17]

The ideology of political İslam is not only an ideology that distorts religious principle to create an Orwellian type of society. It is also deeply racist and includes the belief that some ethnic groups are racially superior to other ethnic groups (this is something they have borrowed from the national-socialist ideology).
  In the most recent event the 63 year old president of the Turkish Medical Association said that videos that have surfaced in recent days on the usage of chemical weapons by Turkish forces in Northern Iraq (against Kurdish militias) could indicate the usage of chemical weapons and that this event should be investigated by independent investigators. And they arrested her (a physician) for saying this.
(News: https://www.yahoo.com/news/turkish-docto...21927.html )

[Leonardo17]

In this news, an Arab Minority mother is explaining how her 22 year old son (Muhammed Gobadlou) with a nervous disease was taken by the “authorities” for participating to the riots and how he has been sentenced to death without even being allowed to see his lawyers. And at the end of her speech all she is asking is “İs this İslamic Law?”
- Well, no, it isn’t. Not even in the middle ages no. Not that I know of

https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-mother-d...21570.html

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think that you're going to be able to understand the problem of political islam until you can genuinely understand and allow for it being..well..islam. Not your islam, perhaps, but islam all the same. The real question, is why the worlds major monotheistic religions have turned out to be such raging dumpster fires, even when apprehended by the (admittedly secularized and contemporary) believers themselves, such as you.

Is it a coincidence? Or...Is it like gravity, it just happens that way in all places at all times? Or... is it volitional and intentional, such that the bullshit isn't a bug, but a feature, included for effect? I think, especially with political beliefs, it's a bit of 1 2 and 3, personally. Coincidence determines what general belief set any given actor feels the need to draw from in order to assert their political beliefs. Dominionists (and theocratic belief systems) anywhere would still be dominionists (and theocratic belief systems) anywhere else- all that changes is the local flavor to better exploit the sensibilities of it's demo for effect.

[Leonardo17]

My answer to this will be a little… spiritual.

The issue is this: In Yoga they call this the first chakra person, -There are 7 chakra in the human body and the “first chakra person” is an individual that functions from the level of his first chakra only. That is a type of person whose existence is material, whose needs are closely connected to the satisfaction of bodily needs and impulses, whose mind is machine like, whose behavior is basically animalistic, who is basically a machine more than a human being who can make decisions and choices (as Rousseau puts it in one of his books). This is a nutshell explanations that is much more elaborate in several books on yoga and spirituality.

Anyway, this “first chakra person” does not have the ability to understand anything spiritual. When you say “spirit” he or she will think of it as the physical body being raised from the dead at the time of the final judgment like zombies in “The walking dead” series, when you talk about “dimensions beyond physical existence” his / her mind will go to a vision of heaven with plenty of food, wealth and riches, and of course “wives” whose number will vary according to your religious tradition.

So when you give a spiritual teaching to those guys (a spiritual teaching of any kind). Like the Indian populist president Modi for instance. All he / she will see will be a political / social ideology. They won’t even see a philosophy in it (you have to be a second chakra person in order to have such intellectual capacities according to yogic systems of thought – we can elaborate on that later if you like).

So you don’t need something highly complex as the holy books of major religions for them to turn these messages completely upside down. Just give them Karl Marks and his ideas on historical materialism. A) They will turn his books as a sort of bible and b) you will have Stalin of Mao like creatures murdering their own people in the name of dialectical materialism.

And that’s the idea behind spiritual progress. We want to achieve spiritual progress because without that, there is no “magic book” as you put it, who can explain you everything and tell you the truth about everything. Such a book does not exist. Or at least that’s what I came to understand at this stage of my spiritual progress.

So beyond the philosophical / conceptual separation of religion and politics, there is this spiritual dimension to it also.
But what you say is true. To the Ego-centered mind 1 will automatically lead to 2, 2 will lead you to 3, 3 will lead you to 4 etc. And I think the solution to this very problem is already being mentioned within the spiritual teachings themselves. I also happen to believe that in this century we will see the gradual collapse of this erroneous approach to spirituality. In fact, I see political İslam, Anti-abortion movements in the US, or the racist attitudes of some “Buddhists” in Myanmar as a form of panic that is being displayed by these ego-centered beings. On a subconscious level, they know that nothing is ever going to be like it was before the 17thor 18th centuries. They know that the masses, the individuals are changing. So they are resorting to increasingly oppressive and dogmatic interpretation of religious texts that goes in hand with an increasingly aggressive and fanatical behavior toward diverging ideas on issues that they are defining as “sensitive”.

To sum up: I think this is an evolutionary process and I think that there will be very obvious changes in this area toward the end of this century.

[Ahriman]

^^^ Ok man, I'm pretty sure a "first chakra" sort of existence is really the only sensible way to go, all of that "spiritual" stuff seems to me to just be a pipe dream, you're right about that "food, wealth, and riches" bit, my afterlife would be sweet as fuck because it would have an abundance of food, wealth, and riches, humans should not be humans, humans should be animals, this mortal reality disgusts me in so many ways but it's only because humans insist on being humans, so "humanity" (as an energy/essence/nature) is the problem.

[LinuxGal]

Any mistake in the Quran will be a "checkmate" for Islam because the whole idea of the religion is that the Quran is the direct word of God.

The Quran says the sun sets in a mud puddle somewhere in Morocco.  That didn't seem to wrap things up for Islam.