Crusades: Good or Bad?

[giblets]

Hitler had a dog. Dog owners have killed so many people.

[Bereta_Eder]

[Bereta_Eder]

On a more peaceful note, I think the beef sava has with you (elok) is that in some other threads you approached muslim religion on a teocratic basis and used passages in the koran to justify your view that this religion is somehow not peaceful or incompatible with the west.

That isn't something new since for the most part of the last centuries that was the dominant theory.
Which of course is wrong and is used to create division.

Using theological approaches is very risky because passages that are deemed hostile can be found wherever.

Of course it might sound true to you and how you approach this issue, but it isn't true
a) in a liberal society with ample education and wealth for all
and
b) you yourself has said about the US bombing muslims. This creates precedents.
Maybe if oil or corporate interests were to be found in other parts of the world with different religions the outcome would be the same. i.e. friction

[Elok]

The thing with Sava is actually fairly routine; I say something Bernie Sanders wouldn't say, Sava calls me the enemy of mankind, one week later I happen to take Sava's side in an argument and he gets over it. Possibly not this time since I goaded him on, but ALL THE CAPS-LOCKED HATE doesn't indicate that he's really in full-on spit-flecked rage AFAICT.

Re: Islam, my position is complicated. I don't think most Muslims are dangerous or anything like that. Nor am I interested in digging through verses in the Koran that say, "and you shall take the enemy's camel as your own, provided it is after the full moon of the fourth month" and use it as evidence of anything. I've seen that same dumb game played with the Bible.

However! The fact remains that Muhammad was, by our standards, a deeply unpleasant person. If he lived today, we would rank him up there with Fidel Castro--not a total psycho monster like Hitler or Stalin, but he was a warlord. He established a theocracy; waged aggressive war; compelled conversion of all pagans; condoned the taking of slaves, including children, and their use for sex; committed ethnic cleansing, banishing or giving to the sword whole masses of people, without trial and enslaving their families. Yes, he was benign by the standards of seventh-century Arabia--better towards women, charitable to the poor--but this man is the founder of a major world religion, and as such supposed to be a moral example. Nobody has to say, "Well, Jesus/Buddha was the product of his time." The four Rightly Guided caliphs were as bad, or worse.

Now, as the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, this is not a super-important point. The Mormons were founded by a con man, but they behave themselves today so not many people really care. But I don't think it's bigotry to point out that this religion's most violent period was not centuries after the fact, or a corruption, but the very first century after its founding. That most of what we think of as "the Muslim World" was taken from Christians, Pagans, and Zoroastrians by force, by some of the faith's most revered figures. No other religion has such a bloody beginning that I know of, unless you count the historically dubious Old Testament stuff for Judaism. And even there, I've never heard of Jews revering Moses or Joshua the same way Muslims revere Muhammad.

[Bereta_Eder]

And yet despite its peaceful origins christianity had so many ills perfomed in its name.
Or buddism. WTF is this with the rapes in india?

If you want a sociological justapostiction between violence and peace, maybe it can be found if you dwelve far away from the greek european basis of philosophy and its impact on nature and identity forming with that of the chinese model.

One is violent and imposes its will on the soil, forces an outcome, violently seeks the result ina platonical manner, whereas the other is cultivating the outcome, a direct action on the chinese cosmotheory is an admittance of failure, whereas in the greek (european/western whatever) model it is glorified.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Jews seemed to revere David quite a bit

Maybe not anymore, but I guess they got over it over the centuries. (now it seems Christians revere David more than Jews)

Muhammed was a merely a prophet. Prophets are people.

[giblets]

I thought Muhammad was considered by Muslims to have set a good example people should follow?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Mostly... liberal Muslims will point to how much better a person Muhammed was than people of his time and say it is foolish to compare him to the moral standards 1400 years later.

[Proteus_MST]

Which seems to be justified. Modern christians do the same with the content of the old testament (with the exception of christian fundamentalists of course).

Nevertheless, the old testament gave inspiration/justification for much of the brutality commited by the church (as well as giving justifications for the slavery in the southern states of the USA)

[Elok]

Mostly... liberal Muslims will point to how much better a person Muhammed was than people of his time and say it is foolish to compare him to the moral standards 1400 years later.

Well, who exactly are they supposed to emulate, if every prominent Muslim from the first century or so gets written off as a Product of his Time? And if they got it wrong, who got Islam right? Isn't Islam supposed to be the source of its own moral standard? You'd think the Prophet would be right essentially by definition . . .

[Imran Siddiqui]

You compare them to the people of their era and see what those folks were trying to promote, even though their moral standards don't match how much we've progressed - you know the exact same thing that modern sane Jews and Christians do .

[Elok]

I was under the impression we were supposed to emulate Jesus. I have no idea what Jews are supposed to do, given that half the OT conflicts with history as we know it. Of course, that half contains most of the ugly parts, so maybe that's not so bad. The Buddha is fine. Confucius had his moments, but AFAIK was generally inoffensive. Lao Tzu may or may not have even existed.

Muhammad wasn't just like your well-meaning but racist uncle; he had eight hundred civilians decapitated without trial, then sent their wives and kids off to slavery. Among other things. When IS does things that are broadly similar, do the imams tell them to ignore the example of Muhammad and everyone who knew him best, in favor of an interpretation that just happens to fit in with the values of Christians and secular Westerners? I'd have a hard time taking that with a straight face.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well Jesus is God. But He also never speaks (really) on ending slavery or does much about the misogyny all around him (including women among his followers would be like the least He could do these days). So we have things like God speaks to us in ways we can understand where He finds us (aka, Calvin's Theory of Accommodation).

Some of the great Kings of Israel had just as bad, if not worse, track records than Muhammed. I keep cycling back to David... but David!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Anyways it isn't like the treatment of the Banu Qurayza is unheard of in the Judeo-Christian lineage...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Muhammad

Ibn Ishaq writes that Muhammad approved the beheading of some 600-900 individuals who surrendered unconditionally after a siege that lasted several weeks.[54] (Also see Bukhari 5:59:362) (Yusuf Ali notes that the Qur'an discusses this battle in verses [Quran 33:10]).[55] They were buried in a mass grave in the Medina market place, and the women and children were sold into slavery.

According to Norman Stillman, the incident cannot be judged by present-day moral standards. Citing Deut. 20:13-14 as an example, Stillman states that the slaughter of adult males and the enslavement of women and children - though no doubt causing bitter suffering - was common practice throughout the ancient world.[56] According to Rudi Paret, adverse public opinion was more a point of concern to Muhammad when he had some date palms cut down during a siege, than after this incident.[57] Esposito also argues that in Muhammad's time, traitors were executed and points to similar situations in the Bible.[58] Esposito says that Muhammad's motivation was political rather than racial or theological; he was trying to establish Muslim dominance and rule in Arabia.[51]

And what does Deuteronomy 20:13-14 state?

13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.

[Elok]

Did not comment on two social evils (or comments were not recorded) vs. unleashed hundred-year-war on most of the known world. That isn't much of a comparison.

Jesus had a number of female followers--Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, sundry other Myrhh-Bearing Women. He just didn't have any women among the Twelve. Possibly because nobody would have taken female followers seriously. At any rate, that would be part of the precedent (along with Paul's epistles and long custom) for not letting women into the priesthood. Okay, I can bite that bullet, even if it's unpopular. Orthodox Christianity does not allow female priests, and I can accept that.

Slavery we've gone over before, and my position hasn't changed: slavery made sense within the economic realities of the time. It doesn't anymore. It was not abolished (in this country, where it never really resembled the Classical/Biblical models anyway) when we suddenly realized people don't like being property, but when it had become largely obsolete and the number of people who felt threatened by it overwhelmed the much smaller number who continued to profit.

We differ greatly in our views as to the Church's role in social change. My feeling is that the Church exists primarily to save souls, and improvement in material conditions along the way is largely a side bonus. Which isn't to say we should turn a blind eye to human misery, but that goal should not be allowed to overwhelm the Church's stated purpose.