One further comment about the Gaza situation
Leave it to George Jonas to find the tone-perfect comment about international responses to Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza:
Societies dispensing the advice of proportionate response have often reacted with less restraint than countries they warn against “overreacting.” Certainly Israel has tolerated insurgents terrorizing civilian populations to a much greater extent than the U.S. (or, for that matter, Canada) ever would. In Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to a few mailbox bombs and two kidnappings by the Front de liberation du Quebec. Agree with Trudeau or not, it took just one murder (Pierre Laporte), one maiming (Sergeant-Major Walter Leja) and one abduction (James Cross) to send tanks rumbling down the streets of Montreal in 1970.
Israel suffered 77 dead at the hands of terrorist bombers and snipers in the first six months of 2001 alone. Yet when an Israeli helicopter gunship carried out a targeted attack against a Hamas office in Nablus that tragically killed two passing children in the street in addition to six Hamas officials, [Colin Powell] reacted in a predictable manner. “This kind of response is too aggressive,” he told CNN’s Judy Woodruff. “It just serves to increase the level of tension and violence in the region.”
Rather a double-standard, no? Note too how Hamas’ actions — suicide bombings and rocket attacks carried out in the name of the eradication of the Jewish state — are never called disproportionate either, but are quickly excuses as being legitimate responses to aggression/poverty/squalor/whatever. Yet were someone who genuinely suffers and endures poverty and squalor (e.g. a homeless person) in the downtown core of a Canadian city moved to act violently, he would be very quickly and efficiently dealt with by police officers.
Where Hamas specifically, and the Palestinian people in general, are concerned, it seems that Western government officials practice a kind of soft bigotry. The people of the West, and the Jews of Israel specifically, should know better than to get their hands bloody in response to even the most vile acts of aggressive terror. But the Palestinians evidently aren’t expected to know better.
Steynian 305 « Free Canuckistan! (January 7, 2009, 10:54 am).
[...] HYNEK– New Year, new plan, and a new shootout in Gaza; One further comment about the Gaza situation…. [...]
I do not know if yo saw the transcripts, or at least what the Journal published a couple days ago, of the cell phone calls between the Mumbai terrorists and their leaders (who, in their great defense/support of their cult stayed out of the fray, not like, say, the leaders of Christendom who dirtied themselves by actually entering combat for their beleifs in the Crusades) in which the gunterrorists were told to target innocents and not to target Muslims, to keep the phone on so the leaders cold be gleeful of their actions, and to commit suicide in the end.
But, of course, we can not say that Islam is to blame, can we? Or mention that they are behind a disproportionate number of violations of human rights and international law from asia to africa, especially in Israel? Or that they are a particularly nasty Christian heresy, in competition with secularism for the honour of ‘nastiest Christian heresy’? Both are such since they take parts of Christian truth (Catholic truth) and magnify and distort them, ignoring the truth in the process.
Didn’t read the transcript, but I’ve heard much the same analysis of its contents from various quarters.
It brings to mind a re-working of “The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin” I once did: “brave, brave, brave, brave jihadis!”
“Or that they are a particularly nasty Christian heresy..”
How do you know? Were you there when Prophet Mohammed received the revelation?
Unlikely, given the time gap.
But perhaps he reads the Wall Street Journal.
Or maybe First Things.
He might even read the Asia Times, for all I know.
Point is: the evidence for Islam being a heretical offshoot of both Christianity and Judaism is…becoming more plentiful.
But why am I telling you this? Surely, as the only rational person here, these are details you should be educating us mere, deluded theists about?
Books and articles on Christian/Islam polemics fill libraries. And you know what, I agree with you. I also think Islam might be a heretical offshoot of Christianity and Judaism; and Christianity and Judaism as heretical offshoots of Sumerian/Egyptian religion. It’s always the case with religions. Which follows is a distortion of the earlier one. (So, the deluded theist, how is this first step for an enlightment?)
Well, given that I’ve had the Sumerian/Egyptian “connection” thrown at me before, it’s not that much of a first step…given that the “connection” there is not so much a connection as it is a loose correlation.
And as many atheists are only too fond of reminding theists like me: correlation does not imply causation. Equally, then, a loose correlation does not a heresy imply (or make).
The case with the Koran is different; it can be concretely demonstrated that much of it is excerpted, lock and stock, from various esoteric Jewish and early Christian writings, which were themselves subsequently twisted to fit the Bedouin cultural paradigm.
Sorry, I confused the articles and forwarded you a question concerning above under another article. The case of Koran, I agree with you. But it is easier to prove this about Koran because it is more recently dated. It is very diffucult to collect historical reference for OT; nevertheless only the fact that 10 commandments are almost exactly the same as Sumerian tablets should be satisfactory proof. Plus the creation myth, flood of Noah and many other stories are but repetitions of Persian/Sumerian/Egyptian Myths. What’s more, some earlier legal systems, such Hitite’s, was far more advanced than either OT or Koran. Hitite law forbids killing and cutting of any limbs for punishment 3000BC. And look at the allegedly divine revelation of a thousand/two thousand years later! It is more primitive.
So Hume cannot save you!
Not really; the 10 Commandments — as moral principles — are common to several religions, even if they aren’t always recorded on tablets. So the fact that similarities exist is not itself convincing. And the fact that similarities exist in cultures from the same general region and time period is not particularly surprising, and even less convincing.
However, I find your evidence here to be less than fully satisfactory. Granted, the Instructions of Shuruppak were a) written on tablets, and b) contained moral philosophy similar to what one finds in the Ten Commandments…but then, the Instructions also contain other teachings as well, some of which have parallels in the Book of Proverbs, and some of which have no Biblical parallels.
Also, it serves to note that there were almost 500 tablets unearthed at Abu Salabikh alongside the Instructions, so it’s obvious that the Sumerians used tablets to record many important things down, including their moral precepts. That the Hebrews used stone tablets later on in history, and then to record their moral precepts, simply reflects how widespread that method of recording had become after millennium or two, methinks.
And as to the similarities in the moral precepts themselves, well…as noted, many of those precepts seem to enjoy a certain universality across the religious spectrum, and (apparently) across the historical spectrum as well.
Odd, isn’t it, that multiple societies in different parts of the world, and across different historical epochs, always seem to arrive at the same basic moral precepts? Almost like those precepts are in-built to the human condition?
It is true that there are correlations between the various origins mythologies of the Ancient Near East…but again, correlation does not imply causation, or in this case a direct inheritance between the various legends. It may be an indicator of cultural mingling and cross-cultural influence, but one notes that the origins legends of each cited culture are not carbon copies of each other; Gilgamesh is a substantially different story than the account of Noah, for example.
I’ve never held Genesis to be a literal account of God’s creative action; I don’t think the story of Noah is a literal one either. Those stories are transcriptions of ancient oral traditions, which include early attempts at theodicy, that the Spirit has taken up and shaped in order to convey important theological truths. Adam and Eve weren’t real…but that’s not the important part of Genesis 1-2; God’s being the author of all creation is what’s important.
To put it more succinctly: The historical legend is just a vehicle for the theological truth.
For all the evidence presented, you end with a subjective statement, which is a move I find almost as disappointing as the method by which the final Cylon was recently revealed.
The Hitite laws are interesting, in that they tend to advance alternative modes of punishment for crimes, many of which seem to involve the payment of fines. I can’t find a resource online which stipulates what is to become of the man who, for example, cannot pay the three shekels of silver after tearing off a slave’s ear, however…and I would be curious to see what the answer to that line of inquiry might be.
One notes, also, that for all their supposed enlightenment, modern society has not exactly swarmed back to the Hitite way of doing things, even in the most post-Christian parts of Europe. One wonders at why this might be, if in fact the Hitite way was so preferable?
But in the end, we come down to the subjective statement: are the Hitite laws really less “primitive?”
Perhaps it is fortunate, then, that I have not cited Hume.
I appreciate you knowledge and links. My info is what has remained in my mind as main ideas from some intensive reading made years ago.(esp.Eliade and Scholem)
As to Hitites, I have visited the site and found it very impressive. The civilization seems to have been lost/covered for some unknown reason. Anatolia is full of layers of these civilizations which have not reflected in the divine revelations of the Middle East – Neither in the Middle Ages because they have recently been discovered.
If we agree that the texts considered divine are a cultural accumulation, then there is nothing to be discussed.
Hume was an associaton from your quote ‘correlation does not imply causation’ Lastly, if you really mean what you say in your quote, then you must accept that the correlations of Koran with the mystical esoteric Christian literature of the period cannot prove anything.(I’m still reading the links you gave concerning this one)
Ah, there we go. You know, I’ve never looked up the source for the correlation quote; I’ve simply had it thrown in my face before, and have adapted it to my own means. The bare-knuckle life of a web-forum apologist, which I once was much more so than I am now, lends itself to that kind of learning.
However, the connection in the case of the Koran is different than that of e.g. ancient Judaism to even earlier religions and cultural legends. The Koran rips off whole chunks of text wholesale, rather than merely taking the occasional inspirational note here and there.
I agree that some of the books of the Bible reflect a transcription of ancient oral traditions and teachings, which include aspects of ancient Near Eastern science and retrojective speculations about e.g. the emergence of creatures.
And I agree that there must have been some cross-cultural influences at play, given the extant similarities. At the same time, I recognize the extant differences between the accounts in each culture under discussion.
And finally, I do hold the text of the Bible to be, itself, divine revelation, although not always a revelation of e.g. literal history.
Granted, the discoveries are recent, although one notes that the Hebrew people may have had some interaction with the Hitites; they are spoken of in the Old Testament as a people who lived among the Hebrews, although there is debate as to whether these are the same people as expounded the previously cited laws, or a later people who took on the name.