What Is Your Religion ?

[mike435]

Write it in an organized paragraph or Farsi.



There is a good idiom in British literature that says: "The pot calling the kettle black"

OMG I cant believe what you are saying
when I watch the news I always say these people don’t exist it is just a right wing neo con propaganda
OMG

how can you consider the group(hezbolla) g-dly when it kills innocent people
g-d is good, reason for creation is g-d’s expression of loving and kindness
how can Hezbollah be this when it kills so easily so offensively


Were do you see the g-dly ness in AMIA Bombing were 85 were murdered
Were do you see the g-dly ness in starting a rocket war with Israel and sending thousands of rockets filled with ball baring at civilian sites deliberately solely to kill the civilian
Were do you see the g-dly ness when these rockets were designed so even if they miss a target the ball baring shooting out kill the people around it


how can you consider this group g-dly when it considers a mission is a success when innocent civilian are killed inside there shelters or home
how do you consider this g-dly, good, holy , this is not al-h

[mike435]

We defend the oppressed and fight the oppressor,

What bull is this what oppressed are you talking about, the lebonies are being oppressed by Israel is there checkpoints that’s oppressing theme or Israel military rule of Lebanon or is it Israel dominance in Lebanon or its control of the government or it business man what are you smoking were do you get off saying this shit
The minute legitimate thing you can use would be the shba farms and even that used be syrias
And for the sake of this conversation lets say its Lebanon’s, lets say they get it back, that action of getting it back all of sudden makes the Lebanese free?, makes there life better, ?

life is not all about honor, the only reason you want the farm is because you cant stand seeing Israel having it, you will never even occupy even if you did have it yet you are willing to kill thousands on both sides just you can continue you bs cry to fasly make a belief that you died for something worthwhile

and if it is Islam that Israel is hurting either Israel is extremely powerful or Islam is extremely week

remember that death comes for us all and justice awaits us next, all I can say is that stick with what you believe is the truth, we do the same, in the end only the truth remains.

You see this sounds good but the sad reality is your reality is that I should be terminated and killed while my reality says I should first accept your reality and let it coexist and just mined my own
You see you believe that I deserve to die while I believe you are creation of g-d and he will deal with you
You believe that yea g-d should deal with me and you will the medium to deliver that justice.
Do you see what I mean
I believe justice lies in g-ds hands while you believe justice lies in g-ds hands but you can be the administrator of it

“If they really believe in God let them express their desire for death!”

i don't know if it directed towards me or you
but me i have to live to the last breath and killing or suicide is wrong even excecution can be done by a single person becuase in religion i cant even have an executioner

[mike435]

i am still waiting for your responce for you to explin to me how hezbolah is g-dly

and how murduring and using terrorisom is doing g-ds work

[asal67]

I am Muslim, and I am proud of my religion. As long as we say that we have a religion and what's our religion, that's enough because most people say that they don't believe in any of the religions. So I think everyone should be proud of their religion and believe in what they have to believe.

daghighan moafegham aziz

[mike435]

abadani nicly said

[Inquisitor]

OMG I cant believe what you are saying
when I watch the news I always say these people don’t exist it is just a right wing neo con propaganda
OMG

how can you consider the group(hezbolla) g-dly when it kills innocent people
g-d is good, reason for creation is g-d’s expression of loving and kindness
how can Hezbollah be this when it kills so easily so offensively

Which God are you talking about? You don’t believe in holy Quran. How can you tell me what is Godly or not according to holy Quran? Do you even know the 99 names of Allah (swt) in Islam?

اللهم اني ادعوك باسمائك الحسنى كلها

From one side you defend the value of human life and from the other you bomb Lebanon and Palestine and else where and talk about collateral damage.
Your governments are constantly in war inventing ever-deadlier WMDs.


Count every single death that has been committed in the name of Shia Islam in Occupied Palestine and compare the figure with all the blood that Zionists in particular or other ideologies have spilled… it would be incomparable!

and if it is Islam that Israel is hurting either Israel is extremely powerful or Islam is extremely week

Israel is nothing without the money of USA. Leaders of Islamic countries are weak. They are bunch of puppets from Maqreb to Bahrain.

Were do you see the g-dly ness in AMIA Bombing were 85 were murdered
Were do you see the g-dly ness in starting a rocket war with Israel and sending thousands of rockets filled with ball baring at civilian sites deliberately solely to kill the civilian
Were do you see the g-dly ness when these rockets were designed so even if they miss a target the ball baring shooting out kill the people around it


how can you consider this group g-dly when it considers a mission is a success when innocent civilian are killed inside there shelters or home
how do you consider this g-dly, good, holy , this is not al-h

Problems didn’t start summer of 2006, you have to study the history from late 19th century to this day, and for Lebanon you have to go back all the way back to 1982.

It is an occupied land, many of those so called civilians have migrated there from Russia, Poland, ... .

Watch this documentary

http://www.baabeilm.com/Audvid/video/films/thematic/the_american_democracy.wmv

[Inquisitor]

I believe justice lies in g-ds hands while you believe justice lies in g-ds hands but you can be the administrator of it

And they did nuke Japan and armed Saddam with Chemical weapons, Tragedy of Qana, Rwanda, ... .

Is this Justice ?

i don't know if it directed towards me or you
but me i have to live to the last breath and killing or suicide is wrong even excecution can be done by a single person becuase in religion i cant even have an executioner

It is indeed unexpected as well as funny to read your comments because you have taken every “You” in my previous post as a reference to yourself as an individual; however I merely meant you as people or your government or what you stand for.

[Inquisitor]

i am still waiting for your responce for you to explin to me how hezbolah is g-dly

and how murduring and using terrorisom is doing g-ds work

I 'll be online once a week or often not at all.

If you want to get a quick respond, join http://www.shiachat.com

My brothers and sisters in Islam will intercept your threads or posts quickly

Wassalam

[Tenerife]

Atheist.

[IQ]

I don't think that you shoul've put sunni and shia as different vote, because christianity is similar or even worse. there are so many different types of christianity too. so i find it a little bit inappropiate. it just should've been muslim.

[Nargees]

I am Ismaili Muslim hastam which as you might now is one of the branch in Islam. AND proudly can say that I am MUSLIM and NEVER NEVER change my relegion.

[reza1st]

To me, lack of self confidence along with weakness of humankind brings about religion. If we were not to die no religion in this world would have existed. I believe it is everybody’s wish that the heaven and hell, the life after death, were reality. Some of us have learned to put aside logic and believe in these goodies (bekhodemoon yaad daadim ke khodemoono gool bezanim). Yes it is hard to think that when we die, that’s the end of us. But to me that’s the reality of this life and nature.

A lot of you may have questions like “why do we exist if there is nothing after death?”, “what’s the purpose of this life?” and …
It is easy to find the answers to these questions but you have to have self confidence and look wisely. (Study Probability and Statistic, study it very deeply)

All religions like everything else around us have goods and bads. What is destructive is to force religion on others and to think that the religions are created by god (a metaphysical power). If there exists a god hopefully it’s greater and better than the so called god who sent Koran, Bible, … that are full of flaws!

People please read Koran before believing in Islam, read Bible before becoming Christian, study them, think about them and critique them. Don’t interpret them, it is not suppose to be hard. If you be tricked by the ones who tell you that “you have to look at what god meant then and in this verse” then all your life you have to be interpreting everyone’s words and sentences along with every book, because they are not any different . (If you read a mathematical book that had 2 x 2 is equal 12 would you say it is a mistake or would you say you can interpret the 2 by 2 as 6 by 2 or 12 as being 4?!?! I don’t think so!)

And be open minded. Be debate friendly and talk to each other. Don’t think what you believe is the best, it is not! Listen and think about what others have to say.

Finally here is something I believe in: be good for yourself and for the sake of others. Be kind to everyone from any religion and any country, not for god, not for heaven, just for yourself and them, for your conscience. Teach this to yourself. This is much greater and stronger than believing in any religion. This is you believing in yourself and goodness of others. Be strong.

Wish you all the best.

[maryam9]

You are neither a scholar nor an high school graduate yet, therefore I do not care what you want to call someone/something that you have no clue of, because it is not academic.
Tell me what is your definition of Fundamentalist and I will give you mine

take the oppertunity and clarify
i definitly can use it

Inquisitor - you didnt actually say what it was

I am genuinley interested in knowing the difference between extremists and fundamentalists.
Can you please clarify the difference for me . Thankyou.
__________________________________________________ ___________

reza1st - you raised some interesting things. I wanted to reply to one of your topics but im going out right now and am in a rush.

[IQ]

Extremism is a term used to describe the actions or ideologies of individuals or groups outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common standards of ethics and reciprocity. It is usually considered by those to whom it is applied to be a pejorative term. It is typically used in reference to political and social ideologies seen as irrational, counterproductive, unjustifiable, or otherwise unacceptable to a civil society. The term connotes the illegitimacy of certain ideas or methods.

The terms "extremism" or "extremist" are almost always exonymic—i.e. applied by others rather than by a group labeling itself. Rather than labeling themselves "extremist", those labeled as such tend to see the need for militant ideas or actions in a particular situation. For example, there is no political party that calls itself "right-wing extremist" or "left-wing extremist", and there is no sect of any religion that calls itself "Extremism."

Radicals as extremists
The term "extremist" is used to describe groups and individuals who have become radicalized, in some way, even though the term radical originally meant to go to the root of a (social) problem. The term "radical" is a somewhat less negatively-connoted label sometimes used by radical individuals or groups to label themselves.

The terms "extremist" or "radical" are often used to label those who advocate or use violence against the will of the larger social body, but it is also used by some to describe those who advocate or use violence to enforce the will of the social body, such as a government or majority constituency. Ideology and methodology often become mixed under the single term "extremism".

The idea that there is a philosophy of extremism is thought by some to be suspect. Within sociology, several academics who track (and are critical of) extreme right-wing groups have objected to the term "extremist", which was popularized by centrist sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s. As Jerome Himmelstein states the case: "At best this characterization tells us nothing substantive about the people it labels; at worst it paints a false picture." (Himmelstein, p. 7). The act of labeling a person, group or action as "extremist" is sometimes claimed to be a technique to further a political goal—especially by governments seeking to defend the status quo, or political centrists.

On the other hand, according to George and Wilcox, the use of the "extremist" label has been historically applied to both the extreme right and extreme left, but they claim that some academics on the left wish to change the frame of reference to one in which only the far right, but not the far left, lies outside the pale of societal acceptability.

Uses of the term in mainstream politics
John Fitzgerald Kennedy paraphrased Dante by saying "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality" (from Dante, Inferno, The Divine Comedy).

Barry Goldwater said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue" at the 1964 Republican Convention in a phrase attributed to his speechwriter Karl Hess.

Robert F. Kennedy said, "What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."





Fundamentalism originally referred to a movement in North American Protestantism that arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism (see below, "History"), stressing that the Bible is literally inerrant, not only in matters of faith and morals but also as a literal historical record. This original "fundamentalism" holds as essential to Christian faith five fundamental doctrines:

the inerrancy of the Bible,
the Virgin birth,
physical resurrection,
atonement by the sacrificial death of Christ, and
the Second Coming.
In its broadest usage in general terms, it denotes strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles; or, in the words of the American Heritage Dictionary: "a usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism."

History
Fundamentalism, as the term is used today, is a fairly recent creation closely linked with the historical and cultural contexts of 1920s U.S. Protestantism (e.g. the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in the Presbyterian Church). Since then the term has been 'exported' abroad and applied to a wide variety of religions including Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. Fundamentalism should not be confused with Revivalist movements which can be traced back much further in time and are not specific to 20th Century America.

[IQ]

Origins and Development of the term
Fundamentalism, as a movement, arose in the United States starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

It spread from there to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately after the First World War. The movement's purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and to defend it zealously against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other "-isms" it regarded as harmful to Christianity.

Since then, the focus of the movement, the meaning of the term, and the ranks of those who willingly use the term to identify themselves have changed several times. Fundamentalism has so far gone through four phases of expression while maintaining its central commitment to its orthodoxy.

The earliest phase involved identifying the fundamentals of Christianity and initiating an urgent battle to expel those inimical to orthodox Protestantism from the ranks of the churches.

The series of twelve volumes called The Fundamentals (1910-1915) provided a wide listing of things considered inimical to the Faith: Romanism (i.e., Catholicism), Socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Eddyism (i.e., Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Science), Mormonism, spiritualism (i.e., "channeling" and the like), but above all, "liberal theology"[1], which rested on a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrines of the faith, German higher criticism, and Darwinism, all of which appeared to undermine the Bible’s authority. The writers of the articles were a broad group from North America and the United Kingdom and from many denominations. The doctrines they defined and defended covered the whole range of traditional Christian teachings.

Almost immediately, however, the list of inimical movements became narrower and the “fundamentals” less comprehensive. Some defenders of the fundamentals of Christianity began to organize outside the churches and within the denominations. The General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1910 affirmed five essential doctrines regarded as under attack in the church: the inerrancy of Scripture, the Virgin Birth, the Substitutionary Atonement of Christ, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the historicity of the miracles. These were reaffirmed in 1916 and 1923. Another version put the Deity of Christ in place of the Virgin Birth.

The term "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman-Examiner; but it seemed to pop up everywhere in the early 1920s as an obvious way to identify someone who believed and actively defended these doctrines of Christianity. The Baptist John Roach Straton called his newspaper The Fundamentalist in the 1920s. The Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen disliked the word, and only hesitatingly accepted it to describe himself, because, he said, the name sounded like a new religion and not the same historic Christianity that the Church had always believed.

Through the 1920s in the United States, the fundamentalists and modernists struggled against each other for control of the large northern denominations. Fundamentalists viewed this struggle as nothing less than a struggle for true (i.e., historical) Christianity against a new non-Christian religion that had crept into the churches themselves. In his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) Machen called the new naturalistic religion "Liberalism" but later followed the more popular fashion of calling it "Modernism".

Even though people like Harry Emerson Fosdick professed to be Christian, fundamentalists felt Fosdick and other nonfundamentalists could not be regarded as such because they denied the traditional formulations of the doctrines of Christianity and created modern naturalistic statements of the doctrines. The issue was as much a struggle over a view of the identity of Christianity as it was over a method of doing theology and a view of history. Fundamentalists believed that the ways the doctrines were formulated in an earlier era were true and that modern attempts to reformulate them were bound to be false. In other words, the fundamentals were unchanging.

Church struggles occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and even in the Southern Presbyterian Church, but the grand battles were fought in the Northern Presbyterian and Northern Baptist denominations. Machen was the undisputed leader among Presbyterians, joined by Clarence E. Macartney. Baptists created the National Federation of the Fundamentalists of the Northern Baptists (1921), the Fundamentalist Fellowship (1921), and the Baptist Bible Union (1923) to lead the fight. The battles focused upon the seminaries, the mission boards, and the ordination of clergy. In many ways, however, the real strongholds of the Fundamentalists were the Southern Baptists and the countless new independent churches spread across America’s South and Midwest, as well as the East and West.

Late 1920s to the early 1940s
By 1926 or so, those who were zealous for the fundamentals had failed to expel the modernists from any denomination. Orthodox Protestants, who still numerically dominated all the denominations, now began to struggle amongst themselves. During the Depression of the 1930s the term "fundamentalist" gradually shifted meaning as it came to apply to only one party among those who believed the traditional fundamentals of the faith. This party embraced a policy of separation – if they could not remove modernists from the Church, they would remove the Church [meaning themselves] from the modernists. Meanwhile, neo-orthodoxy associated with Karl Barth’s critique of modernism found adherents in America as well as Europe.

During this period, "fundamentalist" came to refer principally to those advocating a separatist practice as a means of maintaining the fundamentals of the faith. These separatist fundamentalists split off from the modernist mainline churches, forming various new orthodox denominations. These fundamentalists also identified themselves with what they believed was pure in personal morality and American culture. Thus the term "fundamentalist" came to refer largely to orthodox Protestants outside the large Northeastern denominations.

Early 1940s to the 1970s
In the 40s, a split occurred among these separatist fundamentalists, specifically over the issue of separatism. While the persistent separatists continued to identify themselves as "fundamentalists", the other sector came to regard the term as undesirable, having connotations of divisiveness, intolerance, anti-intellectualism, lack of concern for social problems, and possibly even ignorance or foolishness. This second group wished to regain fellowship with the orthodox Protestants who still constituted the vast majority of the clergy and laity in the large Northeastern denominations – Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian. They began calling themselves "evangelicals" rather than "fundamentalists". The champions of this movement were Carl F. H. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer, and later Billy Graham. While the two groups still had much in common organizationally, methodologically, and theologically, the fundamentalists believed they were more zealous than evangelicals in their opposition to apostasy, Communism, and personal evils, and they were far less willing to cater to social and intellectual respectability. The evangelicals regarded the separatists’ approach as unduly antagonistic and counter-productive; furthermore, by abandoning ecclesiastic, academic, and social institutions, the separatist fundamentalists had essentially surrendered control of these fields to the modernists. The separatist hard-liners tended to oppose Billy Graham, the reading of Christianity Today, and patronage of Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary, while evangelicals supported these.

Late 1970s and the 1980s
During this period, dismayed by changing social conditions, many of the separatist fundamentalists also rethought the withdrawal from society, and became politically active, and as such were sometimes described as neo-fundamentalists. They formed coalitions with other conservative Christians. Jerry Falwell, and Tim LaHaye together with Pat Robertson became leaders of the trend. Religious and moral conservatives of all kinds also went on the offensive at that time, all trying to re-assert conservative (orthodox) control of the churches and other institutions. However, this shift has tended to blur the lines between fundamentalist, evangelical, and all other conservative Christians, and even social conservatives of all religious persuasions.

The fundamentalist phenomenon
This formation of a separate identity is deemed necessary on account of a perception that the religious community has surrendered its ability to define itself in religious terms. The "fundamentals" of the religion have been jettisoned by neglect, lost through compromise and inattention, so that the general religious community's explanation of itself appears to the separatist to be in terms that are completely alien and fundamentally hostile to the religion itself.

Some fundamentalist movements, therefore, claim to be founded upon the same religious principles as the larger group, but the fundamentalists more self-consciously attempt to build an entire approach to the modern world based on strict fidelity to those principles, to preserve a distinctness both of doctrine and of life.