There should be no Sharia Law zone in the US to whatever extent Sharia =! Constitution (and other valid state and local law). If we permit Sharia law to trump Constitutional freedoms anywhere in our country, we are WRONG to do so.

Jan

That is exactly the point: Christians have cherry-picked violent statements from Old and New Testaments to validate abysmal behavior in the past. It would not be correct to conclude that therefore 'Christians are incapable of good'.

Muslims have had enlightened societies in the past - they are in their own version of the Middle Ages right now - and therefore one should not conclude that a Muslim society is incapable of being enlightened and tolerant. It is the current behavior of Muslims that is terrible; they are not predestined to behave that way because of their religion; they choose to implement the most negative aspects of Islam. And they should be dealt with harshly by the rest of the world until they stop doing so.

Jan

This is one of the cases where I think that they should not have a choice: if they live in the US, they live under the Constitution.

Jan

I can certainly look it up! but the point that I am trying to make is that all religions have what we would now call 'aggressively evil' incidents in their pasts. Whether it is the wartime activities of goat-herders trying to conquer Canaan (Old Test.) or the Albigensian Crusade (New Test.), Christianity has 'snapshots' of its past which would show it in a bad light. I attribute this to the fact that Christians are human beings and, as such, reflect the culture of their times. The times in which they lived considered that type of behavior to be not only acceptable but excellent.

Moreover, if someone says - say to an audience outside the Gulch - that anywhere that the Muslims have predominated numerically has been rife with violence and suppression, it just undermines the other points that they are trying to make to anyone in the audience who knows some history.

Our current culture has changed in most of the world. We no longer consider burning cats alive to be a fun time and beating your child bloody with a razor strap (which was OK in my granddad's day) is now right out. The problem is that the culture of the Muslim world has not kept pace with that of the rest of the world, and when you filter the Koran through that filter you end up with violence and despicable behavior. (A different filter of the same teachings, in the 10th Century, resulted in a pleasant Muslim society.)

Jan
(And yes, I would be delighted in discussing the Old Testament with you some time. You will be a lot better than I am in talking about the bible, but I am interested in the archeology of the Middle East and we could probably have some worthwhile conversations.)

A hard core Southern Baptist will tell you that you are going to hell for dancing and wearing lipstick too. Then there are the snake dancers who practice the modern version of dunking. If you don't drown you are innocent. If you do, God wanted it to be so.

Most of our "Representation" is too busy working to get re-elected to be bothered with their oath and the job they were elected to do.

According to the late, great general Norman Schwarzkopf, the job of the military is to break things and kill people. In other words, to win the fight.

Under the First would it be legal to put up a sign on a building designating it as "Lulu's Whore House", or "Murder For Hire"?

True. The U.N. with the able help of Ms.
Roosevelt carved Israel out of Palestine..

Could the US not pass any law that the majority agree on? As an example could we not pass a law against soccer? Then why not against Sharia law or mosques? No mosques allowed in the US, period.

Like certain places in Michigan. Get rid of all of them. The men, women, cats, dogs and chickens.

Yeah, following that logic we'd never have fought WWII. Not all Germans or Japanese should have been killed because only a small percentage of them are bad eggs. If you have lung cancer, you take out the whole lung, not just the bad part. If a nation or a religion (or a street gang for that matter) doesn't want to be killed off, the "good" one should take the bad ones out or suffer the consequences for their actions..

Correlation could still be there.

Don't forget the diaspora, part voluntary, part involuntary, and more than one wave. Until 1947, there really had not been a large concentration of Jews in the region for quite some time. Certainly no country of their own at any rate.