Saddam Hussein Lives!

tahmed32 (formerly 321) #14 [“…What were you … Or … man who first came up with this fantasy smoking …”]

It was neither smoke nor drink but something much better, something you break open chew the pulp of. It’s a cactus that grows in the high desert, especially in shady nooks and caves on the slopes of hills. A sister species of the Middle Eastern cactus is also found in the American West. It opens one`s ``Doors of Perception``. Many famous people throughout history are known to have had visions and spoken to unseen spirits after chewing on it. It is a good cure against the constipation of the mind and dirrhoea of the mouth. I highly recommend it.

Goats, who otherwise eat all shrubbery (not to mention unpublished manuscripts), avoid it altogether.

…SR

Haroon Moghul,
you have a good command of the language and
deliver it in a fine style. I do not agree with much of your theme here
but it was sure put together well.

tahmed32 with the 1 missing. Is that you? Or some bloody ....?

SR is sometimes difficult to grasp. I do not believe that he was being

serious.

Ras

Hamidm #22 A standard joke among schoolkids is the excuse to the teacher that the ``dog ate my homework``. Here we have SR - a grown up man, one of the 10 percent literate individuals in Pakistan - writing quite seriously that the ``goat ate the chapters``. And I understand there are others like him. Talk about bloody idiots. :-)

My only problem is when I see people like you giving morons like SR a break by accepting their claims that this is what Islam is all about. Dont let them hide behind the Quran or Islam. Grown up men who claim the goat ate up pages they wished were in the Quran, or that they know the speed of heaven (as another idiot who claims to be a PhD in physics did), or (more seriously) who have abused Islam to sabotage the judicial process in Pakistan should not be allowed to hide their mischief under the guise of Islam. I hope one day you will realize what I am talking about.

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Geneva covention maaN ki....


http://eces.org/blog/

four thousand years after founding of judiasm, jewish religious police still goes out onto the street on saturdays to enforce sabbath regulations (and check out origin of the term zealot). hindus elect as vice president, a man who likes to slay five hundred year old buildings. parsees would rather become extinct than to allow their children to marry outside their faith. about twenty to twenty five percent of people who vote in the u.s. are
christian fundamentalist who if given the opportunity would do away with first amendment. even after all the turmoil iranian society has gone through after the fall of shah, thirty percent of voters still vote for candidates chosen by hard line religious clerics. so people here are guilty of displaying the same head in the sand attitude that landed us in this mess in the first place when they here make the argument that religious fundamentalism in countries like pak or indonesia is an unnatural phenomena that will die away without external support.

challange for people who enjoy what east has to offer is to prevent the agenda of islamic zealots from gaining traction amongst the ill-educated masses who basically want to rebel against excesses committed by elites perceived to secular due to covert and overt western support. this to a large extent can be achieved by bribing the masses with good governance. and no, there is no correlation between democracy/secularism and good governance. turkish army generals were as secular as they come and the result was apparent after the first free elections held in turkey. and it was zab, a democratically elected prime minister who gave impetus to islamic agenda in pak by authorizing a constitutional amendment that declared qadianis as non-muslims. and it was the same man (a scotch drinking feudal) who imposed prohibition and declared friday as the day of the sabbath.

and ours is not the only society that is going through this turmoil. voters in third world christian countries like venezuela and philippines have elected nutcase leaders that have won on the basis of a class warfare agenda. and in england, a similar debate was raging at the time of french revolution. here is what edmund burke in a famous critique of the french revolution had to say about the issue of liberty vs. good governance:

“I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers”.

history i daresay has proven him right.

HamidM:

``the fault, dear romair, is in islam itself - a retrograde, obscurantist and fundamentally flawed ideology that has doomed its ardent followers to a life of misery and incessant prayer......... ``

As a Hindu who reads the Old and New Testament out of intellectual curiosity, I can say that both Christianity and Judaism are equally backward and and obscurantist.

The solution was a post inquisition period of enlightenment which seperated church from state and led to the reduction of the influence of religion in day to day life.

joieya,

...... i ``finished`` the koran at the tender age of ten ..... there was a big celebration - mithai was distributed and the maulvi sahib got a new suit ......... things would have been okay if i had left it at that, but then curiosity got in the way of faith ....... later on in life i made the mistake of reading the koran in english; i pored over it with a highlighter and underlined the passages that didn`t quite make sense to me ....... my shia friends told me that the goat was responsible for some of the more glaring contradictions, but i was relentless .......... befuddled and finally exhausted, i stuck the book between a copy of russel`s ``why i am not a christian`` and ibn warraq`s ``why i am not a muslim`` and ever since i have been in a state of confused limbo ......... every now and then someone mentions ``the goat`` and i am tempted to go back and see if i missed something the tenth time around, but it seems all so futile ....... so now i rely for new interpretations friends who go to tafseer and on friday night discussions with enebriated believers who swear that the koran does not specifically forbid drinking - i believe them ............

Hello hamidm2 :

Have u read Quran urself with or without translation ?

Regards,

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The article was interesting and the discussion is really surreal, on the point of being absurd!

SR, are you serious!?! Are you being sarcastic? I have known you for a while and as the old T of Chowk fame, would say, seems like you are doing this on purpose to goad the Chowkies!

It is like saying that ``my dog ate my home work!`` BTW, the idea of reproductions from the original sounds like the cave analogy from Plato`s Republic in that what we are seeing is the imperfect duplicates and the not orginal! Are you sure, you did not make this up! This is a joke, right?

Ciao

tahmed

.....don`t you see the contradiction when you say to sr, ``You certainly did not get it from the Quran, which by definition is the only source of religious inspiration for a muslim``

...... give the man a break! ......he said that ten chapters were eaten by the goat so obviously he couldn`t get it from the koran - what is missing, is missing ........ you see, the problem with the koran is that the proof of its authenticity lies in the claim that it makes within itself - there are no independent sources of verification because nobody has seen gabriel except the prophet (and he had a vested interest), othman had his own axe to grind, mirwan was an imbecile, poor ali got shafted by his relatives, and the goat, who could have been the star witness, couldn`t speak ..............and through all this , allah has chosen to remain silent for the past fourteen hundred years ................. so this whole thing about the veracity of the koran is a cirular argument that would drive most rational people nuts ............ if only goats could speak

p.s. SR might have been inspired by chapter 5 of ibn warraq`s book - it is the devil`s work but it does offer an alternative point of view

SR:
What a tragedy! A god known for virgin birth, resurrection from death, parting red sea, killing the firstborns and turning rods into snakes could not control the mind of a goat from eating up his best words for mankind for millenia to come. What a limitation of powers in the absence of human mind? Obviously, if a goat can not be controlled, controlling weather, floods, earthquakes, and universe as a whole is baloney. The key to understanding the concept of allah is within quran as ``lam ya lid wa lum you lud`` meaning he is independent of creative process infering that he does not really exist for all practical purposes.

god = f(human mind)

sr #13 you write ``The trouble is that there is only one original manuscript that is error-free (Quran-e-Haquiqui) and that manuscript is preserved in heaven (on some robust media that does not deteriorate over the aeons). ``
What were you smoking when you came up with this fantasy?

Or, more accurately, what was the man who first came up with this fantasy smoking when he came up with this. (You of course are merely parroting what you heard or read from some mullah, who in turn heard or read it from some other mullah).

You certainly did not get it from the Quran, which by definition is the only source of religious inspiration for a muslim.

SR

.......... oh, my god !.............. you mean to say that if hadn`t been for a goat we wouldn`t have had to wait for newton and einstein to discover calculus and relativity ............ and if hadn`t been for that khabees, mirwan, the ummah would have been able to sove the problem of child-brides and riba-free banking years ago ..........i wish we had access to the real thing ........

.........but haquiqi or not, good muslims are still discovering the mysteries of the koran ...... the other day, a good friend of mine with a phd in physics from a prestigious east coast university, was going on and on about how, during tafseer class, he had discovered that the koran talked about the core of the earth being made of fire and molten iron ......... i suggested to him that some bedouin might have seen a vocanic eruption, but he was adamant that this proved that the koran held the secrets to all knowledge ........ then he went on to tell us about how in another tafseer class he had found out that man was afterall made out of a ``clot of blood`` - voila! ............ i looked at him in amazement - if it hadn`t been for the dang goat, this man could have saved himself the trouble of getting a phd .................

hamidm #5 [``...what i don`t understand is that if god is so dang perfect, why didn`t he ... document it so that no one could interpret it incorrectly ?......... or did mohammad and gabriel conspire to distort the message ?........``]

You are mistaken, as usual, because Allah did create a perfect document.

The trouble is that there is only one original manuscript that is error-free (Quran-e-Haquiqui) and that manuscript is preserved in heaven (on some robust media that does not deteriorate over the aeons).

The so-called copies of the Quran that have reached us are all flawed, thus the imperfections is not in the (original) Quran, but only in all its reproductions that we have here on earth. It is okay to refute the gibberish that has been inserted into the copies we have access to in this world, but you cannot deny the irrefutable and absolute truth of the Quran`s original manuscript that is preserved in heaven.

First, Gibrael had to memorize it and come down, traveling great inter-gallactic distances to narrate it to the prophet. Then the prophet repeated it to the followers who in turn memorized it. Then those followers, or the ones remaining, were all gathered together during the reign of Usman and their records were compiled in one consolidated volume. And since Usman was too old himself he gave this vital task to that wicked weisel, Mirwan. And Mirwan, of course, was upto no good so he let his goat loose on those portions of the scattered notes (written on leaves) that he did not like and thus ten of the forty siparahs were lost because the goat ate them. Only thirty survived. Go ask any Ayatullah in Qum and he will testify to the varacity of this tragedy. And there is no telling what else Mirwan added in there. The notes taken during the period when Ali was the prophet`s personal secretary and scribe were in serious jepordy, as Mirwan was Muawia`s cousin. On the other hand notes taken down during the period while Muawia was the personal secretary and scribe (after Ali was replaced post conquest of Mecca) may have been added to and embellished.

Allah`s unlimited warranty of preserving the Quran, unfortunately, applies only to the original manuscript, that`s the reason he would not let it out of heaven.

So don`t go making irresponsuble statements about Allah or the Prophet because we did not getting the authenticated copy of the perfect original maniuscript.

...SR