Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance "Firstly, muslims don't like to prostate infront of any one but God"

Hurricane I was talking of Islamists , not muslims. [ people like Bin laden, not sufis].

I disagree with the sufis, but I respect some of them and they are in any case morally distinct from Bin Laden types.

And you can't counter arguments by insults only by other arguments.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance Those who try to start with God fail at the very first hurdle. The necessity of proof.

For 2000 years they have tried and tried and to what result. One big zero.

Neither Aquinas nor Anselm ever succeeded. The Islamists are not good enough even to lick their feet. They have no arguments, just brute force and will be replied in the same fashion.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance "Are you suggesting, "nature of Life" and "welfare of Life"? Or are you suggesting "nature of a man who is xyz" Welfare of a man who is xyz"

iron_mask, to the extent I understand what you are asking. I am talking about the Nature of Man's Life in general. Not a particular man and his nature but the nature of man's life in general.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance "Can you imagine a radically opposite way of thinking"

The issue is not whether I can imagine it but whether it would be justifiable. The concepts of value and legitimacy pertain to Man and they have to be objectively related to Man's existence.

Let those who have a "different way of thinking" try and justify their concepts without reference to Man and their irrationality will become clear.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance "It could also be the promotion of virtue and suppression/elimination of vice."

No that does not follow. Here is what I am saying. The concept of legitimacy of the state and much more broadly the concept of value [ of which legitimacy is a subset] are metaphysical not subjective concepts. They are derived from the nature of reality, the nature of man.

They are not merely matters of opting for one framework or the other.

Now when we objectively derive these concepts we find morality[ except in terms of rights] , in order to be valid, has to be voluntary , not enforced.

A person who is forced to act let's say to be polite is not by that reason practicing the virtue of politeness. He is merely acting on coercion.

Virtue in order to be virtue has to be voluntary, or else it's not virtue at all.

Therefore the idea of enforced morality is a contradiction in terms.

The state by attempting to enforce morality will only destroy rights and lives, not create a virtuous society.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance The legitmacy of the state and what is perceived to be the legitmacy are two separate things.

If one comes up against a view of government which one judges to be wrong one need not simply accept it as a fait accompli. As some sort of primary unanalyzble, unchallengable idea. The proper response is then to challenge and debate.

The proper purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights. The priveliging of any religion is a violation of the rights of those who don't share that religion or don't share it's dominant interpretation.

Hence a state based on privileging any religion is [to that extent] illegitimate.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance "They are simply requested to not call themselves Muslims"

When the state passes discriminatory laws against you which you are obliged to follow at the risk of imprisonement it does not constitute a "request", it constitutes persecution.

Of Medical Students, Passports and Religous Tolerance The issue is reasonably independent of the details of Qadiani doctrine etc.

Sattar2 is absolutely correct. The issue is state coercion and discrimination . The state has no right to force any particular view of this matter on the citizens. Those citizens who choose to regard Qadianis as muslims ought to be free to do so and those who choose not to should be free not to.

For the purposes of the state, self identification ought to be enough.

An Ode Called Amritsar Before the partition, people used to commute daily from Amritsar to Lahore and vice versa, so close were these two cities.

Did you try the famous eatries in Amritsar ?

A Meeting with Che Guevara For a different and a far more decent point of view see the following:
-----------------------------------------------------
Let the left's tyrants die
This is no time to rehabilitate Che Guevara

Leave the left's tyrants in their graves

Che Guevara was sexy and idealistic. He was also a defender of Joseph Stalin and mass murder

by Johann Hari
(http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=441)

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation "Parallelisms are worse than worthless. They are deceptive"

Only when taken to mean that which they don't , or by dropping the context which I never do nor imply.

"The real test lies outside of our minds - in the kinds of biases different religious systems create within the societies they dominate.The idea of cause and effect has to have existed in EVERY society, but the doctrine of karma helped sustain the caste system, specifically in India."

The biases that are created are not fixed or immutable, nor should we take them to be so. I have said this before and I will say it again. The job of a liberal is to evaluate and if necessary challenge, modify these biases whereever and to whatever extent possible.

And to take the same example as above even a simple look at the history of caste suggests that caste is just as suceptible to liberal attack as anything else.


Now I suppose I should get ready for another round of insults for saying all this.

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation hurricane,

The distinction between so called "intellectuals" and so called "simpletons" is unnecessary. It only discourages both directions.

You may be surprised by what the "high brow" stuff is actually when explained simply.

For instance Shankara had this view that there is transcendental reality called Brahman, which is like a Universal all pervading underlying self and this self and the individual self are identical. All the problems in the world arise , according to Shankara, when man fails to realize that his self and Brahman are identical.( that he is the brahman, or in other words "that art thou")

And the highest goal of life is to realize this fact( that individual self is identical to Brahman) through a mystical realization.

You don't see parallels here to the view " Religion is that which your SOUL feels"( the parallels are not exact of course but they exist)

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation Raw_Dust,

One more point. There are of course Hindu traditions like nyaya which do not divorce reasoning from perception and they represent the best in Hindu traditions.

In fact on your thread about Indian canon on the UP books I left a comment saying nyaya shastra must definetly be included in that list.

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation Raw_Dust,

It is possible to look at it the way you describe, but the overall picture has far more to it.

It is true that the Hindu tradition does not , for the most part, start from received dogma. It claims to develop and validate it's conclusions on the basis of reasoning.

But many parts of the tradition divorce reasoning from a strict connection to sensory evidence. Hence a tradition like vedanta reaches( or validates) mystical conclusions via what is calls "reasoning".

On the other hand the western tradition (and culture) is also a composite. It does not take faith and faith alone as the basis. The best representative here is Aquinas whose ideas are a synthesis of faith and reason( with faith having an upper hand sometimes).

In other words the westeren tradition is saved from the hell of complete dogma via the parallel and synthesising tradition orginating in Greece.

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation where did I argue that similarities make things the same ?

I argued that similarities are not insignificant( although the differences may be greater still).

The \'One God\' Religions of Revelation The idea that there are no similarities in the Brahman of Shankara the monotheistic God is not true. One could of course argue that the differences overwhelm the similarities but not that there are no significant similarities.

Brahman is posited as
1) A tanscendental reality
2) A kind of a self( A kind of a uinversal underlying self to which the individual self bears the relationship of identity).

These two attributes( Shankara would deny that these are attributes) are the basis of similarity.

Now it is true that this view was implicitly contained in the Upanishads and Shankara did not have to invent it.

But the claim that Jewish and Christian influence may have triggered the defense is a plausible hypothesis in the same way that Kant was triggered to present his view of causality by hume's efforts.