Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
How? Through frustration? I've seen your "discussion" with someone near that ten thousand page point, and found it a bit wanting.
|
I think I would have enjoyed discussing Islam with you before 9/11, as I can talk about it with near-infinite patience, and your analytic strengths would have been fun to see applied to its history when neither of us had an axe to grind. I imagine we could each have been pretty rational about it. But it is not my religion and it is not my duty to defend it or to preach it. I didn't study it to convert people. I also didn't study it to justify its radical movement, which is what my position will be seen as by sock onlookers and perhaps others.
I cannot discuss this with you or Slave (or Pony) because you continue to regard 20,000 young criminals as representative of the single core value of the faith of 1.2 billion who've never lifted a finger against an American.
Lastly, anyone who can read 10,000 pages of Hodgson and Huston Smith and come away with "They stole algebra from Vedic India" isn't sharing enough worldview to make discussion productive. There are formal rules of comparative religion that finally elevated that academic enterprise above "your sources suck"; if you don't want to play by those rules, there is no game to play, period. I don't know if it's your atheism or what (I doubt it, but admit its distant possibility for the sake of intellectual honesty), but there simply isn't enough common ground between us to even find a place for me to stand to discuss this. If we were forced to start with shared first principles, maybe. But I'm not really turned on by the prospect of a convo in which one of us shits on a religion that neither of us believes in. Feel free to dump on Christianity, though. I'm here for that.
