great paragraphs from what you're reading

[FreelancePoliceman]

~ Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer

He's supposedly a controversial figure (I mean Robert Spencer in this instance), but it is difficult for me to find any of his points here wrong.

It is currently my view that we cannot really say anything definitive about Muhammad or Jesus as historical individuals who actually existed. My current position is to doubt they did and that I am open for others to persuade me otherwise. I think with a truth claim, I ideally believe in proportion to the evidence and if there is no evidence then my default position should be to not believe it rather than to disbelieve it.

In university one of the classes I took was on early Islam. The professor made sure to emphasize that nothing of the time of Mohammed can be known by reliable sources, including whether he even existed. I didn’t receive an impression that this was controversial, for what that’s worth.

[Socionics Is A Cult]

In university one of the classes I took was on early Islam. The professor made sure to emphasize that nothing of the time of Mohammed can be known by reliable sources, including whether he even existed. I didn’t receive an impression that this was controversial, for what that’s worth.

By level of the number of people who would strongly disagree, it must be highly controversial.

He is probably the second most written about figure in history, but there must be tens of thousands of books entirely lacking in substance. I only know of a small handful of books that actually do have something substantial to say (the one I consider the best and most neutral is "In The Shadow of the Sword" by Tom Holland although I feel those who would be most interested would stop reading very quickly because they fundamentally disagree about what is said about a topic that is emotive for them).

[Socionics Is A Cult]

In the summer of 2009, fifteen young tourists made a pilgrimage to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. After walking them around the city’s square, the tour guide, a lanky Serbian in his midthirties, regaled them with stories about the country’s recent history of inflated potato prices, free rock concerts, and wars with neighboring countries. But as the guide sprinkled his comments about Serbia with references to Monty Python humor and Tolkien fantasies, the tourists grew impatient. They weren’t just an ordinary group of travelers. They had come to Belgrade to learn how to overthrow their own country’s dictator.

Searching for a way to fight back against a tyrant, they asked the tour guide about how his countrymen had defeated the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. You don’t need to take big risks, the guide told them. You can demonstrate your resistance in small ways—drive slower than usual, throw Ping-Pong balls onto the streets, or put food coloring in fountains to make the water look different. The foreigners scoffed at his advice: such trivial actions wouldn’t make a dent in an iron curtain. It can never happen in our country, a man insisted. If we stand up to him, a woman challenged, our dictator will simply make us vanish. How can we even plan a revolution, when he has made it illegal to gather in groups of more than three?

They didn’t know it, but the tour guide had heard all these objections before. He heard them in 2003 from Georgian activists, in 2004 from Ukrainian activists, in 2005 from Lebanese activists, and in 2008 from Maldivian activists. In each case, they overcame fear and apathy and took down their respective dictators.

The tour guide, Srdja Popovic, had trained them all.

~ Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World by Adam M. Grant

[Socionics Is A Cult]

All religions are not equal in their capacity to mete out violence and genocidal hate. To say otherwise is to be hopelessly misguided or profoundly duplicitous. Two other popular deflections are 'But what about the crusades?' and 'But the Bible also has violent passages.' The crusades were a response to hundreds of years of Islamic aggression, and they took place within a very restricted time and place, nearly a millennium ago. As for the Bible, you can count on one hand the number of individuals who have used violent passages from Deuteronomy to justify act of terrorism in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, innumerable Jihadis around the world use Islamic doctrines to justify their violent actions. Scale matters. Another classic ploy used by apologists is the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. This argues that entire Islamic countries, Islamic governments, and leading Islamic scholars are "fake" representations of the true faith. If you point to sharia law in Saudi Arabia, the retort is that this does not represent True Islam. Similarly, Iran's mullahs apparently do not represent True Islam. Osama Bin Laden was a "fake" Muslim. Other "fake" Muslims include Amin al-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was on friendly terms with Adolf Hıtler), Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (arguably the leading Sunni theologian today), and Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the late leader of ISIS).”

~ Gad Saad, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense