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Originally Posted by concheet
I don't mean to be picky, but please give me the name of the religion at that time that prescribed death for a variety of crimes. Remember we are talking about roughly 1000 BC.
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I'm not talking about a religion alone; I'm talking about laws. The Jewish laws were as much tribal as religious. It's pretty impossible to separate the two.
The most famous ancient code of law is Hammurabi's, the Babylonian king.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_law#Punishment
It was written around 1760 B.C. It was one of several ancient codes of law that are all pretty similar -- which is unsurprising, because they all emerged from the same general area.
Hammurabi's code provided death for, among other things, murder, theft, burglary, some kinds of incest, adultry, rape, bigamy, even *divorce* (if it was the woman trying to dump her husband).
The earliest code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, was written around 2050 B.C. It provided death for, among other things, murder, theft and adultery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
There was also the
Codex of Eshnunna (pdf), written around 1,900 B.C. It prescribes death for deflowering a bride-to-be, "distraining" that causes death, shoddy construction that causes death and trespassing at night.
And those are only the codes that we know of. They were so detailed and so well-established that it's clear that their roots went back much farther.
Death was handed out pretty freely back then.
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The operative word is "can." That 1% of Muslims actually are.
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So deal with the 1%. Why try to tar the other 99% with the actions of the few? Whatever religion you profess (if you do), do the extremists represent you?
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While there may well be good parts in the religion, the religion itself is so permeated with violence that it may well be the religion that is the problem.
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If you admit that 99% of the adherents aren't violent terrorists, it's hard to see how you can plausibly claim the religion is the problem. A 99% success rate is pretty good.
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Of course I am not advocating wiping out all the adherents, and there is not a thing I can do about the religion either.
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Understood.
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Doesn't take numbers. eg Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. Just take a lot of good men to do nothing, right?
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But their numbers are so few that it would take apathy on an epic scale for them to take over. Hitler, Stalin, etc. were at least operating within the cultural structure of their time and place. You're talking about trying to overthrow a millennia old culture and replace it with something alien, imposed from without. It's just not going to happen.
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True...but they have 95+ % of all the world's known oil reserves.
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And are constrained by the market. They can't wield oil as a weapon without damaging themselves just as much. For them to sell, there need to be buyers; and they are dependent on the oil revenue to keep their economies functioning.
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Well, there you go. I am not advocating fear, lol. Just a healthy skepticism, watchfulness, and a readiness to pounce as necessary. I hope you are right and that Islam matures into peacefulness, but until then I advocate, as my Dad used to say, keeping your eyes peeled.
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Sure, be watchful. After all, the extremists *are* murderous nutballs.
But there's no truly logical reason to tar the entire religion, and it's strategically dumb besides: why pick a fight with 1 billion Muslims when you can deal with a few thousand extremists instead?