How to beat your wife...

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If you read the text according to the grammar of it in relation to surrounding passages and historical context you will get only one meaning.

If you start with ideas outside the text and read them into it you can get any variety of meanings you want.

In a purely scientific sense, yes, getting a more accurate meaning with grammar, relation to surrounding passages, historical as well cultural context, the history and the origin of their culture, their religion, their laws, rituals, etc.

In a religious nature, you always get lots of different meanings, different denominations have the same arguments, claiming historical context and the relation to sorrounding passages, however, mantaining their belief in supernatural events and supernatural realm and God being a direct interpretation of the Bible, while purely scientific view suggest being written by men, with previous pagan religions as source for inspiration on some areas (ie babilonian and egyptian mythologies). While different denominations claim the same actually, there are still different interpretations within protestant denominations.

Nevertheless, scholars differ and some have different hypothesis and theories than others.


As said before, different meanings result from different interpretation of one single text, besides dogmas that come from other source than the Bible, more clearly seen in Catholicism.

Ragweed: You have the temerity to say that greenblue hasn't got the ability to think in an intelligent way because she doesn't agree with your drivel? The only fact that I've seen you post time and time again on this board is that you are a religious zealot who may well believe what he has been taught, but you are incapable of giving any of the rest of us a good clear argument because either you only went to the Religious Instruction classes at school, or your parents home-schooled you on daily serves of nothing but the Gideons you continue to quote from. It would be really worrying to be brought up in a situation where dogma is the main form of knowledge, because you seem to have closed your eyes to the rest of what is going on in the universe. Stop searching for the hero inside yourself and listen to people that DON'T share your view; then you might actually learn something.

But he speaks for Muslims, and more importantly, many muslims allow him to speak for them. If a person who claims to be Muslim agrees with binLaden's views, does that make them not Muslims?

But. I've read quotes selected from the Quran that have said it is not alright to kill people to force them to convert to Islam. I've read quotes selected from the Quran that have said it is not alright to kill any living creature needlessly, and I've read quotes that say that he who is kind to the kuffir is blessed.

Just like there are quotes in the Bible of putting one's enemy to the sword.

Now. The way I see it, no matter which monotheistic religion is correct, the holy book of said religion cannot be fully correct. To err is human, and even if the books were divinely inspired, they were written by a human, who, due to being human, probably screwed up. Even if the original version wasn't screwed up, the texts have been changed. The oldest copy of the Bible we have is the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written 800 years after Christ's life. Think about that this way - The United States hasn't quite made it to 250 years. The Catholic Church has added books to the Bible, and have been caught removing passages from the Bible. No matter how divinely inspired the Bible is, the undisputable truth is that the text has been corrupted over the years.

And so it will be with any religion.

Back to Islam. While I frequently say that the problem is Islam, that's not true. The problem is the hands of the people who control Islam right now - the mullahs in Saudi Arabia, the inhuman maniacs like Osama binLaden and Abdullah Omar.

The problem is also the liberals who insist that because the extremists do not represent Islam, that Islam must not be associated with them. Fact is, I could link to this story about how honor killings are on the rise in the Palestinian-controlled areas of Israel, and lots of people on this site would sooner get angry at me for pointing it out than that it happened in the first place.

Hell, the topic started with one guy quoting a Muslim Cleric on the subject of wifebeating, and the guy who owns this site no less said "don't you say that Muslims actually believe that", and proceeded to insist that anyone claiming that Muslims think like that are liars. What he should be saying is "How dare he usurp and corrupt Islam with his sixth century barbarism". But he won't, because Liberals believe in shades of gray except when the US and Christianity are concerned, as demonstrated by half the posters in this topic.