Pretty sure we need the context of all those Quran quotes before we go making any crazy judgments.

I guess I am out of touch with a certain segment because I don't know what this is either. Carry on.

Hate women, meet other like minded malcontents, prophet.

Almost all self-education, God bless the modern internet. I come from a long line of atheists but I read the Bible when I was young and the poetry of the King James version is almost unparalleled and, possibly more importantly, Jesus had righteous leftist bona fides, so I was a fan. I liked the idea of thinking about religious texts from a leftist atheist's secular perspective, hypothetically being able to better accept them knowing it's all just allegory and parable. Reading the Quran and learning about Islam didn't come until later when I found out that Muhammad was actually just Jesus With A Sword, and the internet caught up so I could dig through footnotes.

Peterson argues that existing human social hierarchies are innate, because humans are the same thing as lobsters. He says this is proved by the fact that lobsters possess the hormone serotonin.



Lobsters do possess serotonin, but otherwise his supposed facts about lobsters are sort of wrong.



And humans differ from lobsters in some quite radical ways. We don't live underwater, we aren't crustaceans, we don't generally practise cannibalism... oh, and we have brains, which lobsters don't.




https://theconversation.com/psycholo...-do-they-90489

I have read both the Bible and Quran but never thought of them in this context likely because I have an admittedly strong anti-religion bias. It is interesting to think of them as leftist texts given how they are normally perverted by the right. I’d always thought of Jesus that way even though the right never does.

Anyway, like I said, a couple of your posts sent me off to learn some things I didn’t know. That is the real benefit of a forum like this so thanks.

Ok there has been enough posting about Peterson to force me to go watch a video of his. From that sole source I see no reason to look further. He seems like an idiot.

I’ll still listen to his shows with Harris but so far I’m sceptical as to why he is gaining so much fame. His main points seems like dumbed-down platitudes and social Darwinism.

Unusual sighting of Peterson in the wild, forced to admit to Aussie comedian Jim Jefferies that he was idiotically wrong about something.

Is the word 'hadith' there causing confusion?

These are the portents of Allah which We recite unto thee (Muhammad) with truth. Then in what fact, after Allah and His portents, will they believe?

Allah hath (now) revealed the fairest of statements, a Scripture consistent, (wherein promises of reward are) paired (with threats of punishment), whereat doth creep the flesh of those who fear their Lord, so that their flesh and their hearts soften to Allah's reminder. Such is Allah's guidance, wherewith He guideth whom He will. And him whom Allah sendeth astray, for him there is no guide.


My best guess is you think those are saying all hadiths in the future should be trusted?

There are religious people I love and respect, so I always felt bad about thinking, "Damn, religion is wasted on religious people."


Yeah, I just learned lobsters don't actually have brains. I thought that was a typo.

http://www.gma.org/lobsters/trivia.html

...No, not really. Mohammed was a much-married man of blood and power, and Our Lord wasn't. The Koran is Mohammed's Mein Kampf. It is the personal credo of a military dictator (except that Mohammed, unlike Adolf, probably never even wrote it, and it was cobbled up by his fan-followers).

My late friend Clarissa was married when young to someone called Salman Rushdie. By 1989 they were long divorced, and Clarissa was living with their young son Zafar a few streets away from me. On 14 February that year, Valentine's Day, police armed with machine guns crashed into their house and took charge because Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had just pronounced a 'fatwa' on Salman, a death sentence.

This death sentence had been deliberately procured by a group of British Muslims based at Regent's Park Mosque, calling themselves the UK Action Committee, and they had done it by faxing to Khomeini's office the passages from Salman's novel The Satanic Verses which made fun of Khomeini (called 'The Imam' in the novel), as well as the passages which made fun of Mohammed and his writing and subsequent disowning of what are called the 'Satanic verses' of the Koran.

And for this, a hostile foreign power proposed to theaten my friend and her child, and British Muslims, who had already burned the book at demonstrations, Nazi-style, were unanimously in favour of the threat.

The Koran is just Mein Kampf in Arabic.

I feel like we hashed this out in Unchained awhile back, about where I'm coming from, but I guess not.

I've used this exact phrase then,

so I'm not about to say, "Oh duh, Krazy Khomeini, forgot about him. OK let's call the whole thing off."

Apparently the fatwa against Rushdie still hasn't been called off. I figured after all these years they would have given him a pass a la Henry Hill.

Intellectual dark web meeting



https://twitter.com/benshapiro/statu...25279939104768

57 on red: Do humans form hierarchies naturally or ar they sociological constructs?

Are there any critics of Islam that are not (considered) racists or bigots?




What does define a religion? The sacred texts or the beliefs and practices of its adherents? There can be a wide gulf between the two.


----


As it so happens I watched a series of lectures called "Understanding Islam" last week. I found them quite good so I just drop the videos here:

Re 57:

Holy ****!

Right?

Lot of smugness in one picture.

And Joe Rogan.

Isn't genital mutilation a traditionally north-African practice (i.e. not directly related to Islam)?

Haven't caught up with this thread yet due to work and because I expect most of the takes will be various gradations of bad.

I noticed that Sam's latest podcast is with Masha Gessen, so I expect (not really) that will help to address the concern that he only has conservatives on.


https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/sta...01741950431232

No,,, no i dont think you get to hug joe rogan unfortunately. Hes not on the side where he thinks the PC left is any cool, quite the opposite in fact. Thats why hes here, these guys have to a large degree become central because they speak out against that crap, and alot of people are starting to understand it. The racist, sexist, bigot, islamophobe nonsense, you know what im talking about. I guess some of you feel lonely left at the station when everyone else has got on the train though, comedy has left you, intellectuals have left you, our former president has left you, I imagine it must be cold out there but joe rogan isnt coming to warm you.

Shes pretty solid iirc.

The intellectual dark web gathering, I will add some other broadly known figures ezra klein, cenk uguyr and milo yiannopolous and do a very rough Intellectual ranking.

Dave rubin: Weak
...
Ben shapiro, Joe Rogan, Cenk uguyr: Decent
Milo Yiannopolous: Intermediate
Sam harris, Jordan peterson, Ezra Klein: Strong
Eric Weinstein: Very strong

When it comes to politics i would say most of these ppl are pretty normal given how US looks like atm, a variation between very conservative and pc-liberal, but i think a person like ben shapiro is so conservative i would call it bizarre level. Dave rubin is a libertarian just because he thinks it sounds so good "in theory". Milo is a provocateur that pushes boundaries to an extreme level, but i dont think hes as conservative as ben shapiro, e.g he suprisingly supports reparations. Ezra and Cenk are the good old pc liberals, whereas without knowing all the details i would guess that i see myself politically closer to ppl like joe rogan, harris, weinstein, and ezra/cenk on the non-pc parts.

Yeah though I feel like he's doing an exaggerated bit as a reference to some exchanges we had in Unchained way back, but I could be remembering that differently.