re: #569 Bagua

First off, your discussion is with Cato who made the comparison, not I.

If you think so, why did you interfere in 478 explicitly quoting my reply to Cato?

How the book is used is crucial. I care nothing about what is written in books that are not used to justify things I find abhorrent, like suicide bombing, killing gays, ethnically cleansing huge countries of Jews, and so forth. If I didn’t see people holding up the Koran and screaming “Death to the Jews, Death to America,” I would care less what is written in it.

And I agreed with you here. This is my point, in fact — looking for the root causes of religious violence and discrimination in sacred texts is more or less a red herring. Not that there’s not plenty of material in said books to justify it, but because religious institutions always had a way of highlighting what they like and ignoring what they don’t.

Many of those people can’t even understand the book they recite by heart as it isn’t in their language. The interpretation and how it is used is everything. The Sufis for example appear to be peace loving and mystical, my Syrian friend clearly uses the Koran in a noble manner. Curious Lurker is another example, in their hands, the Koran is a good thing.

Exactly. Let me know in which hands the Mein Kampf has ever been a good thing.