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Originally Posted by happy_terd
How about:
Would you burn every religious book if 100% guaranteed to get rid of religion once and for all and for good?
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I was going to say I'd consider it if it got rid of organised/forced/obligatory religion (but in a more flippant manner), but giving it more thought I don't think I would. Getting rid of them all would add some kind of authority to them for starters; and it's people who interpret, reinterpret and misinterpret them to suit their own needs, consciously or sub-consciously.
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Originally Posted by ellimak
Frankly, if you are a Westerner, there are a lot of things in the Qur'an which simply aren't going to make sense if you don't have some knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. For example, you won't have an understanding of the idioms used, you won't understand how the split between Sunni and Shi'a happened, and you won't know the importance of the spoken word to this culture (which is important to understanding how Islam spread and why there are still Qur'an recitation contests to this day). I could go on about these kinds of things for pages and pages.
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There are currently three Muslims in my team at work, two of whom are very happy to expound at length about their religion, its history, interpretations and so on - what makes this genuinely fascinating to me is that one is a Sunni (as is the less verbose one) and the other is a Shi'a. It takes me back to encountering the children of Catholics and Jews at school for the first time and seeing the differences between the non-Christianity I was brought up (*) with and the upbringing given by more religious families.
(* (my nanna and aunt both professed to be CofE, but raised me (unintentionally, I suspect) as a pagan agnostic) )
Quote:
Originally Posted by Donnageddon
I am far too busy buying copy after copy of Dan Brown's books and deleting every one of them. And I will keep buying and deleting his books till he learns his lesson and quits writing them!
... OMG... what have i done?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mrscoach
I am against all book burnings, unless it is for the purpose of keeping warm and there is nothing else to use, i.e. wood. And religious texts would be the last to be burned, no matter what religion.
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Ditto. Except the books that I would burn last would be the ones I was most fond of. The ones I was least fond of would go first, regardless of any religious content.