How many Syrian refugees should Australia take?

[David]

Key difference: I'm not the one making sweeping generalisations about, say, the character of English literature. You've effectively just satirised your own argument!

[Mugwump]

[Skids]

Switzerland to vote on burqa ban

Switzerland could become the latest country to ban facial coverings worn by some Muslim women after activists collected more than the 100,000 signatures required to put the proposal to a national voteFull-face coverings like niqabs and burqas are a polarising issue across Europe, with some arguing they symbolise discrimination against women and should be outlawed. The clothing has already been banned in France.

'Facial coverings are a symbol of radical Islam that have nothing to do with religious freedom but are rather an expression of the oppression of women,' said Anian Liebrand, a Swiss campaign leader

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2017/09/15/switzerland-to-vote-on-burqa-ban.html

[think positive]

I agree with Anian, and I bet the vote doesn't cost 122 million!

[David]

It's a much smaller country, so of course it won't – beyond that, Switzerland seems to have a lot of these referendums. It's a curious system.

I wouldn't be sure about the vote getting up*, by the way. It's a conservative country, but even our National Party couldn't get on board with a 'burqa' ban, which perhaps shows that even among the right this is a fraught subject. Ultimately the aim of these 'burqa bans' is to send an assimilationalist and/or hostile message to Muslims – the issue itself is an irrelevance.

*Having said that, Switzerland does have form in this area:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_referendum,_2009

[HAL]

No one says you have to.

[Skids]

One's too many.

Teenage London terror suspect a ‘refugee foster child’ cared for by elderly couple honoured by the Queen


A teenager suspected of being the Parsons Green bucket bomber is thought to be a refugee fostered by an elderly couple who were honoured by the Queen.

The 18-year-old -- the youngest to be arrested over a terror attack in the UK -- is being quizzed by cops after he was seized in Dover, The Sun reports, over Friday’s London Tube attack.

The arrest is “very significant” and the terror threat level remains “critical”, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said.


https://thewest.com.au/news/terrorism/teenage-london-terror-suspect-a-refugee-foster-child-cared-for-by-elderly-couple-honoured-by-the-queen-ng-b88602100z

[Mugwump]

[stui magpie]

^

Great post IMHO.

[David]

Allowing for different churches' perception of the Old Testament, I don't think there's ever been a time that it was treated as some mere addendum to the NT, as you seem to be suggesting. The doctrine that most – but not all – churches follow is that Christ's death on the cross annulled Mosaic law (i.e. the hundreds of commandments detailed over the course of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). They still, however, teach the narratives of the Old Testament while historically ascribing varying (but usually maximal) degrees of literalism to them. This means that Christianity was never only about about Christ's teachings or Paul's letters, but also about Adam and Eve, the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Golden Calf, David and Goliath and Job's trials, as well as some of the less palatable episodes such as the various divinely ordained massacres of the Canaanites and Lot's rape at the hands of his daughters. As just two examples (likely one of many) of Christian fidelity to the OT, the Catholic Church based their entire doctrine on the subject of masturbation on a misreading of a verse in Genesis; and, of course, to this day, Christians base their opposition to homosexuality on nothing that Jesus said or did but rather on a few references in the OT and one of Paul's epistles. Thus, to characterise Christianity as only being about the NT or the gospels just seems like opportunistic revisionism or cherry-picking to me, I'm afraid.

What does this mean for Christianity? To return to your assertion on the previous page, the very thing I'm not doing is using ancient texts to point to Christianity's inherent barbarism. It really is quite the opposite: my contention throughout the past few pages has consistently been that religion in practice is only loosely related to its sacred texts, which – usually being the products of many authors and time periods – are often of ambiguous intent and inherently contradictory, leading to a broad range of possible readings. Instead, I argue, the major religions' texts truly have the ability to be used as a justification for the best and worst of human action. What dictates the actions of its followers, then? Largely, I'd argue, power, capacity for pluralism, the existing aims of political groups or causes (whether they be 18th century Christian emancipationists or Jewish Zionists in the occupied territories), dominant social and scientific views, and the interplay between text and receiver that dictates how all media content is consumed.

Ultimately, I have to wonder what exactly the end game of this argument of ours is: is it the assertion, pushed by certain far-right groups, that Islam is an unacceptable political ideology that needs to be warred against, or treated as a cancer? Of course I'm opposed to such views, but I can only say that I have no interest in asserting a moral equivalence between Islam and Christianity, or any other religion, because I find the idea of ranking faiths absurd and pointless anyway. My primary argument here is with the idea that Islam is a special case, or that it needs to be treated as one: in my view, it should already be clear to any intelligent member of society that it functions in essence like most of the world's other major religions, with all the contradictions and danger, backwardness and genuine social benefit that that entails.

Quietly, I suspect that the sooner that it and other religions recede from public life, the better our world will be; but you don't get there by promoting hostility, conflict or discrimination, and neither should we let faulty, prejudicial and ahistorical assumptions about it influence immigration or asylum policies.

[Mugwump]

^ you must know very different Christians to the ones I know, almost none of whom treat the OT with "maximal literalism". Indeed, ever since Darwin I think there has been a large mainstream of xtianity that recognised Genesis et al as a kind of mythic, or mystic expression.

We can probably agree that the kind of Christianity which treated the OT literally would indeed be better off vanished from the world. But it is onbvious that Christianity has as its centre the life and teachings of Christ, to most of the Christians I know. Despite the corruption of humanity, Jesus Christ is an astonishing figure, in his archaic message of love, redemption, tolerance, the inevitability of suffering, sacrifice and forgiveness. If you cannot see the moral power and the moral challenge of that message then I think you are missing something powerful. When it vanishes from the earth, as it nearly has, a powerful antidote to the totalitarian tendencies of human power and grim-jawed progressives will be lost with it.

What is the argument about ? I think it started because I said that Buddhism in itself seemed to me a fairly benign ideology. I was thinking more about Buddhism's effects compared with the oppression that usually issues from those who arrogantly think themselves arbiters of "progress", but you seemed to think it was code for dissing Islam. This is Ok by me as its founding texts and essential message are not at the more benign end of the spectrum either.

[think positive]

2 great posts Mugwump.

So very much of angst is caused by still worrying about the sins of the fathers. Surely in all facets of life we need to get past that eventually?

[Mugwump]

^ thanks TP. I'm glad that both you and Stui read it, as it's not light stuff.

The "sins of the fathers" thing is nearly always about the desire of some to appropriate history in order to achieve, or justify, changed power relations in the present. Only rarely is it a disinterested attempt to understand the past in its own terms.

[Skids]

You asked for it....

https://www.facebook.com/meo.my.902266/posts/2070819486480919

[thesoretoothsayer]

Taking in large numbers of people from the middle-east may not work out great for other minorities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/opinion/sweden-antisemitism-jews.html

Interesting that the group carrying out the 2nd largest amount of anti-semitic attacks in Sweden are our "tolerant" leftist friends.