My faith is being overtaken by beheaders

[LibCampFireClub 635]

Within the body of Muslim and Physician, Qanta Ahmed's work, you will find her personal accounts of witnessing Muslim women who are routinely abused by men in the name of twisted religious laws.

Qanta Ahmed is a Muslim physician, author, and British citizen. In a recent exclusive interview with United With Israel, she called Israel’s achievements in women’s and minority rights an inspiration to the Muslim world.

Qanta Ahmed is a physician, a Muslim of Pakistani origin, a British citizen and the author of “In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in Saudi Arabia.” Ahmed told United With Israel that she has traveled virtually everywhere in the Middle East, and has found no other country in the region with the same “level of freedom and integration.” Based on her experience, she acknowledges Israel as a special and unique country, a fact she believes no one should take for granted.

Ahmed recounts, “There was a very powerful sense of national identity in Israel, and in a certain way an acceptance of people wanting to be different. I found Israel extraordinarily liberating, for Muslim men and women. I met with Israeli Muslims…I visited the Beit Issi Shapiro Center in Kalansua, where Israeli Arab women were taking care of children with special needs. These women participated in the society, whether veiled or not. They had a role outside the household.”

Qanta Ahmed with Israeli Arab women

Ahmed remarked that during her visit to the Technion, she was amazed by the various programs offered and the strong minority presence on the campus. She noted, “20 percent of the undergraduates at the Technion are Arab Muslims and seeing how they were thriving is very different from even the privileged women in Saudi Arabia. There is a different climate. I don’t feel in Israel that women are under siege or unequal or victims, but that is a strong feeling in the Muslim world. They aren’t fully empowered and they aren’t equal. I found Israel very refreshing. I did not find it in any way oppressive.”

Ahmed was also impressed that Israel provides a safe haven to the Ahmadi Muslim community, which is “persecuted across the Muslim world.” In contrast, the Ahmadi Muslim community in Haifa has “been thriving for the last 100 years.” They have their “own mosques, cemeteries funded by the Israeli government, and a school,” while in Pakistan “Ahmadi cemeteries are frequently desecrated, Ahmadis are barred from giving the Muslim call to prayer, and it is forbidden to call their holy places mosques.” Ahmed relates, “When I was visiting the minorities in Haifa, there were young men who recently converted [to Ahmadi Islam]…[and] some of them were Palestinians from the West Bank. They were excommunicated by their families in the West Bank for adopting their views and sought shelter in Haifa.” She acknowledged, “Israel is a guarantor of religious freedom. Religious freedom is an absolute human right under Israeli law, but not in the Palestinian Authority.”

http://unitedwithisrael.org/muslim-physician-israel-is-an-inspiration-to-the-islamic-world/

Edited September 15, 2014 by ExExpat

[rlogan 2,036]

All very interesting but it has nothing to do with that I posted in response to what the other poster posted. My response was to the idea that it is odd and possibly wrong that people in the congregation who are poor should contribute to that congregation to fix, in particular the church roof. That's not odd and it's not wrong, if the congregation contribute to things that the congregation want to contribute to, and for the most part, in churches, that's exactly what they do do, that's not wrong.

Rubbish.

The Catholic Church was imposed by the sword, executing any and all things that stood in its way, in partnership with the Spanish Crown in huge swaths of the world like the Philippines.

When you impose by force, over more than a thousand years, a rote belief system on an uneducated people - including persecution of science and scientists - this leaves a lasting impact down through the ages: uneducated parents teaching uneducated children what they learned from their uneducated parents.

The Catholic church is a top-down hierarchy, not some kind of grass roots democracy. These congregations do not vote on how their money is spent. Most of them can't even read. These are ignorant peasants, and I don't mean that as a pejorative. I mean that as genuine empathy for their position. The priest is the only educated person in the room, and he has it over on everyone else. They pay a tithe. It bears no relation to what needs to be fixed, which is why churches are such massively expensive castles by comparison to what the people have themselves.

The original Christians were an underground secret society who met in their homes. The whole point was to eat their own food. Instead of giving their wheat, their meat, their first fruits to the rich temple overlords. It was such a big problem - the official temples empty and Christianity overtaking parts of the Roman Empire like wildfire - that in 112 AD the Roman Prefect (Pliny) in what is now Turkey wrote to the Roman Emperor (Trajan) to ask what he should do about it.

This is the first mention of Christianity outside the fabricated history of the Church, from official Roman correspondence. Christians had basically revolted against the wealthy educated class and said we aren't going to give our goods over to you any more. That is the great irony of the Catholic church: re-establishing that control over the people, when it began as a revolt against that very thing.

The Romans got Christianity contained for a time, but it proved invincible across the Empire, so they co-opted in instead. That co-option began under Emperor Constantine with the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. What Constantine wanted was a national registration of names of every person in the empire for military conscription and tax collection. So he made every person register with a parish, and forced all parishes onto an official state religion. Anything else is heresy, punishable by death. One massive dictatorship over religion across the entire Roman Empire with gigantic opulent buildings and a wealthy priestly class instead of people meeting in their own homes. Home-based religion. That's what Christianity was in the beginning. They fixed their own leaking roofs instead of the Priest's ghost house.

With the Catholic Church what you are seeing is what's left of the Roman Empire and others following to implement a military conscription and taxation system upon every person in the empire. They couldn't have cared less what the religion actually was. Look at confession if you want to see how incredible this was in terms of population control: the clergy as the instrument of domestic surveillance. Pedophiles running rampant, protected by the highest levels of the church.

The reality is pretty ugly.

Edited September 15, 2014 by rlogan

[Curmudgeon 227]

Again, how in the world is that a response to anything I posted? Never mind, I do not really care why you went off on this bizarre tangent, it's nothing to do with me. Carry on.