The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cr...oss each other up somewhere along the line.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with ...which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. Th...e blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a "fixed" heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizi...ng, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul--enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final reven...ge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's almost impossible to deal with a crazy man, except that he does have religious beliefs, and the world of Islam will be damage...d if a fanatic like him should commit murder in the name of religion against 60 innocent people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its a...dherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The main objection to religious myths is that, once made, they are so difficult to destroy. Chemistry is not haunted by the phlogi...ston theory as Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices. But it is also a fact that while serious attempts are constantly being made to verify scientific myths, religious myths, at least under Christianity and Islam, have become matters of faith which it is more or less impious to doubt, and which we must not attempt to verify by empirical means. Chemists believe that when a chemical reaction occurs, the weights of the reactants are unchanged. If this is not very nearly true, most of chemical theory is nonsense. But experiments are constantly being made to disprove it.... Chemists welcome such experiments and do not regard them as impious or even futile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western ...imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »