Email about who controls Islam

I don't know about the first paragraph, but his point about the "peaceful majority" or "silent majority" is well taken. This appeared in a circulating email which continues on its way.

German View of Islam 

  This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is said to be Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist.
 A German's View on Islam
 A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'
 We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
 The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
 The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous.
 Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
 The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
 And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
 History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts--the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
 Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it's too late.

 The following is encouraging. It was found at: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/100109/canada/canada_canada_muslim_fatwa_attack_canada_united_states

Attack on Canada, U.S is attack on Muslims: imams

MONTREAL (CBC) - A group of Canadian and U.S. Islamic leaders on Friday issued a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring that an attack by extremists on the two countries would constitute an attack on the 10 million Muslims living in North America.

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The 20 imams associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada said this marked the first fatwa by the Muslim clergy declaring attacks on Canada and the U.S. to be attacks on Muslims.
"In our view, these attacks are evil, and Islam requires Muslims to stand up against this evil," the imams said in their fatwa.
Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, said attacks on Canadian or U.S. soil are essentially attacks on Muslims.
"We are part of this society," he said. "This is my home, and if anybody attacks on Canada, in fact, attacks on my home."
The imams said it is a duty of every Muslim in Canada and the U.S. to safeguard the two countries.
"They must expose any person, Muslim or non-Muslim, who would cause harm to fellow Canadians or Americans," they said.
"It is religious obligation upon Muslims, based upon the Qur'anic teachings, that we have to be loyal to the country where we live," said Soharwardy. "We have no problems in Canada; we can practise our religion freely."
In Montreal, one of the signatories of the edict, Imam Nasir Qadri of the Anwar Musallah Mosque, said he spoke to his followers at his mosque about the issue Friday.
Most of them call Canada home and feel personally threatened by the attempted attacks, he said.
The 20 imams who signed the fatwa come from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Houston.
The fatwa comes just weeks after an attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a U.S. jet bound for Detroit from Amsterdam.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, has been indicted on six charges, which include attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder.

Guardian Angel on the Job

A man was walking in the street when he heard a voice: "Stop! Stand still! If you take one more step, a brick will fall down on your head and kill you."

The man stopped and a big brick fell right in front of him. The man was astonished.He went on, and after awhile he was going to cross the road. Once again the voice shouted: "Stop! Stand still! If you take one more step a car will run over you and you will die."

The man did as he was instructed, and a car came careening around the corner, barely missing him.

"Where are you?" the man asked. "Who are you?"

"I am your guardian angel," the voice answered.

"Oh yeah?" the man asked. "And where the hell were you when I got married?"


This quip reminds us that we live in a world of opposites. Good things happen but so do bad things occur.

Any theory of God must note both and account for both. It cannot wear rose-colored glasses or only see the glass as half full. It is nice to define God as benevolent but when bad things happen in His universe He must bear the responsibility for them.

If a human seeded a resort with toxic water, venomous snakes and poisonous fruit the perpetrator would be apprehended and thrown in jail as a criminal deserves. We seem to have a double standard where God is concerned and excuse the existence of elements inimical to human life as  necessary for God's plan which we humans are too dim to comprehend. We save God from censure and irrelevance and allow Him to act in mysterious ways even when we know that if He exists and dangers exist that He does not warn us about He is committing a sin. Our defense of His immorality is a double standard that we so often deplore when we find it amongst ourselves. We don't hold God to the same standard because that would destroy our faith in Him. We hang on in the hope that the existence of good AND evil somehow makes sense and we try to explain away natural evils such as disease as being necessary to teach us a lesson if we would only take time to discern what it was.

What lesson is the criminal teaching us?

The existence of God depends upon faith and ignoring the obvious. Religion teaches us to close our minds to reality and just believe.

Fortunately not all of us think that way and science acknowledges that there is evil in the world that needs to be understood in natural terms so that it may be overcome with knowledge and technology. We want to conquer disease not excuse or accuse its creator.

In a godless universe guided by evolution disease is an unsurprising outcome. The universe may be such that life can emerge from its interacting elements but that does not mean that life was in any way intended as an outcome. Disease and other natural events that are precarious for life don't care if humans are here or not. They just do their thing impersonally, without malice and will uncaringly snuff life out if life gets in the way of its activity.

Life may have emerged on earth but it will not survive without a constant struggle to defend itself against a harsh world that is no garden of Eden. Hurricanes have no malice against life but they do act in accordance with their nature and will wipe life out that does not take appropriate action to defend itself. To borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins, we have grown up in the universe but without benefit of an operating manual. We have been writing our own guide for thousands of years. We learn of the toxic nature of some plants by watching the demise of a fellow human when our ancestors made the connection between death and eating a certain berry or mushroom. No heavenly father gave us a field guide to consult to spare us the necessity of victims to advance our ken. There is no one to care but us.

Life has emerged in spite of all the enemies allied against it. Once life took hold it is loathe to let go. It seeks to perpetuate itself though self-replication. While natural disasters can destroy individual lives catastrophic loss of all life is unlikely without a cataclysmic event. Such an event does await our descendants but not for billions of years. Perhaps we will have escaped into a safer region of space before our sun enlarges to engulf the earth.

In our part of the universe self-conscious life has emerged and in our part of the universe living beings will return to the constituent parts of matter at the end of life.  Life and death. Beginnings and endings. A world of opposites. We can't have one without the other. We battle against the enemies of life because we find that life is worth living. We seek to improve our existence and progress from God's country to a civilisation that is robust and fair. In the process as they are exposed we slough off old ideas that retard our progress.

In enlightened societies, gone or going are misogynist structures, slavery, belief in evil witches, demon possession, homosexuality is evil, masturbation is evil, working on Sunday is evil, human or animal sacrifice, belief that the world is flat, blasphemers should be killed, etc.

To create a fair and just society some old practices, attitudes, ideas and beliefs must be abandoned. They belong to our more ignorant history and should be left there. Unfortunately, to our misfortune, some still hold on to the discredited past with murderous tenacity.

A God theory must explain the good, the bad and the ugly we find in our domain. A god who wears nought but the coat of benevolence is a figment of our imagination. This idea runs smack into the harsh reality we face on a daily basis in our struggle to survive and prosper in a world filled with natural booby traps.

It is my contention that God exists in the same sense that Mickey Mouse, Superman, Santa and the Tooth Fairy do. As the Greeks did with their gods and the Hindus do with theirs: let us have fun with him and not take him too seriously. For we have made him as fallible as we are.