The Protestant Church is a very large number which doesn't neccessarily always think in the same way. Would you say that Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are both the same person? Would it be fair to laebl the actions of Pelosi or Clinton as representative of the whole Democractic party? You might as well call the actions of 9/11 as an event celebrated by all Muslims.
I think you arguing the same point he was making. He was merely saying that Christian regligious sects have taught similar things to these Muslim sects. He wasn't saying all Christians teach it or that all Muslims teach it.
Maybe I read that wrong then. The Protestant Church is made up of numerous sects, and the ones who preach firebombing anything is very few from what I know.
No, he made a broad generalization about the Protestant church based on a single historical inference from Ireland and its breeding of IRA terrorists (which he deliberately failed to mention in specific). This is why so many debates in D&D are so lame and fruitless -- when people are out of ideas, they just throw in the same old tired moral equivalence shtick, make a couple of broad generalizations and dismiss the issue at hand. The point is Britain has a major problem (just like it did in the past with IRA terrorism), because these things are being taught weekly at supposedly mainstream "moderate" mosques including the biggest mosque in London. People need to actually watch these videos before commenting.
Exactly, when some people here come across a D&D topic that doesn't fit into their agenda, instead of commenting on the issue at hand, they come up with "well the Christians did the same thing" and "Bush is friends with the Saudi family". WTF are those things have to do with what's going on in Mosques in England. Why can't people just speak about the facts in front of them. It is what it is.
For the most part I agree with you. But in this case he didn't start out to post "well the Christians did the same thing." He was responding to another post which read like this. That post implied that only Islam was guilty of those types of teachings. He factually responded that it wasn't true. Had he come out and said what's the big deal Christians do the same thing, then I would have agreed. But his post about Christians doing it was in response to another post. He didn't start there. I feel bad arguing for someone else's post, so I will let him/her defend their own post from now on.
I was listening to a radio program the other day on BBC or NPR or a similar service where they were discussing a list of the 10 most linguistically deceptive news stories of the years. One of those stories was the following: [rquoter] UK's Vicky Pollards 'left behind' Britain's teenagers risk becoming a nation of "Vicky Pollards" held back by poor verbal skills, research suggests. And like the Little Britain character the top 20 words used, including yeah, no, but and like, account for around a third of all words, the study says. Lancaster University's Professor Tony McEnery who conducted the research said vocabulary size was defined early on. His study of blogs, questionnaires and speech found teenagers used half the words of average 25 to 34-year-olds. His analysis of a database of teenage speech suggested teenagers had a vocabulary of just over 12,600 words compared with the nearly 21,400 words that the average person aged 25 to 34 uses. Prof McEnery said in his report: "Of note when examining the word 'no' is the frequency with which the word is accompanied by the word 'but'. "These words occur in the sequence 'but no' or 'no but' almost twice as frequently in teenage speech as it does in young adult or middle aged speech." The sequence is particularly reminiscent of Vicky Pollard's trademark "Yeah but, no but". "I think it was extremely well observed as most comedy often is. "When things are funny it is because they ring true with people," said Prof McEnery who conducted the research for retailer Tesco. Verbal skills But he says there is a serious point to the work, which is to highlight what he sees as the neglect of verbal communication skills in schools. "While the school curriculum shows a strong focus on literacy, speech has been relatively neglected in the curriculum," he said. Employers often complained that new employees were unable to answer the telephone in the formal way required of them for work and that they were also intimidated by speaking formally in meetings, the professor added. He put this down to a lack of training and the overuse of technologies such as computer games and MP3 players. "This trend, known as technology isolation syndrome, could lead to problems in the classroom and then later in life. "Employers are already complaining that first jobbers are lacking basic verbal communication and it seems things could be set to get worse. "Kids need to get talking and develop their vocabulary." Tesco, which commissioned the report, said it was responding by launching a scheme which allows all UK comprehensive schools to interact and communicate with other schools around the country using its internet phone technology. [/rquoter] (source) If you read this story on it's own you might believe that the end of civilization was upon us because students were failing to learn a full vocabulary and the children of this generation were becoming grunting morons. The problem with this, however, is that the story provides this information in a vacuum. It actually turns out that 20 words account for 2/3's of speech of every single English speaking person on the planet. 20 words accounted for 2/3's of Albert Einstein's speech. Same is true for Jonas Salk, Watson & Krick, Alistair Cook, and Ronald Reagan. In truth these ‘stupid’ students are no more inarticulate (at least using this data point) than the generations which preceded them. The point of my long circular reply is that when you take a fact out of context, it can be easier to make them appear scary and threatening. By pointing out that American preachers have done and continue to do the same, the posters are helping to place these isolated facts into the larger context of history. Christian preachers for time immemorial have been advocating many of these same things, but society has not devolved into a parody of the film 'Escape from New York'. By placing these in the context of the history of Christian reactionary theology we can perhaps conclude that these threatening comments have not directly lead to the end of the world to this point, so they probably won’t here, or at least probably will not unless other factors come into play which differentiate Christianity from Islam. The point of bringing up Christian preachers with similar fire and brimstone speech is to contextualize this information on Islamic practices that has you so alarmed.
This may be your point for bring up Christian preachers, I don't think it was the intent for the other posters, it was more like "Christians were doing the same thing" (although I can't say for sure). And bring in Bush's tie with Saudi family surely doesn't provide any context for the topic at hand. And are you not alarmed by what you have seen in these videos?
They took bits and pieces of their statements and sentences... here is what a friend of mine had to say on the issue
Khalid Yassin is a person who doesn't believe in representative democracy because he believes that people can't govern themselves because they don't know Allah's will. And who knows Allah's will? Well in a Islamic theocracy... Of course he also applauds the Islamic courts in Nigeria which sentenced a woman to death for adultery.
I'd really love to hear the "context" under which a statement like this is justifiable. You know, it ain't just a river in Egypt.
The conservative media conveniently edited out the first part of his statement where he says: "The following statement is false."
Perhaps Mr. Yassin should become a mega athlete and claim that his statements were taken out of context or that he was misquoted.
I have a question, nothing more, nothing less... Is there scientific data that shows an average male brain is larger/smarter than an average female brain or vice versa? Also Is there scientific data that shows female decision-making declines with PMS? I need this information to begin forming a rational opinion, but can't really find anything.
No. There are an equal number of neuropsychological examinations where women are significantly better than men, as there are tests where men do better than women. Men tend to do tests involving visio-spacial memory while women do better than men in tests involving complex patterns like the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test or tests that involve recall of extended sequences. The differences between groups on all tests on average is a small fraction of the range of differences within groups. In other words if the range between the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile of men scores a difference of 100, the difference between male average and female average is a fraction, something like .01. In the past when the whole range of tests have been compiled to find a 'total winner' women have turned out to be slightly more quantifiably intelligent than men, but this may be a result of the specific range of tests available. Quantifying general intelligence is notoriously difficult. Because brain mass and cognative ability are greatly influenced by 'nurture' (i.e. brain mass and cognative ability grow as the person in question is provided with intellectual challenge) this may not be true for countries where women are not educated. By the way, you mention brain mass as if it is interchangable with intelligence. In truth, brain mass has a very poor corelation to cognative ability. IIRC absolute surface area is much more reliable. The reason the human brain. If you look at the brains of various species, the 'smarter' ones like apes and men have brains with many fissures and folds, while animals like squirrels have smooth brains. Regarding PMS, I am not entirely sure. I am also not sure about the cognative effects of irritable male syndrome. Keep in mind that women suffer from PMS in verying degrees. My guess would be that you would have to isolate the 5-10% who have the worst symptoms to find any measurable effect if one exists, but this is just a guess.
