I was asked by a long term friend and colleague via email this morning, if I still had a reference from "about 5 years ago" regarding Sharia law and religious text prescribed violence. Gmail is a wonderful organizational tool with superb search capabilities. All I had to do was search "Leviticus" and BAM, a second later, a September 2006 email conversation appeared with this exact same friend, along with 4 other earlier conversations with other people.
My part of the conversation ran as follows:
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Bill,
all religious texts can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways.
See the following, for violence and cruelty (including killing):
and
Literal cHristian interpretists [sic] who insist the earth is 6000 years old, yet eat pork (Leviticus, Chap 11, vs 3 - 27), and don't stone homosexuals when they see them, or shun menstruating women into huts, have their own hypocrisy that they practice.
Literal Muslim interpretists [sic] have to their own perspective as well.
About the only religious writings that I've seen that don't promote violence, cruelty, or death in some manner, are Buddhist texts.
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followed by....
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excellent comparison I just ran across:
excerpt:
| Violence and Cruelty | Total verses | Percent | |
| Bible | 853 | 31173 | 2.74 |
| Quran | 337 | 6236 | 5.40 |
So in reflection, since in 2006 I was not yet living in Arizona, and my friend Ron had not yet convinced me that blogging was a better vehicle than email broadcasting for expressing my is inside my head and starting conversations, I have added Steve Wells's excellent blog (link here) Dwindling In Unbelief this morning, to the JustJoeP referenced blog list at left.
Upon perusal of Wells's on-going efforts this morning, I see that he has recently illuminated the blatant hypocrisy and insanity that is the Bachmann campaign (based on religious texts), and the pornographic & lewd (warning, NSFW) evangelical fundamentalists like Pastors Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson at the Christ Church conference that was just held in Moscow Idaho. It would not surprise me to see frequent postings by Wells during the 2012 election season, just as in 2008 and 2010, his posting frequency increased substantially.
It's nice when you re-discover a stash of gems like this, that you once knew about, but had been too busy / had too many book marks / had not looked at in many years. So I present it here for you, my readers. Soak it in.
I still maintain the fundamentalist religious fervor has killed more people, destroyed more families through abuse, and inspired more hatred and despicable acts of evil than nearly any other single cause in the world today, with the exception perhaps of medieval pandemics - like the black plague.
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