benjw wrote:
Shaf,
I don't find you arrogant at all. In fact I should take this opportunity to apologise for sometimes being at bit arrogant towards you myself.
You are extremely knowledgeable on all religions, but not as accepting of differences as this would suggest. I believe that religion is about faith, not facts, and I understand that your faith is doing the talking sometimes. It is a bit of a catch-22 situation where you can't have religion without faith and you can't have faith without belief.
I find religion very interesting, which is why I find your posts very interesting. But I am not constrained by faith and I would never expect you to believe something that contradicts your faith.
I am still learning and have no illusions of the amount of knowledge out there that I have still to come across.
I try and learn about religions from practitioners and primary sources - hence why I go back to the Bible, Gita, Vedas , Book of Mormon, Kitab-al-Aqdas etc where I can and quote these. Looking at a religion through the lense of their critics does not do them justice.
I will similarly apply the rules to Muslim sects and refer back to the Quran where they differ.
I am all for freedom of belief and freedom of interpretation - and where my posts fall short of this, I do apologise.
However, I perhaps am jealous of the same freedoms being applied to me and am perhaps a bit aggressive when I'm told that I am factually wrong or deliberately lying (as opposed to having a different interpretation). Where facts are challenged and I have provided references, I'd expect some justification for any challenge. Hey - I am human.
Sometimes phrases are interpreted in unintended ways - eg:
"X is a mystical belief" - I interpret this as "X is fantastical - don't even try to apply logic to understand X"
"Y needs to be interpreted" = "do the opposite of Y because otherwise my argument won't hold"
"religion has evolved" = "religion has been changed because the original wasn't universal or timeless"
Cheers,
Shafique
