But who or what is using who or what?

Submitted by Alain Jean-Mairet (Switzerland), Jul 19, 2006 at 07:15

In science, there are facts and the rest, whatever it is and how much it is believed in, is irrelevant. Period. In religion, there are facts too, but the rest can be more important than them.

So, while it is a fact that Islamic sacred texts are aggressive at the core, universalistic, and supremacist, if people believe them to be otherwise, than the latter can become a fact efficiently competing with the former. A religion is what its adepts make of it, and eventually what they believe it to be.

With Islam, the problem is that you cannot really believe that it is a peaceful religion when you really know the texts (see my other post here about the banning of Islam). There may be a puffer zone, say a time where a believer (means someone who started by believing, before knowing anything, and that is the case for most Muslim-borne people, and converted, too, I'd say), learns about one's religion and haven't connected the dots already. But you won't find a connoisseur of Islamic texts arguing honestly that Islam, based on Islamic texts, can be any sort of peace. Islam can be peaceful only if it is made of people who believe in peace itself, above the clear meaning of the texts. Without them, as it were.

So I'd propose that, beyond those in the puffer-zone, only criminals are using Islamic sacred texts for getting any kind of power over their fellow-believers (or over free people, but that is self-evident enough today). I'd add that those people certainly don't genuinely believe (anymore) – they are the true infidels, the true apostates, the true traitors to the faith, the true enemies of peaceful believers, of peaceful Islam. Unfortunately, they have the texts on their side.

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