God always gets the best press.

People love to credit him with saving them from near death despite it clearly being extreme efforts by skilled doctors that did, but never blame God when it was pure chance and bad luck that caused their mortal wounds.

To me, if God deserves credit, it's for the chance happening, the bad luck out of anyone's control, not the Herculean human efforts to repair the damage. If people really believed God intervenes, all Christians would be Christian Scientists or Jehovah's witnesses and refuse human medical treatments.

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I had a similar sign on my doorbell before I fenced my front yard, but I included a minimum $500 charge clause.
I only had one knock after I put it up, Jehovah's witnesses. They put me on their do not knock list after I opened the door and extended my hand to them palm up.
*doublepromote a *quality no solicitation solution

What's up with the people in the background and their trunk full of Jehovah's Witness literature?

@bareboards2 @ChaosEngine and @newtboy Most want a particular church, or prefer a particular church. But a very few NEED a particular church--ie., they can't live without one. Take my mother-in-law. She survived a fire that nearly killed her, was forced to have sex with animals by her abusive father, was beaten by her husband, then lost all her children to DCF and well that sums up her life. It is easy to chalk up her reliance on Jehovah's Witness' faith as her "choice," but then that is denying the biological need to be accepted and loved in a certain manner. Hers is that faith alone. Take it away and she would either A-shut down, or B-more likely kill herself.

Nice. I just have a sign on my door stating -

The owners of this house offer consulting services. We will provide our consulting services to solicitors, canvassers, proselytizers, or others offering goods, services, or information, but only at our emergency rate of $100 an hour, with a 2 hour minimum charge, payment due in cash up front, knocking or ringing the doorbell indicates acceptance of these terms.

I've only had one solicitor since putting up the sign 15 years ago, and they didn't have the $200 cash, so they got an ear full and were told that their church would be getting the bill. No more Jehovah's witnesses for me! Now I have a secure gate and a dog, so the sign rarely gets read.

I could make good use of a force blasting door mat like that, door to door salesmen, bill collectors, Jehovah's Witnesses, the paperboy who never reaches the doorstep. Oh wait, he never reaches the doorstep, I'd like to order an automated deathray too.

The year before last I had a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses at my door. I asked them a simple question - why would their god choose to create autistic people who are incapable of the belief that is sought from us? Being on the autistic spectrum myself I totally understood where I was coming from with the question, and felt entitled to ask it. They were stumped and I politely said goodbye to them. As they left with puzzled expressions the man turned back to me, and asked if he could return if he came up with an answer. I told him that would be fine, but to this day I have yet to hear back from him.

I really like Stephen Fry's answer to this question. I can't envision a rational reason ever being offered to him in response to his answer.

You are empirically incorrect. You are proposing an impossible scenario, that somehow 1.5bn world wide are perfectly aligned, have some say over the actions of all the other people simultaneously and ergo bear some responsibility for any actions committed under the broad umbrella of "Islam"...

http://enews.fergananews.com/articles/2698

To speak of “Islam” as a homogenous phenomenon is analogous to speaking of “Christianity” as a single whole that includes Catholics and Orthodox, Protestants and Copts, and countless other sects, including such marginal ones as the Mormons, the Scientologists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of course, we never do so, because we intuitively recognize that the label loses all meaning when forced on to such a diverse group. We seldom have such qualms, however, when it comes to Islam, even though the label “Islam” covers just as wide a spectrum of geographic, cultural, and sectarian diversity as the label “Christianity.” If anything, it is even more internally diverse than Christianity, which crystallized around an institutionalized Church from the very beginning. In Islam, such an institution never developed. There is no religious hierarchy and no single individual qualified to pass final judgment on questions of belief or practice. Within thirty years of the death of the Prophet, the Muslim community had split on matters of doctrine. Since then, there have been multiple and simultaneous sources of authority among Muslims. Authority is located not in church councils and such, but in individuals who derive their legitimacy from their learning, piety, lineage, and reputation among peers. This gives Islam a slightly anarchic quality: authoritative opinions (fatwa) of one expert or one group can be countered with equally authoritative opinions, derived from the same sources, of another group, or one set of practices devotional practices held dear by one group can be denounced as impermissible by another. In more extreme cases, such conflict of opinion can turn into a “war of fatwas,” fought out, in the modern age, in the press or in cyberspace. (If Islam were held in a more positive light in the West today, this diversity would be described as a “free market of ideas”!) To speak of Islam as a homogeneous entity ignores this fundamental dynamic of its tradition.

This pluralism extends to the most basic level of belief. The major sectarian divide in Islam, between Sunnis and Shi‘is, goes back to the very origins of Islam. The two doctrines evolved in parallel, and therefore it is incorrect to see in them an orthodox/heterodox divide. All Muslims share a number of key reference points (the oneness of God, loyalty to the Prophet and his progeny, the need to prepare for the Hereafter, to take a few examples), but they have been played upon in different ways by different sects and movements. Nor do the two sects exhaust the diversity, for they both have many branches and various theological and legal schools within them, while many modern ideological groups straddle the divide between the two sects.

Or
http://wasalaam.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/the-myth-of-homogeny-in-islam/

I could provide link after link, discuss Sunni vs Shia, or any one of the innumerable other sects (70+ iirc), discuss Islams war with itself throughout history etc, all demonstrating that you are wrong.

You are portraying (demonising actually) Islam in the same way the two morons in the video are, by making all Muslims responsible for any action committed by a Muslim. You talk about enlightenment, but your post reeks of bigotry, hardly the hallmark of an enlightened person, right?

Incidentally, the "popular" view of Islam is of a homogenous group of people, us vs them, a group to be afraid of, or to attack. The average person on the street (ie. plumb ignorant, much like yourself) would not be aware of just how complex it is, far more so than Christianity. It's exactly why the talking heads who got schooled kept trying to make out that Islam was homogenous, and were proved wrong...

But give it your best shot trying to shoot down the considered opinions of Phd's, scholars, philosophers etc if you want to continue to make a fool of yourself.

That's not what he's saying at all.

The bible, or the Quran, or many other texts, just like historical events as they were, or works of literature, or other even historical texts as complex as this often have contradictory ideas. The US constitution is founded on a set of beliefs and ideas that almost all of us subscribe to, yet there are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, pragmatists, etc. all deriving very different ideas from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and more. The reason this is true is because those values often come into conflict, and can outright contradict each other. Freedom vs security, equality vs prosperity, I could go on and on.

With the Bible, you have Catholics, Protestants, subdivided into a plethora of different religions in their own right under the umbrella of Christianity. You have the running joke even within Catholicism that American Catholics aren't really Catholics at all. Not only do different Christians interpret the bible differently, the amount they count on the bible varies between fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses who take the bible extremely literally to extremely secular Christians who have absolutely no problem discarding any part of Christian doctrines when scientific evidence proves otherwise.

You have Christians who act as saintly as Mother Theresa to mobsters.

That's just Christianity. There are extremist Islamic groups that sound more like the Westboro Baptist Church than other Muslims.

But within Christianity, there's "honor thy mother and thy father" and "thou shall not kill". What if your parents are murderers?

That's a crude, and obvious example of conflicting values, but the 10 commandments are simple rules that don't completely resolve every situation.

What's stupid is to believe that you can know about a person's specific ideology just by their religion. Does their religion play a role in their ideology? Absolutely, but how it impacted their ideology has much more to do with their experiences, their natural tendancies, etc. than necessarily their religion. If you grew up in a mob family, honor thy mother and father was more likely the lesson you took from the Bible than thou shall not kill.

And if you look around you, this is plainly obvious. Even look within yourself. We're all a melting pot of lessons and ideas we've learned from school, personal life experiences, our religious beliefs, our parents, our socio-economic backgrounds, our friends, etc. That's why you are different from everyone of your religion, your friends, who you went to school with, your socioeconomic class, etc.

And something this guy doesn't seem to get--there is more than one Christian denomination. Like Bob, many Christians pick and choose their material and adapt the bible to their own principles. Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in hell at all, and many denominations feel that those who did not have a chance, ie. people in India, will be just fine... So yeah, he's an ass. He needs to pick up a book besides the bible and read it to learn, not to hate.

@ChaosEngine I totally get what you are saying. I'm only taking issue with this statement: "it is still practiced in modern Islam."

Would you say that because Jehovah's witnesses refuse to have blood transfusions that it is a practice of "modern" Christianity? No, of course you wouldn't. Jehovah's witnesses are interpreting the Bible/Christianity in a very specific way but you can't claim their beliefs represent mainstream Christian thinking.

Similarly, while there are certainly those who claim female genital mutilation is required in Islam, they aren't mainstream or "modern" in any sense of the word, particularly when you see where the vast majority of FGMs are occurring and the populations (generally poor and uneducated) that are performing them.

So I find that claiming this is a practice of Islam actually conflates the discussion about Islam (and FGM) unnecessarily. About the worst you can say is that in the Koran, Mohammad meets a woman who performs FGMs and she asks him if what she is doing is wrong. He replies along the lines that no, it isn't necessarily wrong but that she shouldn't cut too much away and goes on to elaborate that it is the duty of men to be circumcised but an honor if a woman does it.

So, if you want to criticize Islam about FGM, you can point to this and note that the Koran doesn't denounce the practice--but it also doesn't explicitly require it either.

Scale it up for Jehovah's Witnesses and you've got a video.