Monday, 20. July 2009, 23:57:29
religion, Iran, islam
Religion has a way of corrupting our best intentions and leading us away from God rather than towards Him. The reason for this is religion is always about external behaviour not about motivations or heart level transformation.
While anybody can change their external behaviour to comply with a set of rules, it is only God's grace revealed to us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that can radically transform our hearts and kill our love of evil.
It doesn't matter whether the religion is Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or nominal Christianity (by which I mean taking on the form of the faith in Christ without walking in relationship with Him), religion will always make a person more evil not less.
And so to Iran, where the brutality of the religious regime is making even its young thugs recoil.
From Melanie Phillips:
And this is why they want to overthrow it.
The Jerusalem Post reported an interview with a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia, who had himself been detained for the ‘crime' of having set free two Iranian teenagers, a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, who had been arrested during the disturbances. What was shocking, however, was his description of his previous activities as a Basiji thug:
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so ‘impressed my superiors’ that, at 18, ‘I was given the 'honour' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.’ In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a ‘wedding’ ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her ‘husband.’
‘I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,’ he said. Why the regret, if the marriages were ‘legal?’ ‘Because,’ he went on, ‘I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.’
These people have looked to the west to help deliver them from this tyranny – and the west has looked the other way.
Do you see the evil religion launches? The religious law says that virgins cannot be executed, so to allow these women to be executed they need to be legally raped and this is done by means of a false wedding which is actually a perversion of marriage. All of this to allow a form of religion to justify barbarity.
It's not only Islam that does this of course. Christianity has had its fair share of evil practices perpetrated by evil people who used the power of an institution to condone their deeds and undermine the grace of God.
The full article is here:
Friday, 27. March 2009, 10:58:57
Iran, politics, islam
Melanie Phillips writes:
The Iranians betrayed
Friday, 27th March 2009
Amil Imani has written an impassioned piece about the way in which Obama is betraying Imani's fellow Iranians:
President Obama said, ‘The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.’ But, Mr. President, the Iranian nation does not wish to be associated with this occupying regime, whatsoever. In fact, they want the Islamic Republic to be thrown into the dustbin of history as quickly as possible. Mr. President, today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at large. It continues to impose its horrendous ideology on the Iranian population.
It also looks like my people are going to be betrayed once again by a badly misguided American president. Jimmy Carter helped give birth to the virulent Shiite Islamism by forbidding the Shah of Iran to crush the bloodthirsty Ayatollah Khomeini and his band of rabid Islamists. Now, President Obama intends to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate child, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
... It is worse than appeasement to negotiate a ‘deal’ with the Islamists in Iran because any deal struck with these mullahs is only another ruse for them to further their plans... Misguided advocates of negotiation with the mullahs, beware. The mullahs are on an Allah-mandated mission. They are intoxicated with Petrodollars and aim to settle for nothing less than complete domination of the world under the Islamic Ummah. It is precisely for this reason that they consider America and the West as ‘Ofooli,’ setting-dying system, while they believe their Islamism as ‘Tolooi,’ rising-living order. They are in no mood for negotiating for anything less than the total surrender of democracy, the very anathema to Islamism.
Because of the way in which Iran is under-reported in the western media, few appreciate the terror under which the civilised Iranians, natural friends to the west, are being subjugated by the regime which runs their country. As Imani says, those Iranians have been systematically betrayed by ignorant, stupid, greedy and short-sighted American and western governments, with the result that even now the Iranian regime is playing them for suckers while moving its pieces on the geopolitical chessboard into the nuclear checkmate position. And now Obama has gone grovelling to that regime and even validated it, he has not only further weakened the free world against it but has also taken the ground from under the feet of the very people who so urgently need the world’s support to get rid of that regime.
Those Iranians are indeed the free world’s best hope of averting the coming cataclysm. Obama’s appeasement strategy is as suicidally stupid as it is unprincipled.
Article
Thursday, 22. February 2007, 22:31:25
Iran, islam
I found this challenging, especially this statment: "One of the leaders said that he had read the Bible from cover to cover 10-20 times in the course of his study, but he wondered if any of us had ever read the entire Quran."
Jeff Carr: How Do You Know Someone Until You Talk?
We have been keeping quite a schedule here in Iran, meeting with various religious leaders, government officials, and visiting historic and cultural sites. We have had two dialogue sessions with Muslim clerics in the last two days, both of which were very interesting. The first dialogue was at the Center for Islamic Culture and Information headquarters, in Tehran, and a significant number of media outlets were in attendance. It operated more like a theological conference, with three presentations made by each side. It was quite formal, but I was particularly fascinated by how well Muslim religious leaders understood Christianity. They quoted liberally from the Bible and made many links to corresponding verses from the Quran.
One of the leaders said that he had read the Bible from cover to cover 10-20 times in the course of his study, but he wondered if any of us had ever read the entire Quran. It was a fair question, and one that actually made me feel somewhat guilty. As I began to think about the primacy of the role of religion in Iran, and how much of their nation's value system comes out of the Quran, I began to think about whether or not you can truly understand a people if you have not read their holy book. Could people truly know me as a person, and understand me, if they had no real knowledge of the Bible?
These conversations, as well as many others, have also made it clear that the Iranians are very interested in being respected, but feel like they have not received much respect from the West. Everyone we have talked to has expressed this pain and frustration, and yet they have been so gracious, and continue to want to reach out and build bridges with us, in spite of feeling disrespected. It's a value I think we as Christians in America could learn from our Islamic brothers and sisters in Iran, and it's a value that would go a long way in helping us solve some of the differences between our nations.
Jeff Carr is the Chief Operations Officer for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. Learn more about this delegation at www.irandelegation.org.
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