Poppy is Haram: An educational lesson from Google Auto-Complete
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- Written by B. Kisan
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Google search has an auto-complete feature that gives suggestions to complete the sentence when you start typing. These are generated by algorithms based on the most commonly searched terms. When these auto-generate searches are not politically palatable, they are altered by human interventions.
For example there are a lot of negative searches and follow-through clicks on material critical of Islam. But, due to activism by Muslim groups, these have been played around with so as to place Islam-critical contents further down and Islam-apologetic content higher up in the search results and to avoid the negative search auto-completes.
The Muslim Understanding of Reality and History
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- Written by Louis Palme
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“This day I have perfected your religion for you and completed my favour to you. I have chosen Islam to be your faith.” (Surah 5:3)
This pronouncement was supposedly “handed down” to Muhammad on his final pilgrimage to Mecca in 632. Yet Islam was far from perfected at that time. Of the five Pillars of Islam, prayer and charity were not yet defined. One hundred years after Muhammad’s death, five different “schools” still could not agree on the tenants of Sharia law.
Faith is a virtue, but blind faith can sometimes trap people in an imaginary world divorced from reality. Muslims not only believe that their religion is “perfect”, but they also believe that all events in history were not only “Islamic”, but they were the perfect will of Allah.
To Muslims, it’s quite simple: Allah created the world and everyone in it. Would it make any sense that there would be more than one religion in Allah’s creation? Allah would never allow that! Therefore, Adam was a Muslim, Abraham was a Muslim, David was a Muslim, and of course, Jesus was a Muslim. Because people had drifted away from Islam, Muhammad was sent to bring them back.
The Injustice of Allah’s Punishment of the People of Sodom and Gomorrah
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- Written by Jake Neuman
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The Old Testament tells us that God destroyed the entire populations of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their supposed sexual decadence. Many reasons have been advanced over time as to why God annihilated the entire population including young children, and their homosexual indulgence has been cited to be the dominant reason. Killing even the little children for the sin of the grown-ups makes it a great historical injustice.
The Old Testament is an anecdotal historical document that records different stories of the tribal Hebrew people, many concerning their prophets, from the memories and mouths of human authors. The Quran, supposedly the word of God, gives a more elaborate account of what actually happened to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah in these verses 7:80, 11:77, 15:59, 21:71, 26:161, 27:55, 29:26, 37:133, and 54:33.
When a virtue becomes a vice
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- Written by B. Kisan
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Tolerance, kindness and openness are normally counted in the category of virtues.
When dealing with normal human beings who follow the principle of reciprocation they would generally engender a nice response. As the golden rule states 'treat others the way you would like them to treat you'.
Opening the borders of Europe to a massive Muslim influx by Angela Merkel has often been praised as offering a clear counter to the ISIS claim of the West's so-called Crusader enmity towards Muslims. The point pushed is that this effort of love defeats the ISIS narrative of hatred and enmity by showing how untrue it is.
What those who point this out fail to understand is that the ISIS narrative is the Islamic narrative pushed in the Quran in verses like these:
