A Religion of Lies

When I was in high school, my parents and pastors taught me several things about other religions.  One of the things they told me was that it's considered a moral imperative in Islam to lie to Christians.  This 'fact' was then used as a method of denying any claim a Muslim made to the contrary - of course Muslims would say that their Qur'an says nothing of the sort, because they're supposed to lie!

I still see this today.  It's a belief about Islam that has persisted despite all of the world's attempts to answer it. Just in a brief search online, I found many sites making claims that support that belief:

On a site with an Orwellian name, MuslimFact.com, Don Boys argues that "Islam permits lying to deceive unbelievers and bring world domination," explaining that this right to lie is called "Al-taqiyya" and that it can be used in several fairly common-place scenarios, such as saving someone's life.

This is somewhat true, actually.  The Qur'an appears to be saying - although I'm no scholar of the Qur'an and do not speak Arabic to read it untranslated - that Muslims shouldn't lie in general but can do so in order to accomplish good things, such as saving lives and reconciling people together.  Boys acknowledges that Christians lie, too, but then brushes that under the rug by the argument that we're not given specific permission to lie, and will therefore feel guilt for it.  That's clearly working out for the vast majority of Christians. 

He then follows a slippery slope argument down to its most absurd conclusion, setting it up as follows:

"Muslims have no hope for eternal salvation without their good works, so they must keep working to advance Islam. If a few lies will accomplish that goal, then lying is not bad but good. If they can get good publicity for Islam by lying, then lying is acceptable, even desirable. The Muslim is earning his way to heaven by lying to a non-Muslim."

Wow... where to begin?   First, this assumes (and Boys acknowledges the assumption without apparently realizing what he's saying) that Muslims don't have Christ and therefore their salvation isn't guaranteed.  Well, that's true, except that as Beth Davies-Stofka on patheos.com explains, "Islam does not teach that humans need intercession."  That is, Christ is neither capable of providing a bridge between individuals and God, nor does He need to.  Muslims can go directly to God for their salvation, and receive forgiveness from their sins directly from that source by repenting.  For that moment of salvation, Davies-Stofka explains, "At the end of time, all people will be rewarded or punished according to how well they followed the instructions contained in God's revelations to his prophets."  Well, that kind of sounds familiar, like the idea of St. Peter standing at the pearly gates.  She goes on, "Each person's deeds will be weighed in a balance, and if the evil deeds outweigh the good deeds, the person will be condemned to the eternal flame. If the good deeds outweigh the evil deeds, then the person will be rewarded with paradise."

So basically, anyone, Muslim or not, can get into paradise simply by doing more good than evil.  And evil can be erased through repentance, so that doing more good than evil would seem to be a fairly easy thing to do.

Bonus: They also teach that God is merciful.  So... He might just show you mercy even if you've been a bastard.

So, what does it mean to do "good"?  Well, here Boys reveals his ignorance and his prejudices about what is Good in Islam.  He already believes Islam to require the conversion of the whole world, through violent means if necessary.  Dying in the service of that conversion is the ultimate good.

This is also what I was taught.

Davies-Stofka claims, however, that good means something different: "A person's ultimate destiny, whether it is heaven or hell, depends on the degree to which that person intended and acted as God desires, with justice and mercy toward others." 

On islamqa.com, a site intended for providing helpful support to Muslims from Muslims, they list 8 possible things you can do to be good, such as praying (3 different items on the list include prayer), reading the Qur'an, and "visiting the sick and giving charity."  Notably absent on the list is "strapping a bomb to your chest and running into a crowded arena" or "attempting to convert others by lies and coercion." 

So the "goals of Islam" include charitable works?  Yeah, I'm OK with Muslims lying to advance those goals.

Boys then connects those two highly disparate dots by proclaiming that as a result of their lack of salvation and their pursuit of the expansion of Islam, lying means getting into Heaven.  He's just made lying a "virtue" rather than a necessary evil.

Of course, then he goes completely off the deep end, proclaiming that the only sure way of entering Heaven is to die a martyr, and,

"Most Muslims will not have the 'opportunity' to become a martyr in this war between Islam and the rest of the world and make no mistake every true Muslim must be involved in making America (or the nation where he lives) a Muslim nation. Since Muslims are limited in their ability to die for the cause, they can help the cause by supporting terrorists with money, succor, and cover."

Wow.  Just wow.  First of all, this assumes the moral imperative to make America a Muslim nation.  I'm relatively certain the Qur'an never mention America, but hey, I've been wrong before.

But more importantly, it assumes that all Muslims believe that terrorists will be successful in their conversion of America by attacking it.

If Muslims really wanted to make America into a Muslim nation, the first thing they would do would be to blow up a small piece of it, because... uhm... you always attack countries when you want them to love you?

Where did Muslims in Boys' reality get their playbook?  The Republican War Room?

Love

Visiting another church this morning, and they sang a song that had the line, "and they'll know we are Christians by our love."

Is it love to assume the non-Christians who supposedly would recognize that are unloving or somehow unable to love as deeply as a Christian?  Or, is it a proclamation that everyone who loves is a Christian, regardless of their professed religion?

The High Way, Part 1

I'm on vacation in Minneapolis.  A lot of times, when I come to a new city, my first impression of that city is its highway system.  Some have brilliant, well-designed highway systems.  Others, not so much.  Minneapolis strikes me as the kind of city that is caught in-between - it has a lot of highways, and they crisscross the city in somewhat regular intervals.  This is both good and bad design for a lot of reasons, but let's take the good - it gets traffic around the city quickly and ensures that no matter where you are in the city, you always have easy access to a highway.  That's something Tulsa could learn from, especially in what I like to call the highway desert that is South Tulsa.

Sometimes, when a Minneapolis highway meets up with another Minneapolis highway, the design is good - multiple lanes allow drivers to continue driving at high speeds, plenty of signage ahead of time allows drivers to prepare for their turns, and the lanes remain dedicated for a large distance, meaning that drivers can be back up to speed on the new highway and get comfortable in the flow of traffic there before having to merge.

That's good.

But then Minneapolis also has Tulsa-like highways.  You see, we have only three highway interchanges through town that are reasonable.  When I-244 meets up with 169, there are two dedicated lanes coming from the northbound 169 going to westbound I-244, and those two lanes remain in place all the way to highway 11.  Similar things happen when I-244 meets 51 on the west side of downtown and where 169 meets the Creek Turnpike.

All the rest of Tulsa's highway interchanges are death traps.

One of the busiest interchanges in town is at highways 51 and 169.  People coming from South Tulsa taking 169 attempt to turn to the northwest by getting on highway 51, and on the drive into work in the morning, this is the busiest flow of traffic.  There are, however people having to come in from Broken Arrow and drive toward North Tulsa.  The two flows of traffic cross each other - a giant volume of people slowing down to get on 51, a giant volume of people speeding up to get on 169, and using the same lane:

Image from Google Maps' Satellite Imagery

Unfortunately, finding actual statistics on this interchange is difficult, but there is a plethora of information available about smart design in general.  This type of interchange is known as a Cloverleaf Interchange.  Here's a useful news article to help explain some of the problems and solutions.

So here's the deal - we know these problems exist, we know how to do better design, we know that cloverleaf interchanges typically take up *way more* land than alternatives.  And yet, when we re-did this interchange only a few years ago... we re-did it simply by adding more lanes to the highways themselves and keeping the bloody dangerous interchanges exactly as they were.

Why do we do this?  Well, my theory is that it has to do with money.  We keep proving every bleeping day that money is more important in this city and state than the lives of any of its citizens.  This derives directly from our conservative politics and its resultant "I've got mine" mentality: people who don't drive that interchange don't see a problem with it, partly because statistics are scarce and partly because those things that are out of sight are out of mind.  But, even with campaigning to change this interchange, it won't be enough unless we can change that individualist mindset.

(More to come...)