Kevin, you are getting shrill, I suggest you calm down.
I am perfectly calm. I’m just not very tolerant of amateur attempts to malign my character.
Look at the facts.
I have. The facts are what I rely upon. You’re avoiding the facts in favor of new “facts” that you wish were true. You're also trying to make arguments for Dan, which he has never made.
When challenged you found the first anti-Islamic website you could and plagiarized it completely.
I wasn’t “challenged.” I was asked to produce a source, which I did.
You still insist that this is not only scholarship, but also actual intellectually valid argumentation.
I never once insisted this was “scholarship.” This was just a few people chatting on a forum. Remember, I had no idea “Free Thinker” was the scholar, Dan Peterson. There was no reason to assume a “scholarly” response was in order. He asked for the sources and I provided. These sources exist outside the website you linked to. When I refer to
hadith, I do so accurately. This is valid because it remains a refutation that worked. Muhammad, according to Islamic sources, allowed women to be raped. Dan seemed to imply that Muhammad probably didn’t condone it, but unlike Dan, I back up my claims.
There was no reason for Dr. Peterson to stick around to discuss anything with you, your motivation and dedication to knowledge was already easily demonstrated?
Again, your excuse flies in the face of what we already know. Dan was posting anonymously. This wasn’t a “scholarly” discussion in any sense of the term. Dan jumped into the discussion with a goal in mind. His goal wasn’t to dissuade me of my thinking, as he subsequently implied. His goal was to show others that I was wrong. He was unable to accomplish that goal, so he went with what most apologists go with: character assassinations.
The facts are simple, you did not invest any time in research or education
No, I knew of Muhammad’s atrocious acts from reading books like Ibn Ishaq’s, “The Life of Muhammad” (translated by A. Guillaume and published by Oxford). I also own several books by Robert Spencer, Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, to name a few. I knew what Muhammad was reported to have done, but I didn’t have citations tucked away in my back pocket at the time, and I certainly didn’t have them memorized. So I obtained the citations of what I already knew to be true, from the web. Your bluster over this “plagiarism” is just an attempt to attack me as well as divert attention away from the fact that I was right. If it is true that I was right, it would seem that this would be the true motivation behind his departure, especially since that has been his
modus operandi for quite some time. I have demonstrated on numerous occasions that Dan is quite simply wrong in some of his assertions regarding Islam. For instance, the preposterous claim that militant
jihad only refers to
defensive warfare, and the notion that famous Muslims like Al Ghazali
wouldn’t have condoned the killing of women and children.
On a related note, I recently showed Bill Hamblin to be wrong when he said the subjugated peoples under Islamic rule could “do whatever they wanted.” His only response to my criticism was to assert he never said that while accusing me of, you guessed it, “misrepresentation.” So I listened to his interview several times again, and make no mistake about it, he really did say they could “do whatever they wanted.”
you simply reverted to the first (I suppose you could have gone through a few, but not many in 37 minutes) negative website you could find.
Would it have made a difference if I went to the USC online library of Muslim texts? The same citations can be found there, but one could hardly call that a “negative” website. At the time, however, I wasn’t aware of its existence.
Why should Dan have responded to anything you had to say?
Because he asked me to produce sources. I produced sources. Of course I could have simply noted that the
ahadith support what I say, but I am pretty sure he wanted specific citations, book, volume, etc. Dan did not complain about the fact that the same sources appear on “negative” websites. That is a new complaint that you are making, and now you’re trying to pretend that this was the basis for Dan’s attack on my character.. It doesn’t matter if critical websites also mention these citations, what matters is whether or not these citations are true.
Your motivation and dedication to actual knowledge was easily demonstrated.
Granted, back then my knowledge of the controversial Islamic matters was nothing compared to what it came to be after a couple years of intense study. And no, I didn’t try to learn Arabic.
He had the class to not embarrass you. Your hysteria does nothing to alleviate the magnitude of your mistakes.
Hysteria? What mistakes? You seem to overlook the fact that I was right. But of course, you never really intended to touch that relevant issue did you?
You hate Muslims and Islam because of your continually demonstrated prejudice
Ah, Tradd Button! I thought maybe it could have been you; the resemblances are too uncanny too be coincidental. How ya been? Are you still posting on Christian forums pretending to be an objective admirer of Islam while failing to disclose the fact that you’re actually a Muslim?
Of course, nobody has ever demonstrated that I “hate Muslims,” because it simply isn’t true. You rightly noted that everyone has their own perspectives and this axiom applies here as well.
Ultimately, however, to accuse me of hating a billion people is just a lame effort to emotionally charge a subject where no emotion exists. The only person to ever accuse me of hating Muslims is you - I think - and this is because you have never been able to argue your points. The reason I am critical of Islam is because, quite frankly, there is plenty to be critical about; though I considered myself “burnt out” on the subject many months ago.
and you could not care less about facts, you simply find the first negative information you can and latch onto it. You have repeatedly demonstrated why your opinion on this subject is not worth discussing.
Yet, Dan obviously felt it was worth discussing on numerous occasions since this incident. Of course, as I said from the beginning, he only picks fights he thinks he can win. He has tried to pick several with me over the past few years, even after his dramatic declaration that I was too “spiritually” deficient to dialogue with.
Harmony asks,
There's been a lot of dancing around it, and a lot of attacks on the guy who initially raised it, but the question still isn't answered. Why don't you answer the question?
"Tradd Button" is a recent Muslim convert, with family ties to Mormonism. He is one of my Muslim stalkers who likes to follow me around on the web, though I must say it has been many months since his last appearance. He is not here to answer questions. He is only here to attack. That has been the only reason behind
all of his appearances on message forums. He tends to think of himself as an intellectual god among insects; he also thinks that since Socrates often ignored questions then that means he should too. I had an entire forum filled with "debates" he and I had over the course of many months in 2005, but then he moved on to other forums like christianforums.com where he ("Alabaster") attacks Americans for being stupid, among other things.
Tradd is very intelligent but comes across as dense because of his ego. He is a Middle-East expert living in Egypt, whose known method of discourse is to generally accuse people of shoddy research/scholarship, plagiarism, bigotry, hate towards Muslims, and of course their failure to obtain "education/knowledge." All in the name of Islamic apologetics, of course.
He doesn't answer questions. He
never answers questions.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein