Charles Martel - The battle of tours

[Didz]

But I do not agree with you on religion. Those "People in Power" do not invent religion, they do abuse it though, but they will abuse everything to stay in power.

If they didn't invent religion, who the hell do think did?

It certainly wasn't the sheep. Left up to them we would all be wandering around aimlessly waiting for someone else to tell us what to beleive in.

You say, that you have the gullible sheep who follow the evil leaders... which you obviously both won't and don't respect, but what is the other group then? And eventually everybody is told what to do and how to react, it's part of how you grew up. Someone is always influencing you.

What I actually said was that without the great mass if gullible sheep, evil leaders like Hitler would not be able to secure power and hold on it. It is the mass of sheep who would rather waste their lives watch Eastenders and Big Brother than paying attention to their rights and civil liberties being eroded and then go out and vote for the guy because he managed to do a better job of manipulating the media that will eventually be complicite in turning our countries into police states.

And this may again look alot like you say, because I agree with you a whole lot, but not 100%, and it's quite hard for me to explain those subtle but (vital) differences.

Glad to hear it^^

If you agree with everything I said than you would just be another sheep.

Instead, we'd all be killing each other to become the mightiest man around and noone could be trusted, sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

Rubbish....if people were not so gullible, then our leaders would have to restrain themselves to to serving the community instead of manipulating it and at the first sign of one of these leaders stepping beyond the bounds of their remit they would be removed.

The leaders we get are the direct product of our communities being dominated by gullible sheep who are willing to beleive everything they are told, or worse, too damned lazy and self-centred to do anything to oppose people even when they can see that they are only acting in their own interests.

Also it was mentioned that there are no "Islamic" contributions to science, literatture or philosophy, only "Arabic". This is quite wrong considering many, maybe a majority, of the greatest philosophers, scientists from the Islamic world were Persian and spoke Persian as an everyday language, not Arabic, many were not very religious (Avicenna himself preferred to drink wine rather than sleep) but they were Muslim and that makes their contributions.

As far as I am concerned this is a historical fact.

However, what we get are large numbers of sheep who swallow some anti-islamic propaganda disseminated by someone with a personal agenda to spread religious hatred and who have insuffiecient intelligence or motivation to check the facts for themselves.

The Muslims certainly were (are?) imperialistic, but empires usually are, they conquered many territories from older empires and replaced their rule with their own, which may have been better or worse in some respects than the old one, but which such things the common man usually does not notice it that much.

To be strictly accurate what we get are Muslim leaders who are hungry for personal wealth and power who are prepared to use the faith of other muslims to further their ambitions.

No, religous beleif no matter how earnestly held can by itself be imperialistic. It requires people with personal agenda's to expliot that faith by moulding it into a religion that furthers their own ends and then expliots it to manipulate its faithful flock of sheep. It has the added advantage of creating divisions and hatred which these people can expliot to give their ambitions credence and false legitimacy.