Can some Muslim or learned person, please, explain what this really means.
I am kinda disturbed by it, or it has a different meaning to it.

“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. This is because they acted adversely to Allah and his messenger” (Koran 8:12)


Just to let you all know, I am open minded and read religious books on all kinds of religion and I see some good in them and some bad. Mostly people mis interpret them to benefit themselves.

Perhaps a cleric of Muslim faith can explain this? I am sure there are websites with emails to contact such a person.

I think when you come across elements of any scripture, tora, new testament or koran it is important to consider context in terms of chapter/other parapgraphs surrounding the text in question and historical context(was there an occasion at which this text was related).

We do this quite commonly when reading the speeches of politicians and constitutional law, it seems prudent to do the same for all texts.

here is an introduction to the chapter from which you pulled the quote. Unvelievers here are not the west, but rather neighboring tribes of the region(Arab tribes), which had essentially taken out a contract on the early muslim community(offering cash for the murder of the members of this radical social movement).

It seems to me the whole chapter is to inspire steadfastness against much greater odds and armamend.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/maududi/mau8.html

It's a horrible quote to me but no more horrific than texts I have read from other religious books. The bible has many, below are just a few. This is why I am not a fan of organized religion in general. For some reason most of them feel the need for violence.

"Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and expose them in broad daylight before the LORD."
Numbers 25:3-5

"Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them,"
Numbers 25:16-18

"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,"
Numbers 31:16-18

"When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it."
Joshua 8:23-25

"This is what you are to do," they said. "Kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin."
Judges 21:10-12

"So David gave an order to his men, and they killed them. They cut off their hands and feet and hung the bodies by the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-Bosheth and buried it in Abner's tomb at Hebron."
2 Samuel 4:11-12

eew!

Gee, (Spider said the old testament was about the love and mercy of the Lord thy God!)

All I can say is: eww!

peoples metaphors and languages have changed and all of the things written here are translations from other languages and historical and geographic cultures.

Its a mistake to read them with a 20th century literal mind. Even at their own times careful interpretation was used to derive meaning.

The holy scriptures and secular documents like the US constitution were radical social documents in their time. We still look at the constitution and interpret the meaning based on what we think was the intention and how it might apply to todays world.

Why wouldn't you give revelations that same respect?

When the Greeks of Millet said a democracy was one person , one vote, they meant white men over 40. They had slaves, wives were chattle and 39 year olds were still kids.

The US Constitution advocated rights for all, as long as they were not African slaves.

An Eye for an Eye, is radical when you live in a society where if you kill my cousin, i obliterate your entire extended family.

Chopping heads and fingertips is a metaphor for the abilties of acting and thinking/speaking. These terms are still used in describing organizations. The department head, he is his right hand man.

If you think these texts are gory, read grimms fairy tales, or watch Saw IV. Humans like blood, gore and murder, we are weird that way.

It is, but it's also about Justice and Righteousness. You have looked at one small corner of a mural and decided that you don't like it. Look at the whole thing and you will discover a masterpeice.

This is true, a story would be pretty boring if there were no good guys and bad guys.

Only problem is in the OT you can't tell which ones are the good guys and which are the bad guys.

But the point is that most of these books- Bible, Quaran, Torah, etc.- have some really violent parts. And there have been some interesting studies that seem to indicate that people of many religions feel justified in getting violent if they think that the violence was sanctioned by their religion/religious doctrine.

e.g.: http://prometheusongebonde.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/peace-through-the-holy-books-no-way/

It's sad that the violence and judgements in these works seem to encourage violence and judging in their followers but it seems less frequently that the messages of peace and love from these works inspire peace and love in their followers...

Or maybe it just seems that way.

I also have studying the religions and philosophies of many different cultures from all over the world and all throughout history. It is my personal belief that the Koran and the Bible are actually both the result of the same religious folklore of that region of the world.

Having examine that regional folklore in some depth I have personally come to the conclusions that those documents were most likely written by men who were trying to terrorize people into believing in the God they were describing in their stories.

I personally can’t believe that the creator of this universe would be a terrorist. Yet, that is the method used by this regional folklore. Either believe in this God or face its wrath!

So I have dismissed those writings as simply not being divine in nature. Or to put that another way,… if there is any divinity contained in those tales it has been grossly distorted by the hand of men.

I simply don’t believe that God is a terrorist. (i.e. threatens terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve in specific writings).

Just to drive that point home a bit hardly let me offer the following,…

If this God that is being depicted in this regional folklore that is genuine, and is indeed all-powerful. Then why did this all-powerful omniscient God restrict itself to only inspiring men from the Middle East to write its stories whilst allowing the entire rest of the world to develop different views of God? To me personally this makes absolutely not sense at all. If this God is truly all-powerful and omniscient then it would have inspired all culture from all over the globe and throughout all of history to have always written the same things. Then clearly there would only be one God.

The fact that these regional texts all basically report the same stories of the same terrorizing God is a dead give away to me that they were the invention of local regional minds just rewriting local myths to suit their own mortal agendas.

You mileage may vary.

I don't tell this to people very often, but I have considered the possibility that if some non-human life form existed that had advanced technology, (an advanced race perhaps) they (like we have done already) would have learned such things as cloning and controlling DNA to the point of developing the races of humans that now populate the earth.

Okay, so this advanced race created, through manipulation of DNA, more advance humans beginning with the the primitive human life forms that existed in that distant past.

This new species of human was a mixture of the advanced beings DNA and the DNA of the more primitive humans. You might say that they were called Adam and Eve... representing the first two new and improved species perhaps.

The creators were not Gods at all. (And there were more than one of them.) They had many disagreements and power struggles, and still do to this day.

They pretended to be Gods. Humans worshiped them as gods.
But this race of advanced beings were a rather cold blooded non emotional race, lacking compassion, while humans were rich with emotional sensors and imagination. They (humans) seemed to evolve very quickly in awareness and consciousness, which was/is viewed as a threat to these Gods.

Stories of Gods in scripture reflect these advanced races and their battles. They may be scientists, but they are not Gods.

They still exist today. They look like us. They live with us and they operate in secret underground laboratories and even in some hospitals. (Mostly military hospitals)

Sounds very strange I know. I do read lots of strange things, fact and fiction, and I have concluded that this is very possible.

They still have never found the missing link between primitive cave man and modern man, nor do they know how that leap occurred. It was DNA manipulation I suspect.

Its because real life is occasionally violent and horrific and people feel justified DUH

We are standing with you in prayer and believing that no weapon formed against us will prosper (Isaiah 54:17). Our God is Jehovah Rapha, the One who heals; Jehovah Jireh, our provider; Jehovah Shalom, our peace; El-Shaddai, the God who is sufficient for the needs of His people. No matter what concerns you today, Jesus Christ is able to do exceedingly and abundantly more than you can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).

Created by
Sasha Lessin, Ph. D.

based on Study of Zecharia Sitchin's 2002 epic
The LOST BOOK OF ENKI: Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial God

"At the end of days a Day of Judgment there shall be.
The Earth shall quake and the rivers change course,
and there shall be a darkness at noon and
a fire in the heavens in the night,
the day of the returning celestial god
[Nibiru, the far-orbiting 10th planet of our solar system] will it be.

And who shall survive and who shall perish,
who shall be rewarded and who will be punished,
gods [astronauts from Nibiru] and men alike,
on that day it shall be discovered;

For what shall come to pass by what had passed
shall be determined; and what was destined
shall in a cycle be repeated,
and what was fated and only by the heart's will
occurring for good or ill shall for judgment come.

The record read, the Past remembered,
the Future as prophesy understand,
Let the Future of the Past the judgment be!'

These are the words of Enki, Firstborn of Anu of Nibiru"
From The Lost Book of Enki: Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial God, by Zecharia Sitchin

Dr. Sasha (Alex) Lessin (a UCLA Anthropology Ph.D.), guides you though Zecharia Sitchin's revolutionary proofs of extraterrestrial miners on Earth from 450,000 years ago.

The ETs, who became the gods of old, were merely people like us--but longer living--with advanced technology.

These "gods" intervened, beginning 300.000 years ago, in our genetic evolution. They grafted their genes into the genome of Homo Erectus (a humanoid species devolved from earlier Homo Sapien settlers of Earth) to create a slave species. They created the slave species--that's us-- to mine for them.

The gods continued intervening in our physical, social, intellectual and consciousness evolution. They conditioned us to a mental matrix of patriarchal hierarchy, violence, obedience and disregard for the consciousness of underlings. Sitchin's work lets us evaluate the ET interventions and transcend the the master-slave mentality they and their successors instilled in us.

Sitchin translates clay scrolls and inscriptions from ancient Sumer and other early civilizations on Earth. He owns the world's largest acknowledged collection of such evidence. Sitchin's Sumerian information frees us from the stranglehold of organized religions, governments and corporations that feed on ignorance of our true origins. Everything changes for us when we realize, thanks to Sitichin’s translations, that the gods of old were merely people like us--but longer living--with more advanced technology.

The Sumerian scrolls record dynastic and atmospheric crises 450,000 years ago on the planet Nibiru--the far-orbiting tenth planet of our solar system. Nibiru came nearest the Sun every 3, 600 years or so until 10, 900 B.C.E. , when Miranda, a moon of Nibiru, hit and tilted Uranus and became one a moon of Uranus. The gravitational pull of Uranus on Nibiru slowed Nibiru's orbit around the Sun to 3,450 Earth-years [Sitchin, Z., 2007, The End of Days, page 316].

Nibirans, people who look like very tall Scandinavians, live millions of years. However, half a million years ago, they desperately needed gold to shield their planet from fatal atmosphere loss. They knew they could get gold on Earth. Sitchin's translations relate how the prospect of Earth's gold first drew Nibiru's great scientist, Prince Enki then his brother Enlil, their sister Ninmah and siblings' children as well as 600 miners and 300 shuttle crewmen, to our planet.

In Africa 300,000 years ago, Enki responded to a mutiny he covertly fomented in the goldmines. He’d replace Nibiran miners with hybrid slaves. He, his sister Ninmah and his son Ningishzidda would splice their genes into the genome for Homo Erectus, a uniquely compassionate primate he'd been studying. The resulting creatures would serve as a slave race to dig the gold. The slaves would tend crops and livestock for the mining expedition complexes in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and for themselves. After the Deluge, 13, 000 years ago, the Nibiran astronauts had their Earthlings build cities in Sumer. The Nibirans bade their slaves address them as “gods”. The gods lived in luxury in ziggurat castles next to their aircraft hangars. The gods managed their Earthlings through priest-kings--hybrid descendants of Enki’s Earthling lovers.

The gods taught Earthlings information and skills so they could best serve the gods, their needs and the expedition's mining mission--skills in astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, herding, writing, architecture and geology. Several gods dictated memoirs to slave scribes. These memoirs recorded the dictating gods' personal slants on the formation of the Solar System, history on Nibiru, the expedition to Earth, the Flood, and the god’s take on current events.

The gods divided into competing lineages of Enki’s descendants versus the descendants of his half-brother Enlil. As part of this competition--Enkiites vs Enlilites--the gods taught Earthlings the skills and mind-set of genocidal war, violence, slaving and defoliation. Each god insisted on unquestioning obedience to him or her. Each god demanded his or her slaves hate and fight opponent gods’ kings and slaves.

Some Earthlings escaped into the hinterlands, away from the gods’ wars. No more would they be fodder for spears, arrows and chariots. They’d escape also terrible technological killing devices of the gods: explosives, lasers, gas and biological agents. In 2023 B.C. wars of the gods climaxed in thermonuclear genocide of Earthlings in Canaan and Mesopotamia. The unexpected fallout from the nuking forced the gods to scatter over or exit Earth.

Nibirans recorded impeccable evidence that they--extraterrestrials--settled and civilized Earth. Evidence they left includes stone-carved star charts that map Neptune, Uranus, Pluto--three planets beyond eye-range from Earth. Maps chart rocket routes through our solar system. The maps feature accurate geographical details of the entire Earth. Details on the maps could only have been charted from space. One such detail on the maps is an accurate drawing of the landmass under the Antarctic icesheet. The astronauts were able to map Antarctic land after 11,000 B.C., because the sheet had slid into the South Sea, caused the Deluge and drowned most Earthlings.

Our science confirms the records the gods dictated to their scribes. We have verified and continue to verify the Nibiran goldminers' genetic, metallurgical, geological, scientific, mathematic, astronomical accounts. Modern biology validates Sumerian engravings of Enki and his sister Ninmah splicing double helix DNA to create an Earthling worker. Our science still can't move and join giant stone slabs as did the Nibirans for their navigational landmarks. Nibirans fitted huge rocks for the launch pad in Lebanon, the Giza pyramids and monuments on our moon, Mars and on Mars' moon, Phoebos.

With Sitchin's evidence we free ourselves to create a new paradigm, a paradigm unfettered by the heirarchic godspell. "Godspell" is philosopher Neal Freer's word for the yearning of Earthlings with a slave mentality that yearns for the return of the masters, the so-called gods who abandoned them. The gods through the religions they propagated to propitiate them by killing followers of other gods.

Gods are merely long-lived, technologically advanced humans with a wide range of individual quirks and a hierarchic, patriarchal warlike culture. They obsess on genealogical precedence and male superiority. Most gods are petty, murderous slavers, contemptuous of Earthlings' consciousness.

Now, with the truth of our origins known, we can break violent, greedy and murderous patterns the ETs taught us and perpetrate through their representatives among us. We can break the godspell, become peers rather than servants of the gods. We and they evolve together to support, encouragement, love and celebrate consciousness and its manifestations.


Perhaps many of our questions about religion originated first from older religions. I truly believe Ancient Egyptian religous beliefs were the stepping stones for later religions many worship today. Although if you believe in ancient Egyptian religous beliefs you would know that everyone is worshipping the wrong god today. The very god that has tried to eliminate humans.

This is for many a fantasy, ridiculous, and especially uncanny for me to post here. Yet try to have a open mind and see what other possibilities there could be if you can. We are one star out of billions of stars and planets!

JeanieBean I support your theory very much! Thank you for your insight.

cheers

davidben1's words gave rise to a profound thought in my heart.

years ago , I believed it God that spoke to my inner heart and said,, "sometimes, I wish the book was not there" or words to that effect. Not recalling it verbatim is apt, in that I really couldn't swallow that at the time.

But it holds merit.

That same book contains an ironic statement.
"the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

It stands on its own, that if we listen with our hearts, and follow with our minds, then we can hear the harmony in others .

How will it be then, if the letter does share itself only to reflect the death of a moment past?

even this letter is past, but harbored perhaps as an echo.

Better an echo of life, than a profound utterance authored by a man.

I cannot answer myself well enough to refrain from sharing this.

Someone Quoted this:

".....Perhaps many of our questions about religion originated first from older religions. I truly believe Ancient Egyptian religous beliefs were the stepping stones for later religions many worship today..."

~~~~~~
Now.... as far as RELIGION Is concerned, there could be some truth to that statement above....

However....One thing one must Remember... God is NOT a
Religion.

Man TURNED God into a Religion!!!

God NEVER MEANT For Man to Turn Him into a Religion.

God Wants a PERSONAL Relationship With Us!!!

Not a Religious Relationship With His People!!

Beautiful People Here........

Religion is Man Reaching UP to God.
But....

What God is REALLY All About
Is Simply ....

God Reaching Down to Man!!!!!

~~~~

Anyone Ever hear the christmas story about the Birds?

If not, will share it later....unless someone else here, knows the story, and doesn't mind sharing it ...

GBY All.......

Wed 03/12/08 07:38 AM
Someone Quoted this:

Man TURNED God into a Religion!!!

My answer: I agree, Perhaps men who did turn this into a religion probably started their philosophies from older religions.

You say: God NEVER MEANT For Man to Turn Him into a Religion.

Answer: The question is if there is a god first of all. A mystery that will remain for everyone even those who are die hard religious fanatics truly must ask themselves this. Scientists belief in the big bang theory. Others belief in aliens landing on this planet like ancient Egyptiology has.

God Wants a PERSONAL Relationship With Us!!!

Does he? According to Dr. Sasha (Alex) Lessin (a UCLA Anthropology Ph.D.)you would be incorrect. I personally do not say you are wrong, but many do not share this idea. I am open to it of course. Read the long thread I posted two or three threads up and you will see his idealogy.

I believe no one truly knows the answers. Some say they feel it, some use biblical books as proof, others use clay tablets like the professor I mentioned above, others have different idealogies. Whatever the reason, I think what is most important is that it works for you.

Thank you for letting me share this. cheers

"..... Scientists belief in the big bang theory. Others belief in aliens landing on this planet like ancient Egyptiology has..."

Thank you for letting me share this. cheers

~~~~~~~~

And Thank you for sharing, Smiless....always welcome.


Now......first of all, IF the Big Bang Theory WERE correct, for instance...then
where did the gases that make up the "big bang", come from?
Hmmmmm?

I mean.....It all had to all begin Somewhere...correct?
Where did that first atom come from...ot even that tiny little proton......

See...again, as I'd already shared in a previous post......

Man can NEVER understand God thru INTELLECT.
Ever.
Won't ever accomplish a thing ...except more religious arguments..

Why?
Cause God is SPIRIT!!

And that is why God says, man must Be born again in our spirit nature, in order to make sense of the true nature of God!!

Otherwise, all this talk about God just plain and simple, won't make sense.
Atall!!


(Great dicussion going on here, btw..... )

Perhaps you are right about that. I am not a expert in religion or spirits, but I do think heavy on it sometimes.

It remains a mystery for everyone rather they want to admit it or not. It is a never ending story with many ideas! Supposingly there is something smaller in existence then even the electons and protons that revolve around the atom. Perhaps the answer lies there? Who knows?

Perhaps if there is a god, spirit, or whatever one wants to call it doesn't want us to know to keep it exciting for him or her or it. lol

In the long run many cultures belief in spirits such as the North and South Indian civilizations.

I remember when I joined the Army a long time ago for a short period, I was asked what religion I worship. I honestly told him I don't know and he turned the computer screen around to let me pick one. There were literally over 1000 religions to choose from. I told him just check all of them! lol

Anyway in the long run perhaps you are right about your theory or conclusion.

cheers