Neeek wrote:You ought to keep in mind that you are literally trying to convince people that they are simply defining words wrong. That isn't anything like slavery and whatnot. All that takes is education. Or using a different word to describe the idea, which is the route I'd go.
See, you're trying to be all logical and semi-rational here. That really doesn't apply.
What I'm asking people to do is exactly the same in both cases: change a belief.
Slavery has been around for thousands of years, and in a span of less than two hundred years, we've gone from believing that slavery is perfectly acceptable to believing that slavery is not.
Now, we have an entire country full of people who believe that little brown people are out to kill us all, and those little brown people are calling it "jihad." And I want us to believe that's not the case.
The problem comes in when the people who hold the belief that I want to change realize they're wrong. I may not be telling them outright "You're wrong," but asking them to switch from one side to the other is essentially asking them to admit they made a mistake. People are rarely rational and logical about that.
Frank wrote:By casting completely normal structural words in Arabic as if they were some sort of world-wide plot to destroy civilization they are deliberately undermining open dialogue between the West and the Middle East. They are deliberately spreading hate and fear in Western countries in order to spread war and boost ratings.
Agreed.
Catharz wrote:I didn't realize that "jihad" could mean something so mundane.
The word "jihad" shows up in the Qur'an somewhere around five times. And in NONE of those instances does it mean violence. It means striving, persevering, and never giving up.
Actually, I started going to church again (Yes, I'm Mormon, mock me later, please), and when I read this thread, I realized that Mormons totally jihad all the time. There are five basic principles to salvation: faith, repentence, baptism, gift of the holy ghost, and
enduring to the end (they even make cute little bracelets a la WWJD that say ETTE on them). You could sub in the proper verb form of the phrase "endure to the end" in for the word "jihad" in the Qur'an, and it would make perfect sense - their meanings are interchangeable.
And really, when I stop and compare Mormonism and Islam, they teach a lot of the same ideas. It's totally OK that I bring science experiments for my sunday school kids to do on Sunday, because God made the world, so we should obviously study it and learn as much as we can so we can see how truly awesome life is. It was that same idea that spurred the golden age of the Islamic Empire. So, yeah... Studying science to show off God's profile is actually something I get.