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Are you guys saying that an official german TV is propaganda and not a reliable source ? Am I reading that right ?



Cleary having that flag mean I'm afghan lol

Right, my bad. I forgot how unbiased and reliable TV news stations are. Carry on. After all, it's not like Germany's ever had a bias against Jews.

How about you only reason with people, address points, provide an opinion and back it up with whatever evidence you think you have. There's never a point to throwing insults at people when discussing something.

And here you're stereotyping every westerner...

For everyone who doesn't want to search comments for translation:

The video claims the following:
-police knew early that shots were fired during a help call by one of the 3 boys (the audio tape of the call is heard in the video)
-burned car and blood were found early
-censor (explaining: works for security agency decides if security sensitive inormation can be published) told the anchor man not to reveal all details (source: the anchorman)
-despite knowledge of the boys death, the army operated in Gaza to harm Hamas and used the search for the boys as cover

The video implicates (using the opinion of the anchorman) that without the armies aggressive search for the boys and an early reported death, the situation wouldn't have heated up as it did.


It does not say who killed the boys and it doesn't portrait Hamas as innocent. It just shows a single piece of the conflict focusing on government decisions to abuse the situation & News blockade.

Are we really using that card now ?

We been talking in stereotypes for pages, so obviously all germans are nazi.

Brb while I make a pizza and talk loudly gesticulating a lot.

You have a couple misunderstandings, Kara.

First of, this science concerns Sunnah i.e the narrations concerning the prophet's life. It has nothing to do with how the authenticity of the Quran (i.e the holy book) is established.

Second, I don't know how you arrived at the conclusion that what happens in this field is editing texts according to one's subjective values. That's not what this field is about. Scholars do not edit or change the narrations, they assigns a "truth value" to it, ranging from successive to a total fabrication. Everybody knows that this is subjective, and that's why there are many scholars studying narrations and not just a couple few "authorities" that have their rankings taken for granted. No scholar is above criticism in this field. As long as your criteria for your ranking is known to everyone, then subjectivity is no longer a problem.

When a narration is "successive", this is akin to mass testimony, with good reasons to accept it, it is more reasonable to accept it than not to (this is akin to me living in 600 AD Arabia and believing that China exists based on the testimony of people, and whatever trade goods from China we have, despite me never stepping out of my house once).


Except that some morals are timeless. Morals like honesty, trustworthiness, compassion, etc, morals that people typically consider before accepting a testimony or rejecting it. These do not significantly change in relation to time nor place. That's what everyone here would picture when I tell them that X person, who lived in Y society was "upright". They'll immediately recognize that I'm talking about these values, not the way he dressed or ate his food.

Plus, there are other numerous grounds for criticizing a narration or a narrator, "moral uprightness" is just a single facet.

Yeah, but don't mind me. I just posted in here because I was bored, not because I actually care about the content of this thread. This old song and dance in the middle east probably won't end until one of the groups is wiped out, which isn't looking to happen anytime soon.

I'm using this site as a citation for my term paper.

You're from United State virgin islands, I'm not sure they have Pizza there.

Tony Soprano is my favorite Italian stereotype.

Pfft, Fat Tony is way better.

Touche. I forgot about Johnny Tight Lips also.

I prefer Jimmy Falcone, I mean, Jimmy McDougal from Fugget about it!

>this guy doesn't know that Jews are literally bigger gods in Germany than France

I know I talked about that with Zahrah on these forums once and in the end it depended on the part of Germany you're from, but things against Jews are literally the last thing you'd do in Germany.

Look at your calendar, the year shouldn't show 1944 anymore.

So if you took a civilian from mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Finland, Sweden, UK, France, Portugal, Italy, New Zealand, Algeria, Chad, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guatamala, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Panama, and Canada, a military officier from the same, the leading governement official from the same, and a criminal serving severe sentencing, and asked them what an "upright" person was to them, they would all answer the same thing?
Then increase that sample to the global population.

The likelyhood of getting a single uniform item, out of all people living in the same world at the same time, is extremely unlikely (not even given the linguistical differences).
And that is just at this point in time, let alone seperated by hundreds or thousands of years.

What you are stating is that everyone, ever, can agree on a defintion of morality; hell, we probably can't get a uniform definition among the people on this forum.

I stated that the stories humans tell change over time (usually they start getting altered immediately). I'm assuming you don't agree except you keep posting stuff that agrees with my assertion.

This is how I understand the narrations work:
1. A person gives their testimony of what they observed of the Prophet or what was told to them about the Prophet
2. This is evaluated by other people based on a ranking system.

Eyewittness testimony is the absolute worst evidence you can present. People are horrible wittnesses. Everything they see and hear is filtered through biases and imperfect senses.

Then you have an evaluation based on the persons story compared to other's stories and also compared against their moral character.

Now your ranking system. Just because you have a ranking system does not mean it is not subjective. Just because it is a defined system does not mean it is not subjective. Talk with people who have studied human interaction and communication. Edit: and people who do qualitative analysis. Look at the problems associated with qualitative interviews.

Your example using China is not the same as believing stories (hearsay) about a Prophet. You specifically mention talking with people (hearsay) and trade goods (physical examples).

Morals are not timeless. They change as society changes. Morals change depending on the culture, time period, and geographic area you live in.

If someone told me an "upright" citizen gave testimony about something in 670ad I'd need to look up the historical culture of the time.

Was slavery legal? How were children treated? What was the status of women in that society? Was honesty always telling the truth or only telling the truth on certain subjects (e.g. Acceptable to lie to the taxman but not your priest)? What were considered crimes that aren't considered crimes now? What weren't crimes during that period that are crimes now?

I'm pretty sure I define compassion, trustworthiness, and honesty differently than a person from 670 a.d in what is now called the middle east. Not because they are a liar or untrustworthy but because our societies are different and what is acceptable is different.

Make one like the Mexicans do in the fake Italian pizza joints in the US, unless you can make a NY style, then whichever, bring it here.

Pepperoni is fine.

No, because of the way you formed the question.

You should ask them: what makes a person upgright regardless of time, place, and religious belief? I do expect the majority of them to list many shared values.

It also depends on who you ask (don't go asking a serial killer whether killing innocents is ok or not). I find your response exaggerated. A little bit of hyperbole is acceptable and shouldn't be taken literally (if you were referring to me saying "everyone").

When I go to a new country and my neighbor tells me & my Chinese friend who lived 2000 years ago: "X is a good man", my friend and I will conjure up several possible reasons in our heads, and since the three of us are from very different backgrounds, we can only think of reasons that all of us would consider "good reasons". Can't we think of any? Yes, I bet we can.

How can I be certain? It's something you learn from dealing with people from different backgrounds, from reading literature from different eras and geographical locations, and seeing how people view a certain moral value. It could be that X man helps his family and everyone in need, and never hurts anyone, it could be that he helps injured animals, these are universally good value.
You can ask most people on the planet whether helping a poor person is good, or lying is bad, and you'll get the same answer.

Another scenario to think about: when I tell my Muslim neighbor that X person (who is also a Muslim) is upright, we both know which "moral criteria" are candidates that can be included in such notion and which are not, and these criteria certainly change once either X person or my neighbor change.

I said that these moral values I called "timeless" do not significantly change with time or place, so expect some variations here and there. For instance, 2 persons from 2 different cultures might agree that lying is "bad", but the one with a more orthodox (or rather, a concrete notion of what "lying" is) PoV thinks that telling your average-looking wife that she's "the most stunning woman he's ever layed his eyes upon" is bad (since lie = bad), while the other view it as a virtue (in Islam it certainly is ok, lol). We can't discuss every little variation, it's about the core value, but context always matters (and the difficulty in judging arises from the complexity of the situations).

Also, keep in mind that since this field is Islamic, and that Muslims have a moral reference agreed upon by them, the ambiguity of defining who was "upright" isn't an issue for them. The issue is not in defining "uprightness", but rather, is in the how (how do you know for certain that X person meets the criteria for being upright?).


People will never agree on a definition of morality, because they'll never agree on right and wrong concerning every issue.

But that's not the case here. No stories got altered. The stories stay the same, the problem is identifying which are true and which are false.
Using the game telephone as an example was not appropriate. If a massage on the level of that game is to be evaluated using that Islamic field, it would be dismissed immediately. You need to know every person in the chain of narration and trace them to the prophet.

I did say earlier that it is subjective. But it's also the best you can have when it concerns the biography of a person or historical events from 14 centuries ago. The existence of such a system tells you that people took great care of narrations and sought to be as objective as possible when dealing with them.

Note that very few narrations fulfill the "successive" criteria (the strongest of narrations), and even then, everybody knows that these narrations are probable, and will never reach 100% certainty. But it makes more sense to accept them than to dismiss them, especially when coupled with supporting evidence. Just because the field is subjective doesn't mean it should be readily dismissed. It's a deep field and studies are being conducted on it to this day.


Mass testimony is not as bad as you think.

If 10 of your most trusted friends told you that they met with me during different times of their lives, and narrated the exact same thing about me, or quoted something I said, perhaps with slight variations. If you made sure they indeed met with me (I wasn't dead or something), and their story is reasonable, wouldn't you believe their claims? I find it more reasonable to believe them than not to, despite never being able to achieve 100% certainty about this issue.

You expect this story to change after 15 generations, and that's possible, and that's why this system exists in the first place. Because they were afraid the very same thing would happen (as we believe happened with Jews/Christians).

I mentioned trade goods specifically to denote that indeed, there is a need for supporting evidence.

Sure, you need to know about the status of the society in question, and then decide whether you want to accept their system or not.

"Morals" are bullsh!t in general. They are ways that the powerful few control the many by having the many buy into a belief system that only benefits the top few.

Since humans are tribal by nature, there do tend to be a few generic "rules" we accept unconsciously. Firstly that it's a bad thing to kill a fellow tribe member. This rule against killing doesn't extend to humans from outside your tribe. Secondly taking possessions from fellow tribe members, including their women. Again this doesn't apply to humans from outside the tribe. Those are the two beliefs that are pretty much programmed into our DNA and serve to allow us to cooperate in tribes. Of course some are born without those natural rules or at some point in time have them removed, we call then sociopaths.

The whole purpose of religions were to allow a sociopath to control the rest of the tribe by convincing them that what the sociopath did was beyond reproach and allowed by some ephemeral greater power. Everyone else in the tribe had to follow the rules, but the sociopath was exempt and could do whatever they wanted, as long as everyone bought into the belief system.

Morals are most certainly not absolute. Other than preservation(which falls into instincts and not morals) we all share greatly differeing views on about everything.

I mean that's one of the reasons why we're here arguing everyday!

If it depends on who you ask, then it is not universal nor timeless, and it changes (based on time, place, or person).

And anticipating the next argument: It has to be "good" people. Right, so where do you get an acceptable definition of good, across all times and places?

Have you seen the discussions regarding welfare and universal healthcare on these forums?
And extremists (regardless of religion) also think they are doing "good" when they take action that harms others.
Are death threats for drawings or burning a book a good thing? Are repeated invasions for the purpose of (among other things) spreading religion a good thing?
Wait, morality is contextually sensitive now? So, morality is different based on the individual, and context (place and time)? This is entirely what you were stating did not exist, and now you say of course it does? Come on, if you are going to pick a stance, then pick a stance.
Sure, because there have never been incidents where those of Islamic faith do not agree on what is morally good or upright.

You tend to generalize whatever you think explains human nature and perfectly makes sense to you.

There are no tops or bottoms in Islam. And The prophet (who should be at the very top, the one who benefited the most) lived a poorer life for a man in his status, and didn't indulge in worldly gains event after most of Arabia submitted. See the incident of the sun eclipse I referenced earlier.

Can some scholars use religion for worldly gain? Absolutely (heck, I can name a few living suspects). But to claim that the number 1 reason for its existence is "to allow a sociopath to control the rest of the tribe" is very, very absurd.

Not always personal gain is material. Ego is a powerful thing.

..or paranoia, depends where we're going.

Even ego. Any sort of personal gain you can accuse prophet Muhammad of can be replied to directly from his biography/profile.

Pretty sure there are plenty of kinky people who believe in Islam.

I have seen Burqa porn...

I think I find food porn more disturbing. If you get aroused by onion rings you maybe should reevaluate your life choices.

I read a cracked article a few yeas ago.....ah, here it is.

http://www.cracked.com/article_17648_5-incredibly-impractical-sexual-fetishes.html

Number 5 has stuck with me as most disturbing