What Makes People Tick?

Goodreads reviewer Manny wrote a very hilarious and entertaining review (well... not quite a review...) of the Qur'an / Koran on Goodreads. I laughed and chuckled and laughed and chuckled some more. Check out this very entertaining entry about famous authors, Anonymous and the battle of the Goodreads librarians: Manny's Reviews > The Quran  

I am a firm believer in the need for all religious systems to be open to changing (their interpretations and explanations) with the times, for people to be free to choose the religion they want to follow and to choose their level of commitment to that religion. I also believe that as long as one sticks to some basic rules most of humanity shares, we should all be free to live our lives as we please. I wasn't born into a religious family, have never been formally accepted by any religion as 'theirs' and have never converted to any religion. Simply put: I do not officially belong to any religion. If one must label me by religion, it is fair to call me someone who believes what Noahides believe. That is to say that I believe in the God of the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an - The God of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Muhammad and many, many people around the world today. To find out what God wants from me, I turn to the source, to the Jewish Bible. While I most certainly ...

Yale University's Avalon Project has a copy of the Hamas Covenant 1988  in their archives. The following is a direct quote. I encourage all readers to read the entire Covenant and to form your own opinion based on your personal interpretation of the document. Article Thirteen:   Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.  Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion.  Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. "Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know." Source:  Hamas Covenant 1988 , The Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library

Browsing my Facebook feed today, I came across a friend's post asking if shops'd be open tomorrow in her area. I'm in Europe, my friend lives Down Under. I assumed there must be a local holiday I didn't know about until reading the comments - It's "Good Friday" tomorrow. Right. Took a while but : Click. When it dawned on me that I couldn't for the life of me remember what the whole Good Friday and Easter thing was about exactly, I checked Wikipedia. While I understand that Wikipedia is not an encyclopaedia or infallible or anything of the sort, the information it provided still surprised me greatly. Source :  Wikipedia "Easter (...) is a festival and holiday celebrated by Christians and non-Christians" So, according to Wikipedia I celebrate Easter? Uh... NO. I really, really don't! I was raised secular in a mainstream 'Christian' country in western Europe. Even though my family didn't care a...

The Jewish Shema Yisrael and the Qur'an's surah (chapter) 112 known as Al Ikhlas share quite a few similarities. While in today's world many Muslims seem to believe that it is their duty to kill as many Jews as possible and the two religions don't always get on as well as they could, when one looks to the texts and the teachings of these two religions, one finds a lot of similarities. Of the world's three monotheistic faiths, Judaism came first, Christianity came second and Islam came third. While Christianity believes in a three-in-one package deal, as opposed to the only-one beliefs of the other two religions, the three religions are still considered connected monotheistic religions. While Judaism has remained a religion of roughly 20 million people or less, both Christianity and Islam have become huge religions with adherents numbering in the billions, in most countries of the world. All three religions have gone through many changes and developments since thei...