Comment by growlist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by growlist | Hacker News Reader

The other day the Guardian was inviting us to feel terrible about historic Uighur mosques being bulldozed: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/bulldo...

...so I went and did a little research. It turns out that one of these mosques is a shrine to a certain Imam Asim, a charming fellow that played an important part in the purposeful destruction in the 10/11th centuries of the Buddhist Khotan kingdom that once occupied the area, during which destruction apparently 'there were years of battles where "blood flows like the Oxus", "heads litter the battlefield like stones" until the "infidels" were defeated'. Unsurprisingly this violence also included the razing of countless Buddhist temples in the area.

Thus the Guardian, apparently with a straight face, asks us to mourn the destruction of a shrine to a warlord when said warlord was part of a deliberate and concerted programme of ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction including destruction of the temples of an earlier culture. At this point my irony meter is off the scale.

So then we should bulldoze all Christian churches, too?

Numbers 31 "The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”

3 So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them...7 They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man...9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11 They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12 and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar...14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

So you take the Bible to be a literal historical account?

That's irrelevant. What matters is this assumption that every detail of a person's religious tradition directly and literally translates into an indicator of their ideals and behavior. In reality the number of people who take their texts that literally is small, both in Islam and Christianity. And those are the circles that terrorists come from. And their evil has nothing to do with the name of their religion.

That's a goalpost shift from the original post commenting about how these specific mosques were shrines to a warlord who committed actual atrocities. This wasn't an "assumption", these were actual events orchestrated by a real person.

Many Christians take the bible to be a literal historical account. Which details of that we can or can't prove are irrelevant.

If you want something more concrete, the Catholic church committed atrocities during the crusades (which were conveniently also around the 10th and 11th centuries), and there are still statues and altars of historical saints and popes.

The Chinese government is destroying Christian churches too.

"Over the past year, local governments have shut hundreds of unofficial congregations or “house churches” that operate outside the government-approved church network, including Early Rain. A statement signed by 500 house church leaders in November says authorities have removed crosses from buildings, forced churches to hang the Chinese flag and sing patriotic songs, and barred minors from attending."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...

Exactly my point. Good and evil, in the real world, have no correlation with religious symbols. Both the oppressed and the oppressors are both Muslims and Christians.

Why are you acting like that's a good thing?

You see no irony in us being asked to mourn the destruction of a religious shrine for a person that himself participated in the deliberate destruction of multiple shrines purely on the basis of differing religion. Okay then!

I'm saying the people who went to that shrine weren't necessarily endorsing one thing that happened a thousand years ago. Lots of people revere Moses without endorsing slaughter and rape. The shrine served a spiritual function for a group of people; that gives it meaning. Unless you can provide evidence that those who visited it spent their time advocating violence, its meaning in their lives, and therefore its value, isn't diminished.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and certainly not religious flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Compare and contrast with the Guardian's coverage of Confederate statues, which memorialize atrocities as well.

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