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“Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world!

By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.

The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.”
― William Lane Craig

“Humans are in delusion by default, and those who conquer their delusion can understand good and evil. Morality is an arbitrary abstract, it is not good or evil and those who provoke morality a righteous act, are still at the sideways of delusion and conquer.”
― M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS

“In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.

In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly).”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“The thing about people telling you you're beautiful your whole life, is the more that you hear it, the more meaningless it becomes. What does beautiful even mean, anyway? That your features are arranged in a shape someone, somewhere arbitrarily decided is pleasing? Beautiful never quite matches up to the other things you could be, smart, interesting, brave.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“Perhaps one is to first learn the signifiers denoting esteem and conveying authority and from there build the foundation of knowledge based upon this arbitrary system of reputational faith.

This logic seems agreeable to me—one must start somewhere, after all!—but, at the same time, I would first have to convince myself that there is something, anything at all, worth knowing.

Right now, even this seems a rather challenging proposition.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“The universe is arbitrary. Just look at Jeff Goldblum.”
― Evan Mandery, Q

“Destiny is not arbitrary or inimical; it is orderly and reactional. It gives us reactions to our own past actions.”
― Chaitanya Charan Das, Wisdom from The Ramayana: On Life and Relationships

“The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue its own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statues themselves stoked confusion. The New York law described criminal literature with what Ernst called the "six deadly adjectives": obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting—lawmakers kept adding words when they updated the law. Multiplying the number of adjectives was a way of papering over the elusiveness of any given designation. What was the difference between obscene and lascivious? If a judge seemed reluctant to find something lewd, a prosecutor could argue that it was disgusting—and every one of those adjectives was subjective.”
― Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses