As are the majority their victims. On the very same day Charlie got shot up, 37 cop trainees were blown up in Yemen, and Boko Haram killed upwards of 2.000 along the Nigerian border.
But of course it’s not like those’re real people. Don’t rate a global hashtag.
A recent article I read noted that, since (and counting) 9/11 Islamic terrorism had accounted, globally, for around 3500 Western civilian casualties total, or an average of 120 per annum. This number was compared and contrasted with number of “regular” gun murders in the US (~9.500/year), and the number of women killed by their husbands in France alone (149 last year).
Islamism is a fake issue, and it’s certainly no grounds for ostracizing hundreds of millions of people prima facie. But it’s **very **convenient a bogeyman, I’ll grant you that. Not to mention a primo excuse to give “old” dog whistles a fresh coat of polish.
[QUOTE=adaher]
More blasphemy helps. If you want a society to become less fundamentalist, one step towards doing that is for them to hear their religion ridiculed.
[/QUOTE]
So true. Like we see here on the Dope every other day, when Christian proselytes show up in GD and get a good old vitriolic and sarcastic dogpile. They quickly understand the errors of their ways and join us in our merry, secular revels !
You don’t win people over with intransigent antagonism and constant attacks. Even less so when it’s crassly and proudly ignorant intransigent antagonism.
Actually, yes, this does happen. Is scientology really more absurd than Catholicism or Hinduism? Yet we freely mock one was being ridiculous, and yet deference is expected of the latter. Because, essentially, they’ve built up the social capital over time that’s needed to give them a special status among silly beliefs.
We can mock homeopathy and ghost hunters and moon hoaxers every day because of their silly beliefs, but if you turn an equally critical eye to religion, you’re thought of as being rude and aggressive and preachy. Essentially, old religions have been around so long, and have had such a prominent place in society, and have controlled so many people, that we’re expected to treat them entirely differently, with deference and reverence, than other silly beliefs.
And many people grow up in an environment where this rule is almost absolute. They’ve rarely or never actually been exposed to people who treat those religions the same as they’d treat any other belief system. That social status of a religion has power over people.
And when you take away that power, when you treat religions the same as other silly and shitty beliefs, you can break that cycle. You can show people that there’s nothing sacred or unquestionable about that which has surrounded them their whole lives and demanded deference. It empowers people to cast off the shackles of their upbringing - I see it happen all the time.
So yes, the special social status of religion should be attacked. And yes, it has results. Religion greatly benefits from an environment where it’s considered special, powerful, sacrosanct, and beyond criticism. Taking that away hurts religions.
And already, the conspiracy theorists in Europe are at it.
Not merely “it was a false flag”. They called out a rather infamous conspiracy blogger (as in: this guy is certain that the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks were inside jobs) as “paid off by the system” because he didn’t think this was a false flag.
Oh for fuck’s sake you doucher, demanding “cite” every time someone has an argument you can’t refute is lazy and boring. What do you want me to do, find a story where someone says “I was really never exposed to an environment that treated my religion as anything other than sacrosanct, and it got me on the path towards questioning it”? Do you really think I can’t find it?
“Cite!?” is for factual claims, like “the deficit has expanded for the last 3 years”, not philosophical positions like “religions demand special status among silly beliefs, and this empowers them”. To use “cite?” in such a fashion just says “Hey, I really suck at making arguments and thinking. Have some busywork. Oh, don’t want to bother with my dumb ass? Haha I win, your statements aren’t backed up!”
Now that you’ve stopped the condescension, I can apologize for my previous vitriol directed at you. However, to be more accurate, I didn’t just link to the wiki page on the Caliphate, but rather to the religious basis for the Caliphate. This was intended as a contrast to the Biblical quote about Caesar and its (admittedly tenuous) relation to the nascent “separation of church and state” promoted under Pope Gregory VII. (This is not my original idea, of course. I was informed by Tom Holland’s excellent Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom) I replied snarkily to you about “all religions are the same” because you previously made sarcastic reference to Jared Diamond as an apologist for Western supremacy.
I don’t see this attempt as nonsensical. Of course, the genesis and evolution of all belief systems are contingent upon local conditions where they are practiced. But we’re discussing the religion itself here, not its petri dish.
There is no “real” religion practiced anywhere; it’s all down to the individual practioners. But that’s not to deny that, historically, it has certainly influenced the nature of the societies where it’s been practiced, and this historical legacy partially determines the nature of modern societies. That’s all.
Much simpler. I want 1) a GD proselyte and gleeful dogpilee 2) who didn’t storm out in a huff, but rather 3) came to the atheist/moderate point of view or changed their religious worldview one fucking iota as a result.
Because there exists a** yawning empty gulf, **much akin to the one lying between your ears,between “treat a religion as anything other than sacrosanct” and deliberately, running-gaggedly, viciously and smugly shitting all over it, and all of its practitionners, week after week. Which is what Charlie had become (in part) about over the past ten years.
I would also (again ? Or was that in one of the other threads on the subject ?) opine that there’s a difference, in context if not in content, in shitting over the supremely dominant and historically powerful local religion which still holds huge sway even over ostensibly secular civil institutions and mentalities ; and shitting on the religion of a minority of people who already get routinely shat on on a daily basis *by virtue *of being apart of the majority religion/mainstream culture. Standing against power and standing against the powerless, four little letters, slightly larger difference. Or, hell, just ask any Jew how they feel about hilaaarious “satirical” cartoons…
Besides, your premise is up its arse to begin with. Islam is not, and has never been treated anything like sacrosanct in the West, much less so ever since a brain trust attempted a physics-defying stunt landing straight into NYC’s skyline. For fuck’s sake, we (France) actually banned some of its symbols and practices - which of course was less of a way to fight against the oppression of women and more about excluding the Other. Switzerland banned the construction of minaret towers (it had a whole 4 of them, o the Saracen invasion !), Belgium and the Netherlands seemed likely to as well. And need I remind you of the “ground zero mosque” thing ?
Sacrosanct, my sweet aunt Fanny. Muslims can sit down, shut up and take it, all day, every day. And for some truly baffling reason, it doesn’t seem to help bridge the cultural or ideological divide. Confusing.
Well, here’s the article (in French, sorry :/). And I’ll admit to a mistake : those were the numbers for the year 2012, not last year.
The author doesn’t provide the specific source of his numbers, but he’s a Poli.Sci. PhD and researcher at the CNRS (apparently specializing in international relations, political analysis and the epistemology of science) so while I wouldn’t positively swear on my own nuts they’re legit, I’m inclined to doubt he’s *completely *full of shit or doesn’t know how or where to get reliable, scientific data :o.
(emphasis mine) and vice versa. Local states have and historically had a huge impact, first on the codification and interpretation of the Koran to begin with, second on the specific way Islam was and is practised once the religion spread. Islam wasn’t monolithic even when Muhammad still breathed.
The problem is the tension between your first and second sentences.
It makes sense to talk about Islam as a global phenomenon if we are talking about the historical consequences of the emergence of a monotheistic religion in the Middle East, for example. Or if we’re talking about the influence in Islamic societies of rules about zakat or interest-bearing investments or the refusal to eat pork. We get into much murkier territory when we talk about this unitary thing called Islam in relation to subjects like feminism or the treatment of apostasy. On those kinds of subjects you’re inevitably talking about some smaller subset of this global idea–products of the same theology, but not inevitable products, and ones that evolved very differently in different places.
These terrorism-related conversations tend to conflate the two references, Islam the global theological phenomenon and Islam the local cultural product of that global phenomenon. That is, people often talk about Islam as a coherent belief system shared by most Muslims (which is fair if we’re talking about *salat *or Ramadan), but also want to attribute to that common belief system things that are not widely shared among Muslims even though individual Muslims justify these political beliefs with shared theology.
It’s a sort of sleight of hand for painting all or most Muslims with the beliefs of ISIS or Boko Haram, and one that effectively sides with the terrorists on how Islam should be interpreted or what Islamic orthodoxy really has to say. We should reject it.
Okay. Homosexuality is a bronze-age perversion of sexuality and the world would be better if it didn’t exist. Not bigoted, right?
To condemn Islam is to condemn the people who believe it, just like to condemn homosexuality is to condemn those who have that sexuality.
Or let’s do the shoe on the other foot version: Atheism is a new-age perversion of truth and the world would be better off if it didn’t exist. That’s the very belief that people constantly cite to say Christians are intolerant.
And that brings up another issue that atheist often mention: there is no one form of atheism, so disparaging it all makes no sense. And while Islam is somewhat more homogenous, it’s not very much. And a lot of it is good. One of the things I had to learn to get over my Islamophobia was that Islam teaches a lot of good things. Things that even most atheists agree are good.
So, no, moving from the people to the belief doesn’t remove the bigotry. It’s a start, but it’s not the endpoint. The only non-bigoted version is “the extreme version of religions that believe _____ is a perversion of reason and the world would be better if they didn’t exist.”
But, at that point, you might as well say “Belief in _____ is a perversion of reason and the world would be better off it didn’t exist.” That’s the real issue. The religion of the people who believe that is not relevant.
What I’m getting from many of the posts to this thread is that I am somehow coddling terrorists if don’t enthusiastically agree with the most angry posters here that something urgent (what?) must be done about the Muslim Problem, or if I don’t immediately go out and get in the faces of any muslims I might know about what idiots they are for following their stupid religion. Or something.
I do apologize for not striking the appropriate tone these folks seem to require.
Against the force of laughter, nothing will stand. Fuck those who think they can have their own rules in a free and open society. They are the enemies of that society, and you support them. You support ignorance and false deference because you don’t want to hurt feelings. Fuck that shit. This is 2015.
The number of African Americans killed by cops in this time period pales into insignificance in relation to all gun deaths and all automobile accidents. Somehow many of the same people who tell the police threat is a real problem wish to minimise the terrorist threat.
To think I had an argument on here the other day with posters who denied that liberals were as much hypocritical political shysters as their hypocritical shyster conservative opponents.
Lazy and dishonest. You are lying. You know that no one said what you claim they said, and when asked to provide evidence that they did, you’re taking the cowardly liar’s way out.
Good job, BigT. Making a post again with lots of words and no meaning.
You could literally replace the subject of your post - Islam, atheism, homosexuality - with any other belief, and you’re making an attack against anyone who would criticize any belief. By your logic, if I were to criticize those who believe manipulating the four humors as a basis of medicine and said it didn’t belong in the modern world, I’d be a bigot.