There are more Christians than Muslims but fewer terrorist acts by Christians. Cipher that.
By German law, Hitler was required to declare his faith. He was, nominally, Catholic. Hence, Christian. Know any Muslims directly responsible for the death of six million people?
Currently.
A few years ago, there was a lot more violence by Christians and by non-theists than by Muslims.
Where were the Muslims leading the slaughter of WWI and WWII? Where were the Muslims leading the slaughter of the colonial period? What Muslim penned the concept of Manifest Destiny? Where is the Muslim hand in Stalin’s Great Purge or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution? How many fatwas were issued to carry out the Holocaust?
If the religion is solely or even primarily to blame, then you need to explain how people holding the various religious and non-religious beliefs swapped places in the hierarchy of violence in just a few years with no actual changes to the religions.
Social conditions, (imperialism, persecution, feelings of powerlessness, threats to culture, competing ideologies, etc.), provide actual reasons for violence as well as the ways in which that violence will be expressed. Blaming a religion, (and only one religion), while the historical record indicates that sometimes its adherents are violent and sometimes not violent, while the religion demonstrates no significant change over hundreds of years, is counterfactual.
You are reaching deep on this one.
Hitler didn’t lead a church. He didn’t attend church upon leaving home. I’m reasonably sure he’s dead but if you can link any cartoonists hiding from him by all means, cite it.
I can see your confusion though. A warrior who slaughtered Jews and took slaves from conquered territory while on a quest to dominate the world is an easy thing to mistake for a religious leader.
Yes, currently. We’re not screening for the Spanish Inquisition at airports.
Where is any religion in Stalin or Mao’s actions? Your argument is that bad people exist outside of religion therefore religion can’t be a driving force.
Seems to me I’ve repeatedly talked about the nature of the religion and not Muslims as a whole. I’ve never said the religion is solely to blame, I said it was the driving force for fanatics. You don’t see that on the same scale in other religions.
Sure you do–and it can be a lot of different ideologies, not just religion. You just want to make the cut-off 1970 or 1990 or so in order to make it an issue with “Islam” instead of looking at history and seeing that the current situation regarding Muslim fanatics is simply coincidental with the social upheavals. Islam is being used by certain fanatics as an organizing force in the way that Marxism or imperialism or Lebensraum/Manifest Destiny or other factors were used just a few years ago.
For some reason, you need for it to be “Islam” that incites the violence, which lets you ignore all the other factors. While you give lip service to not blaming “Muslims as a whole,” your insistence that it must be their religion, itself, that promotes violence makes that claim pretty hollow.
Like the religion, you are stuck in the past.
Right here: Armenian Genocide
If Islam as a religion is the primary cause for the current violence, you need to demonstrate why Dearborn, Michigan is such a peaceful town and why the Muslims were not rioting and raising hell all through the early 20th, the 19th, and the 18th centuries. (And why the violence of the 17th and 16th centuries was directly tied to the typical sort of imperial expansion that has occurred throughout the world forever without any appeals to religion.) You need to explain why such a “violent” religion peacefully converted all of what is now Malaysia and Indonesia and a significant part of the Philipines.
Your claim is that today’s violence is due to the religion, itself, yet the violence is exactly concurrent with social issues in the parts of the world where the religion is prevalent. That argues much more strongly for the social situations than it does for the religion as the cause.
I am not so much stuck in the past as I am willing to actually look at all of history up to and including the present, while you would like to pretend that there is no history, only belief. I suppose it would be fair to say that, like the religion, you are stuck in belief.
My claim, and this is the last time I’m repeating it, is that those most fanatic about Islam will follow their leader’s words and actions. I don’t know where you get the idea that Islam has been peaceful for any particular century. It’s always been quite brutal where practiced. The Ft hood shooter was an American who followed an American Imam. If you think Dearborn is some kind of paradise free of religious fanaticism it will truly be the only city in the world so blessed.
I’m stuck in the present with the reality of airport scanners and people wanting to randomly kill me.
Which, of course, is entirely untrue of any other group in the world?
Of course the most fanatic of any group will follow their most extreme leaders.
Well, that would be where I am stuck in history, where I note that there have been periods of brutality in some Muslim places just as there have been periods of brutality in some Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu places, but that Islam has not been more uniformly brutal than other beliefs. Actually knowing history allows one to distinguish between the anti-Muslim propaganda and the facts.
And where you want to promote that sort of life for years to come by making unwarranted assumptions about an entire religion, instead of focussing on the actual extremists, that will, when carried to their logical conclusion, create enemies out of potential friends.
Well, history is fine, but our ancestors had to work their way through that. We live in the present and today, in a world where any tom, dick and abdullah can get himself the bomb, I’m less inclined to trust those fanatics who take their religion seriously.
When the President of Iran starts making threats to destroy Israel, it is because he is a Muslim and the guy in Israel is a Jew. They certainly wouldn’t care if it was two Muslim groups killing each other (Unless Shia and Sunni at which point they’d take sides based upon their particular ideology) as we have ample evidence that occurs quite frequently with no one batting an eyelid.
So, what s to be done, Macgiver, Uzi? Besides serving us a shot of hate with a fear chaser, what do propose to do about it? Are we to assume that all Muslims are our sworn enemies, and respond accordingly? Are we to spurn any efforts by moderate Muslims to find common ground? Shall we bomb something, and, if so, anything in particular? What efforts should we make so that our own American Muslims shall have no doubts about our hatred and contempt. Perhaps they should sew crescents on their clothing, so that we may instantly recognize them. (Yellow would be a nice color for that.)
What is to be done?
Is it Israel, Uzi? Is that what this is about?
Discuss it. Keep talking about it and questioning those who claim that theirs is a religion of peace when it has such material in their holy book. But then the same should be asked of Christianity or any other religion.
I’m just arguing that if there was a scale with good at one end and bad at the other, the Quran falls further to the bad than most others. Actually, I don’t think you can do much of anything other than that unless we want to throw our principles out the window. Well, other than to ensure that we live secular y and keep fighting the encroachment of religion into government.
No. It was an easy example. The conflict wouldn’t be occurring if it was between rival Muslim groups. Or at least not high on the worlds radar. Dar al-Islam might not be in the Quran or Hadiths, but it is a concept that many in the ME, at least in Yemen, agree with. It also explains why the majority of Islamic states rarely side with Israel.
Our difference, here, is that I am willing to look at the actual fanatics involved and see a Wahhabist bin Laden or a Khomeini-inspired Ahmadinejad or a member of Jemaah Islamiyah. You appear to want to simply stamp “Muslim” on all their foreheads and join with the idiots accusing the Sufi imam Sauf of promoting terror and pretending that a community center by a group that has been working in the Tribeca neighborhood for over twenty years is trying to “move in” and cause harm.
If you want the billion Muslims in the world to avoid hating us and signing up to join the terrorists, it would probably be a good idea to stop treating their overall religion as the cause of the extremists’ problems so that you don’t encourage them to join the extremists.
Interesiting. So, in your understanding of holy works and their influence, are we to be more suspicious of Jews than Muslims, seeing as how there are several instances of outright massacre in the Jewish holy book? And not massacre ordered by a prominent prophet, mind you, but ordered by God Almighty in person. So to speak.
And where do the Hindu holy books fit on your spectrum of relative horror? Or the Book of Mormon? Are atheists like Stalin getting a pass, since his motivation to massacre was not religious in its nature?
Perhaps you could favor us with a continuum, a clear and crisp analysis of which religious groups are not to be trusted? My grandmother’s Methodism always struck me as rather tame, but really, who knows what outrages she might have been plotting? God alone knows what horrors the Presbyterians are up to!
About what?
Now, isn’t that just about the cutest thing you ever did see?
Without Sufi imam Sauf and the billion other Muslims there would be no fanatics to talk about. It is the moderates who allow the fanatics to exist. But we’re back to who are the fanatics and who is actually following the book in the footsteps of Muhammad.
I don’t care if they hate us because I say something one way or another. Tough shit if they can’t take a joke, like a cartoon, or accept criticism of their ‘peaceful’ religion and pedophilic butcher of a ‘prophet’. And while they have every right to apply for building permits, other people have the right to object to the permit or at the least bitch about it. I’m defending both, although I think it is utter stupidity to permit a building in New York that isn’t subject to full taxation like any other building.