Monty, really, its pretty simple. Your typical Muslilm lives in the Middle East, except for those typical Muslims who live elsewhere. Nonetheless, your typical Midlle Eastern Muslim is entirely the same as your typical, say, Indonesian Muslim, except for minor differences in culture, language, geography, climate and sexual mores. Other than that, virtually identical. And cuisine. Almost forgot cuisine.
Whelp, they don’t talk like us, dress like us, they live somewhere else, they all eat funny foreign stuff and we don’t know much of anything about their history, culture, religion or art. But we do know this : they’re all Muslim, except for the ones that aren’t.
See ? Completely identical.
(In case it wasn’t abundantly clear : Sarcasm was here.)
Good points. About the only things I can think of that are common to Indonesia and the middle east are Islam and Islamic terrorism. Hey, wait a minute!
And an almost fanatical devotion to the pope.
I see. I misspoke one sentence in this discussion and suddenly I’m wrong about everything. I’ve posted quite a bit of evidence to my contention that the Quran is a worse book than the Bible. It is. No debate. Well actually, there seems to be a lot of debate. That by saying it I intend to say that Muslims are evil or that I am prejudiced against them. Muslims are like any other person on the planet (wait, I’ve said that probably a number of times in this thread) within the limits of their cultures. The same as we are.
Am I prejudiced against religion and it telling me that say I should be dead? No, I am postjudiced against it. I’ve looked at it and and found much to dislike.
As opposed to you? I’ve already proven that if you are of a different religion than Islam today, your more likely to be better off living somewhere else than under Muslim rule.
When combined with the dynamics of a collectivist culture where the group is the priority and those outside the group can be perceived as a threat, religion is a way to bind people together and allows individuals to demonstrate their devotion to the group. And if that religion gives permission to persecute outsiders, it isn’t surprising that it is done.
If you think that is prejudice, then I guess I have no more responses to you, either. It appears your letting your particular prejudices block your reason.
I think it’s pretty obvious that countries with heavy Muslim populations are located in the same part of the world. I don’t know what point you’re making regarding the exact boundary of the mid-East. That you have to try to argue this point shows you have no interest in actually debating the subject and are desperate to land any points for the sake of argument.
The reality of the situation is that 6 Christian women and children were burned to death because someone on the other side of the planet threatened to burn a book. The fuse of Islam is an extremely short one and it’s in the news on a regular basis. To you, it’s a intellectual exercise to explain away this behavior. To the people getting killed it’s a harsh reality.
It’s beyond obvious that you and some others responding to this thread are so politically correct that you cannot admit a correlation to a prophet who slaughtered hundreds of people and radical Muslims who follow his example and codified doctrine. Not only have you not honestly engaged in the debate, you are now foot stamping about a pit thread. That’s just sad.
If the basis for your contempt and hatred of Islam is the actions of their prophet in ordering massacre, where is your contempt and hatred for Jews? Moses ordered massacres of his own, and didn’t even offer the opportunity to convert. He gets a pass from Magiver? How come?
We Americans promoted and cheered for the wholesale slaughter of Sioux, Cheyenne, Huron, Iroquios, etc. etc. Of course, we didn’t have any particular religious injunction, we just went right ahead and did it. This is an improvement, then? We didn’t get a permission slip from God Almighty, so that’s better?
And what does “politically correct” have to do with anything? Are you hoping to accomplish by innuendo what you cannot accomplish with fact and reason?
And finally, you suggest we answer hated and intolerance with more hatred and intolerance. Well, hell, what could possibly go wrong? Osama bin Laden wants to convince the Islamic world that America hates Islam, wants war with Muslims everywhere. You urge us to counter this lie by pissing in their Cheerios, bitch-slapping them a few times and telling them to sit down and shut up, this is our planet, you guys just live here because we let you.
Oh, that’ll work! Fucking brilliant.
It doesn’t matter what anybody says in response to Bin Laden. He is never going to change his mind. He needs to die. His followers need to die.
Maybe you should concern yourself with how people feel about their friends and loved ones dying over something as innocuous as a cartoon or a book burning. Freedom of speech is probably the most important right we have in the United States. If you’re advocating we give that up then say it. I don’t think it will affect Bin Laden’s efforts one bit.
Drat. Another irony meter smashed.
There have been lots of bad guys in history. But there’s really no point in railing to the high heavens about Genghis Khan because because he has no attachment to todays world. If his name comes to mind we can heap scorn upon him nan that’s the extent of it. Let’s say for now that Moses did bad stuff. Can you point to any group who is following Moses in a way that focuses on the veils he did? Any Jews out there wanting to massacre their own? No, there’s not. If there were, it would be right to condemn those doing that but to also apportion blame to Moses and his acts ages ago. So, since there are no adherents trying to emulate whatever bad Moses might have done, it’s a moot point. Conversely, Muhammed 1) was a murderous mofo PLUS 2) he has a bunch of adherents that toady are murderous mofos, AND 3) the do their murdering in the name of Muhammed, pointing to his words to justify their barbarism.
If you go back 60 years, Islam in the west was viewed as an exotic religion, and that was about the extent of it. Even 25 years ago, it was pretty much the same. It was only when the murdering in the name of Muhammed became part of our experience that most non-Muslims in the U.S gave the religion or its founder any thought. So, it’s the action of the Muslims themselves (albeit a minority) that have cast a light on the religion and it’s founder. Your apparent dismay as to why Moses isn’t similarly painted is dismaying in itself. What group of Jews is performing what atrocities? And in what way do they claim it to be dictated by Moses? No, you need those three criteria mentioned above. And once you have them, the founder of the religion deserves some degree of blame.
I bothered to cite my position about the Bali bombing instead of posting fiction as fact. You have wagged nothing but opinion. Now you drop in for a one-liner pot shot related to my response to a passive aggressive threat of a pit thread. I’ve got a meter that’s pegged and it’s because a moderator of a debate thread is flinging cow patties instead of debate.
As far as I can tell, your premise is that all religions are exactly alike and therefore no criticism can be leveled for any reason. Scientology is the same as Buddhism which is the same as Christianity, which is the same as the religion of Islam. There’s a term for that kind of thinking.
Rational?
No, “wishful”.
(sigh) TomnDeb never got within a million miles of saying "that all religions are exactly alike ". And even is he/she/it ever had, he/she/it would not offer it as evidence that “no criticism can be leveled for any reason”. Both of those statements are dumber than dirt.
But “Scientology is the same as Buddhism” enters a whole 'nother dimension of dementia, not of space or of time but out of mind, there’s the signpost up ahead…
And spare me the posturing of the hard-headed realist, I’ve known such hard-headed realists all my adult life, and so far they’ve been wrong, wrong, and catastrophically wrong. While we dewey-eyed peaceniks have been spot on the honey. I know its “spot on the money”, but we prefer honey.
Oh, bullshit.
You made a claim that there was no connection between persecution and the Bali bombers and have simply sat back and denied the evidence I presented that they had, indeed, been under persecution for a few decades. I have not denied that their brand of Islam is violent; I have simply noted that you have not made the case that Islam has recently been violent all on its own with no outside factors. I have demonstrated that in every example of violent Islamists, they have been able to find support and new adherents as reactions to persecution, corruption, or social disruption. I have further noted that a number of other examples of inter-religious violence have occurred in the world in the last coule of decades and that they, too, are conected to persecution, corruption, or social disruption.
You have simply ignored my evidence while inventing claims that I have presented none.
At any rate, my quip had nothing to do with that particular line of misstatements from you. I was addressing a different issue in which you falsely accuse me of “excusing” the violence because it was perpetrated by Muslims. In our most recent exchange on the topic, you displayed the playground behavior of a third-grader and now you want to claim that some other poster is not behaving in an adult manner. That breaks my irony meter.
I have not excused, justified, or rationalized any of the violence. I have, in fact, been consistent in condemning the violence. Our differences are not over whether the violence is wrong–it is–our differences are over the issue of blaming some imaginary monolithic “Islam” for all Muslim violence, (instead of looking at the facts to note that the violence originates among separate factions), while ignoring every other factor and simultaneously ignoring the part that religion plays in other acts of violence when it does not happen to include Muslim aggressors.
I do not believe that “all religions are the same.” That is you ignoring everything I have posted on the topic. What I do believe is that most religions have various sects and factions that hold different and even contradictory beliefs under the umbrella of a single name. Some of those factions promote good and some promote evil, but blaming “Islam” or “Christianity” or “Buddhism” or “Hinduism” for the actions of individual sects is simply intellectually lazy. It is easier to demonize a single name than to expend the energy to discover the facts. I believe that we can and should identify those separate factions and address their actions rather than pretending, as your posts indicate, that any named religion is a monolithic organization in which all the adherents hold indistinguishable beliefs and that when any faction behaves badly, we need to condemn “the religion,” even when such condemnation winds up alienating those factions who would generally be on our side of the issue.
It will never happen. People are more complex than that nor would I ever say there was a single factor that causes someone to do a violent act. All I can say is that all things being equal otherwise, if your god condones violent actions then it is easier to reach that point because ‘fewer’ brakes are applied to stop you.
You have to admit that one of your ‘factors’ is the religion itself. It can’t stand alone outside how people act/react.
It depends on interpretation, not actions, given that we can’t escape interpretation. And beyond that, it’s certainly not reasonable to say that there are “fewer” brakes; it’s an unproven assumption. I have no doubt that, for you, it is an incredibly obvious idea, but hell, there are people for whom murdering others via suicide attacks is an incredibly obvious idea. People tend to disagree on what’s incredibly obvious.
You’re trying to argue as though we can just study a group’s scripture and figure out whether it will be more or less violent than another.
I am noting that we can look at the scriptures in conjunction with actual history and note that your hypothesis is bunk. Christianity has a long and inglorious tradition of violence that is clearly the equal of anything committed by Muslims. Conquest? Forced conversions? Persecutions? Massacres? Genocide? Christians have it all–often to a more advanced degree than the Muslims.
If you could point to 1900+ years of Christianity and find substantially less violence than one found in 1300+ years of Islam, (or if you could find substantially less Christian violence in any 1300 years of its history), you would have a chance of making your argument. Since that is clearly false, your argument is simply based on wishful thinking. (It is rather like many of Aristotle’s notions of physics that work out quite well when applying a bit of logic to a poorly understood phenomenon, but which are utterly trashed when put up against evidence: heavier objects do not fall more quickly than lighter objects; the air displaced by a thrown object does not rush around the object to propel it forward; etc.)
I certainly do agree that “religion” is a factor in much of the violence in the world. Where I differ is that I recognize that while Wahhabism and Aryans Nations share the titles of “Islam” and “Christianity” with Sufism and Quakers, the beliefs held by these groups are so different that simplisticly attributing actions of adherents to any of those beliefs under the heading “Islam” or “Christianity” are fatally flawed.
Yes. Your trying to argue that scriptures have no bearing on how a person acts. If that is the case then why have them at all? Obviously, someone follows them, do they not?
Yes you do and the next sentence you wrote spells it out.
And there it is, every religion is the same.
Logic associates the actions and writings of the progenitor of any religion to the actions of those who follow. You simply ignore the connection. It’s like saying Charles Manson had no influence on Sqeeky Fromme.
If they’re all different why would criticism of the religion matter. Do you see Christians or Hindus coming unwound because of Southpark Cartoons? They all have their bad side according to you. Why is Islam the only religion that can’t handle a little urine in their cheerios?
On one hand you say it is isolated factions that need to be identified but you then turn around and talk as if they are of one mind.