Have you ever actually* met *a Muslim? If not, you must live in an economically, culturally & genetically stagnant backwater.
Or your mother’s basement.
That’s always a great question to ask these nobs. But, of course, the usual response is along the lines of they don’t need to meet one to know. And when you mention that you’ve met Muslims who do not fit the nobs’ stereotypes of Muslims, then the usual response is the ones you know are not real Muslims. Nice trick, huh?
Who’s saying the latter isn’t the former?
Yes. I live next-door to a family of muslims, there are two mosques within walking distance of my house, and I work in the Whitechapel area of central London which has a very high muslim population. What about you?
I’ve also read the Koran and the hadith, which I very much doubt you’ve ever done.
I’m also talking about Islam as a belief system, not muslims as people, which is a distinction I very much doubt you’re capable of making.
Now piss off.
tug…tug…tug…
I’ve lived around and worked with muslims for decades. The large oilfield services company I work for employs many thousands of muslims all over the world, including the USA. None of them has ever tried to kill me, or even suggested that I would be smart to convert. Just dumb luck, I guess.
I’ve gone to grade school, middle school, high school, and university with Muslims. I’ve served in the military for 20 years with Muslims. I’ve worked with Muslims in my second career. I’ve had Muslim neighbors and interacted often with those neighbors. I’m currently working with some Muslims. And not a one has attempted to kill me, not a one has told me that I’m an infidel, not a one has told me that I’m going to hell for my religious beliefs. Come to think of it, it’s the “wonderful Christians” who have done the last.
Tithonus: You’ve read the Hadith? You must have a lot of free time, then. That’s quite the accomplishment. Or do you mean that you’ve read something quoted from one of the Hadith? And if you’re such an expert in Hadith, why are you obviously unaware that not all branches of Islam hold to the same Hadith?
Actually, I find the best question remains “OK, let’s say you’re right and Islam is uniquely, especially, super very bad. What do we do about it ?”.
Naturally, in their bigoted little shit-factory of a mind it’s always a variation of “send the darkies back where they come from” (so, Liverpool, Birmingham, Marseilles, Flint etc…:rolleyes:), or even a more final solution ; but few actually have the dubious guts to just out and out say shit like that in public. In the daylight. Away from their like-minded little puke friends, in the quiet comfort of a Stormfront hatefuck of a thread or the halls of UKIP’s HQ.
<Carlin>So that seems to hold them for about half an hour.</Carlin>
It’s hijacking when they aren’t the beliefs that were being pitted, and were instead injected by the pittee for the precise purpose to which you’ve put them–namely, distracting from his openly racist views by defending his over-the-top criticisms of Islam.
No, you haven’t.
Ooh, you’re English! Should I be impressed? You missed the Empire & you’re left with a city filled with descendants of former subjects–who decided to move to what they were taught was The Best City In The World. What have they done to you, personally?
Here in Houston, we’re dealing with the aftermath of neo-Colonialism. But we’re doing pretty well. Many co-workers are Muslim–including my immediate supervisor who’s a fine woman & a previous supervisor who was a Persian Princess. It takes all kinds. Then there’s the Pakistani family who run stores in my neighborhood–on the edge of a fossilized “dry” area; they’re making money by offering better than average wine selections & craft beers in their spotless convenience stores–and opened a nice little liquor store.
Even in my religious days, I was RC–so I learned not to take those ancient religious texts literally. (Most people don’t.) No, I haven’t read all the Muslim texts–nor every bit of the Bible or the Gita or all the words of the Buddha.
In my own state & city, Christians trying to keep their narrow-minded interpretations of their beliefs in our laws–or trying to *put *them there–are doing real damage. They know things are changing–fear & anger drive them. I’m concerned about these ignorant Bible Thumpers–but know that they do not represent all Christians.
Really? I live in London and have many neighbours, co-workers and indeed friends who are Muslims. I also work about a mile or so from you. And you can piss off yourself.
Some Muslims are reactionary assholes. Some Muslims are violent extremists. Some are just plain crazy. But a vast majority are normal decent people just trying to get on with their lives, hopefully without having to put up with your bullshit.
I don’t really know any Muslims, so I’m just guessing here. I’ve heard that the Koran and Hadith are written in something called “Arabic”. As shocking as this may seem to the closed-minded, Arabic isn’t anything like English. It’s what certain “experts” call different languages. One can say the Koran says whatever they want it to say, just a matter of how one translates the text to English.
“Death to America” … well, Muhammad was a prophet after all.
I think religion-as-government is a very bad idea, regardless of the religion. England is a good example, George III fucked the English and the English though it was fun. They had to, it’s their religion. Looks to me much like what Komeni Azerbajani is doing to Iran (with a long I) right now. He could use any religion and still get by with his bullshit.
I don’t know, folks, there’s Muslims in the USA that own guns, they seem to be quite mature and peaceful with them. Doesn’t seem to be anything inherit to being Muslim and prone to extreme violence, pretty much only whitie has the habit of mass shootings.
Ah, no. Lots of mass death in pretty much every culture and on every continent at some point in recent history.
I’ve also gone to high school and university with Muslims. I’ve worked with Muslims in nearly every career I’ve ever had. The UK has a much higher percentage of Muslims per capita than the US. None of those Muslims have ever threatened me either. So what? I’m talking about Islam as a belief system. I’m talking about bad ideas and their consequences. Specifically, I’m talking about bad ideas like these:
*2:6 As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not.
2:7 - Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
3:118 - O ye who believe! Take not for intimates others than your own folk, who would spare no pains to ruin you; they love to hamper you. Hatred is revealed by (the utterance of) their mouths, but that which their breasts hide is greater. We have made plain for you the revelations if ye will understand.
Whoever changes his religion, kill him. - Al Bukhari*
Do you want, like, five hundred more where they came from? 'Cause I’ve got 'em.
Islam, as it turns out, has a lot of these bad ideas. The fewer people who hold them, the better, especially for them.
Much of my reading has focussed on Al-Bukhari. It took a while, but it’s not so tough if you break it down. Little and often, that’s the trick. I’ve been reading it for a while. Ever since around early July 2005, as a matter of fact.
Of course I’m aware of that, you condescending arse. But the main branches of Islam all adhere to hadith which contain deeply illiberal ideas, so your attempted “gotcha” proves nothing.
It’s a simple two step prescription:
-
Acknowledge the link between bad beliefs and bad behaviour, and acknowledge that the more bad beliefs a person honestly holds, the worse we can expect him to act. We have no problem doing this with Christianity and ultra-zionism, so this step should be easy. Unfortunately, we have to contend with dickheads like you who insist on equating every criticism of the bad ideas in Islamic doctrine with foaming hatred of every single Muslim on the face of the Earth, past, present, and future, so this step is actually proving to be quite the hurdle.
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Once the link between bad beliefs and bad behaviour has been acknowledged, use the power of conversation to debunk, delegitimise, and ridicule those beliefs.
There’s not really much more we can do. Still, it worked for Christianity. It could easily work for Islam.
Yeah. Always. Except when it isn’t. Fuckwit.
Okay, so if we’re obligated to stick exclusively to the OP, then Construct was the first person to hijack the thread, followed by Emiliana and Septimus, and then Rigamarole and Monty, then me. Then you, frankly, since you’re the one intent on hijacking this thread even further and making it into a discussion about the discussion. At least the other hijacks have been interesting.
Why you’re singling me out, I don’t know.
But whatever. If you want to pin 100% of the blame for this alleged hijacking on me go right ahead. I couldn’t care less.
Okay, fine. You win at fucking Muslim Top Trumps. Who cares? It’s irrelevant!
Why is this so hard to get through your heads? You can criticise Islam as a bad religion without condemning all Muslims as bad people. Saying otherwise is a bit like saying you can’t hate cancer without hating cancer patients.
Actually, yes, I have.
Your turn.
Except people can’t just choose to not have cancer any more.
So when you say that not only is Islam a nefarious meme like all religions are (which I’d be perfectly fine with) but that it’s uniquely bad and evil, and uniquely intransigent, and opine along with the OP and **Rigamarole **whom you implicitly post to support that it’s “insidious” and “an existential threat to the West” and hasn’t contributed anything to humanity as a belief or cultural system (go and visit the Alhambra, you nekulturnyi bastards ! Then count to fucking ten WITHOUT USING A ZERO !), and also its holy book is so much worse than every other religion - which is bullshit, BTW, judging by the Bible alone - then you’re implicitly saying that Muslims, as a group, deliberately opt to live according to Super Evil or, worse, are in mindless thrall of Super Evil but they’re too dumb OR evil themselves to get out.
So no, there’s no distinction to be found there, asshat. You can’t separate demonizing the belief and demonizing the people who hold the belief, because belief is ultimately a rational choice.
And your points about the Koran is even *more *invalid in that the majority of Muslims haven’t and can’t read the Koran in the first place ; as well the majority of Muslims in the West (and certainly those who embrace extremism, paradoxically) aren’t even all that practising to begin with. Which is the whole fucking point. There is a nuance, but it is between Islam the religion, and Islam the meta-identity. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with hadiths, or shariah, or the specific wording of Surah 14, or Muhammad and Aïsha, or whatever the fuck.
And in that way Islam is extremely dissimilar with, say, Christianity, whose more activist adherents want, for example, to have the Ten Commandments hammered in stone inside US courtrooms yet when pressed cannot fucking list them. And that’s Christian Identity in the most literal terms - identifying as part of a group, dubbed “Christian”, which has a number of implicit values and demands on society, and uncritically perpetuating those values and demands, not out of religious devotion, or faith, or genuine belief in bargaining with the Big Beard in the Sky, but to be recognized and accepted as a full-benefits member of the group.
So, totally entirely unlike Islam, then.
YOU brought the comparison with Christianity to the table when you stated that Islam was somehow worse than other religions, BTW, you disingenuous chucklefuck.
Fuck, but I’m getting angry just having to state these basic, herpty derp facts to anybody ; much less one new self-righteous, acceptable-bigotry-of-the-day cunt a week.
Don’t blame me - I didn’t pull out the pack.
Because Islam is as diverse a religion as Christianity, ranging from the insane Wahhabists to the liberal Ismaili and all other types in between. To look only at the texts and not the myriad ways in which they are interpreted, discussed and lived is to ignore what a religion is.
Christians often say that the church is its people, not the building; the same is true of any grouping. Is Islam the Muslims of ISIS? Or is it the Muslims of Dearborn, Michigan, or those of Jakarta, or of Tehran or Istanbul? Is Christianity solely represented by the Pope or Fred Phelps or Benny Hinn or the Lord’s Resistance Army? Some texts says to fight unbelievers, others say to teach them; this is true of both Islam and Christianity, and both place great emphasis on helping the poor (a group which, to drag this temporarily back onto topic, Construct openly wishes to punish for their poverty).
Rather than to condemn 1.5 billion people in one fell swoop, it would be better to address the words and actions of individuals and small groups that clearly adhere to them. Know them by their actual works, not by some enormous strawman built by those with a less-than-honest agenda.
Because you chided someone else for hijacking and told them to take it to another thread. I was pointing out your hypocrisy. You must have the short-term memory of a fruit fly.
So, let me get this straight. You agree that Islam is a bad religion (insofar as it contains a lot of bad ideas), but only on the proviso that we put every other religion in the same basket? Do you honestly believe that every religion is as bad as every other? That’s ridiculous. If we accept that bad beliefs lead to bad behaviour, and that beliefs which lead people to commit violence against innocents are the worst kind of beliefs, then it’s impossible to say all religions are equally bad. There are some religions which simply don’t allow for the kind of bad behaviour we see regularly from Islamic extremists.
Take Jainism, for instance. The supreme principle of Jainism is non violence (ahimsa). As Sam Harris has pointed out, the more extreme you get as a Jain, the less likely you are to be violent. Ergo, Jainism, at least, is simply better than Islam.
So no. All religions are not the same. The differences between faiths are both relevant and unmistakeable.
The Koran is a uniquely bad book in certain ways, yes. For example, it’s intended to be taken absolutely literally. From Jibril’s lips to Mohammed’s ears, so to speak. That makes life difficult for moderates because it’s kinda hard to argue with God, unlike the Bible, the most unsavoury passages of which can be hand waved away as irrelevant or as the misinterpretations of flawed men.
The Koran also contains uniquely bad ideas. The concept of ‘outer’ Jihad as religious war is, to the best of my knowledge, unique to Islam. The idea that believers who martyr themselves in such wars get put on the fast track to paradise is another. If there is another religion which contains those specific ideas I’ve not heard about it. People who believe those ideas are apt to behave badly.
For the sake of balance, it should be noted that other religions have their own uniquely bad ideas. Religious opposition to embryonic stem cell research, for instance, is almost exclusively Christian. Nevertheless, in this age of plane hijackings and dirty bombs, belief in such bad ideas as martyrdom and jihad pose unique problems for everyone.
Woah! Hold the fuck up. I speak for myself, not anybody else. Rigamarole said Islam hasn’t contributed anything to humanity. Go lay that shit at his door.
People tend to uncritically accept the ideas of the cultures in which they’re raised. The more weight given to bad ideas inside a culture, the more likely it is that they’ll be uncritically absorbed and perpetuated by the people who live in that culture. That’s just as true for Muslims as it is for anyone else. It’s worth pointing out that by far and away the biggest victims of the bad ideas in Islam are muslims themselves. I don’t think they’re dumb or evil. I think that a significant number of them (some, not all) were raised with bad ideas and are acting accordingly. The solution to this is to aggressively debunk the bad ideas.
For what it’s worth, I sincerely believe everything I post. If I was just trolling, I would post more threads (which are much more noticeable than posts), post more shorter and unsourced posts, and not make apolitical posts.
Older racists may have inherited their beliefs, but this is no longer true for younger traditionalists. Many young people today reach their far right beliefs via forums on websites like reddit and 4chan where they are regularly exposed to the most extreme and poorly supported leftist arguments. As such, many young reactionaries can plausibly pass as unintelligent Social Justice Warriors if they so desire.