The inquisition was carried out under Papal decree. If that’s not “official” it’s hard to imagine what you would interpret as such. Catholics believe that the Pope is infallible and his lineage extends back to Peter (or is it Paul?).
I was actually referring to the latter in “White supremacy teaches hate. Religions do not”; i.e., you state that religions do not teach hate without any qualifier of “some” or “most”. I then gave you two contemporary cases showing that not “all” religions do not teach hate.
The Inquisition was hundreds of years ago, and no, you are dead wrong. Catholics do NOTbelieve the Pope is infallible :rolleyes:
Would it trouble you too much to get your facts straight?
You included both. So prove the first.
No, you gave me a couple ancient ‘examples’ of exceptional situations. Go show me where today’s Catholic church preaches that the Inquisition was a good thing. I dare you.
You have shown a significant (but not universal) correlation in a thread that you started with the (to me) ridiculous claim that Western societies need to “defend” themselves against “Islam.”
Correlation is nice, but if you have not ruled out other potential influences (and demonstrated that the same issues are going to serve to attack or undermine Western values in Western societies), then you have failed to persuade me that your alarmist views are worth worrying about.
You are the one with the agenda and the message that you are proselytizing. If you cannot persuade me of the truth of your xenophobic claims, them I am one more person whom you cannot rely uponm to pick up my torch or pitchfork and follow you into the Muslim enclave to purify our society. Were I you and I felt the message was important, I would make the effort to rely on better evidence presented more persuasively.
She appear to be using the historic record of the preceding 1300 years in which few nations were “converted” to Islam by the sword. The “convert by the sword” period of Islam lasted barely over 100 years. History: it is an interesting source of valuable information. You can learn from it.
Hey everybody, we got Valteron to use modifiers! Victory!!!
Seriously, though. Yes, of course you’re quite right that Islam is generally homophobic in its philosophy and doctrines. Christianity and Judaism, of course, are just as much, if not more so.
But most of today’s Christian and Jewish societies more or less adhere to modern secular humanistic values in their civil government, so they’ve moved away from applying the legal penalties for homosexuality that their philosophy and doctrines prescribe. This is also the case in some Muslim societies such as Turkey, but not in many others, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
There seems to be nothing inherent in Jewish, Christian or Muslim religious doctrines that makes this outcome inevitable. In medieval times, for example, Muslim societies such as Turkey and Iran tended to be more tolerant of homosexuality than contemporary Christian and Jewish societies were. So if we want to understand why homophobic bigotry is such a problem in so many Muslim societies today, we have to look into the specific historical and social causes of the phenomenon, rather than just lazily falling back on the simplistic explanation “Islam is homophobic”.
Don’t you see, though, how silly it is to compare such generalizations about Nazi Germany—a phenomenon that lasted for barely twenty-five years as a political party and barely twelve years as a national government—with generalizations about Islam? Islam has been a major world religion for the last thirteen centuries and in that time has had many, many different political and social manifestations. Trying to pin such specific labels on Islam as a whole just makes your argument seem ridiculous.
If you could only manage to focus your anger and your accusations on the particular manifestations of Islamic thought that are actually causing problems for modern Western societies, your arguments would be so much more reasonable. If you claimed that modern shari`a-based governance in Saudi Arabia is “a horrid and homophobic regime”, or that modern theocratic-extremist Sunni Wahhabism is oppressive and misogynistic, you’d be hearing nothing but agreement.
But apparently, that kind of rationality and factuality in debate would take away all your fun. You don’t really seem to care about any of these issues except insofar as you can use them as an excuse to make sweeping negative generalizations about Islam in essence and in toto.
Now, I will have to preface my remarks by admitting right off that I do not have hard evidence of honour killings of gay men in non-Arab Muslim countries. Then again, as I pointed out, it is hardly the sort of thing you can ring up the Afgahni or Pakistani Embassy about, now is it?
However, I would point out to you that honour killings of young WOMEN (in some cases mere girls) is NOT confined to Muslim Societies that are Arabic. In other words, murder of fazmily members for sexual misbehaviour occurs in non-Arab Muslim countries. I find it hard to believe that that “misbehaviour” is NEVER homosexual.
BOTH Pakistan and Afghanistan are non-Arab Muslim countries. Read about the honour killings by a Pakistani man who slit the throats of three little girls here .
Read about the distressing increase in honour killings of women in Afghanistan, here .
Now once again I will admit that I do not have a hard example of a gay person being honour-killed in Pakistan or Afghanistan (as opposed to being executed, publicly whipped or otherwise mistreated by the state rather than their families).
But considering the level of puritanically-based murder against women in those countriesd, is it such a stretch to think that Pakistani and Afghan fathers have murdered gay sons?
One theory as to why honour killings of gays appear to be more prevalent in Arab countries is that Israel provides a refuge gay men can flee to, and later report these horrors in the west. See my cites in other messages about this. I doubt if Pakistani gays have the same latitude to escape their Hell.
Finally, Tom, your comment that “Now, you have asserted that the “honor” killing of homosexuals is an Islamic phenomenon and I have asked to see evidence that it is prevalent in all Muslim societies.” is ridiculous. Since when does something have to occur in every single Muslim country to be a feature of Islam? Nobody would deny that head scarves and veils for women are features of Islam, even if very few Muslim women in Turkey or Bosnia wear them.
Nor is it confined to Muslim societies themselves, in fact. The concept that a woman’s sexual “misconduct” justifies or mitigates her murder by a male family member is one that is still applied in many non-Muslim societies, e.g., in Latin America. It’s even sometimes still seen in the US, in reduced charges or reduced sentences for men who kill their wives (or their wives’ lovers) upon finding out about their adultery.
Once again, you’re trying to lay the blame specifically upon Islam as a whole for a phenomenon that doesn’t occur solely in the Islamic world, and also occurs outside the Islamic world. This doesn’t accomplish anything except to make your arguments look like mere anti-Islamic bigotry.
A pity, because if you were willing to relinquish your absolutist anti-Islam rhetoric in favor of more factual and specific statements, we might actually be able to have a good discussion about how to defend modern liberal values against these potential threats. (As some of the rest of us were in fact managing to do, before you did us the honor of returning to this thread.)
And I repeat that something does not have to occur 1) Exclusively in Islam and 2)In every single Islamic Society on the face of the Earth; in order for me to justifiably call it Islamic.
I am sure that there is some case of a European, American or Chinese chopping the hands off a thief somewhere in the last 100 or 200 years, for example. So bloody what? I am talking about Islam generally and broadly speaking. And what you find is sexism, homophobia and theocratically sanctioned violence and cruelty throughout its woof and warp. The fact that some Muslims are nice, kind, quiet people changes nothing in what I have said about Islam.
What are you on about, your cite says exactly the opposite.
I included both out of politeness so that your claim would be in context. But in any case, you claimed that “all” (by omitting any qualifier) White Supremacists teach hate so the burden is on you. I expect a complete list of White Supremacists and their teachings by morning.
You dare me, ooh, should I be scared? What will you do, start typing with both hands for a change?
The trouble is that you’re not talking truthfully “about Islam generally and broadly speaking”.
For example, you keep trying to paint honor killing as somehow intrinsic to Islam, ignoring, for example, the inconvenient fact that honor killings are very rare in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world containing almost one-fifth of ALL the world’s Muslims.
Don’t you see how feeble that makes your argument appear? If honor killing is somehow emblematic of Islam or intrinsically rooted in Islam “generally and broadly speaking”, how come it’s such an insignificant phenomenon among almost one-fifth of the world’s Muslims in this one country alone?
The only way you can justify that statement, even “generally and broadly speaking”, is by completely ignoring the many Islamic societies, both contemporary and historical, in which that statement is utter bullshit. This massive failure of logic on your part is why nobody here is taking your arguments seriously.
Won’t you reconsider your reconsideration of your earlier statement back in post#57 that “this thread is over for me”? On the whole, the debate was getting along so much more productively and intelligently in your absence than it has been since your return.
Well, clearly you have trouble with reading, comprehension, or both so it’s pointless to go on discussing this with you.
Right. Sure you did.
Yeah. About that comprehension thing. I did not claim ‘all’ anything. And I’m not playing this game of following you as you squeak out of something when you’ve been proven wrong and setting up another straw man.
You claimed religions teach hate; tomndebb and I both pointed out the poverty of your ‘evidence’. Having been proven wrong, now you’re headed off on another tack. I’ll not be following you. Have a nice time.
What really busts my chops the most about these anti-Islam generalizations is that they’re exactly the same sort of thing you hear from the extremist-theocratic Islamists themselves.
Extremist-theocratic Islamist: “Homosexuality is not tolerated within our religion. The punishment for homosexual activity is death.”
Moderate Muslim: “Islamic doctrine is generally opposed to homosexuality, but there are differing views in Muslim jurisprudence about it and what the legal response to it should be.”
Non-Muslim anti-Islam bigot: “Homosexuality is not tolerated within Islam. The punishment for homosexuality is death.”
Extremist-theocratic Islamist: “Our religion requires that a woman who misbehaves sexually must die. The honor of her male family members depends on punishing her for her crime.”
Moderate Muslim: “Most interpretations of Islamic law forbid so-called honor killings, and the majority of the world’s Muslims don’t consider them legitimate.”
Non-Muslim anti-Islam bigot: “Islam requires that a woman who misbehaves sexually must die. The honor of her male family members depends on punishing her for her crime.”
Extremist-theocratic Islamist: “Our religion must be propagated so that it dominates the world, by forced conversion if necessary, and the unbelievers must be wiped out.”
Moderate Muslim: “I believe that Islam is the one true religion and I welcome converts to it, but conversion to Islam by force or fear is unacceptable to God.”
Non-Muslim anti-Islam bigot: “Islam demands to be propagated so that it dominates the world, by forced conversion if necessary, and demands that the unbelievers must be wiped out.”
And so on and so on ad infinitum. Honestly, you anti-Islam types couldn’t be parrotting the militant-extremist-Islamist spiel more faithfully if you were actually on their payroll!
If you hate oppressive theocratic Islamist extremism so much (and I can’t say I blame you for that), then why on earth are you supporting it by agreeing with its rigidly, oppressively fundamentalist definition of the “true nature” of Islam, and denying any meaningful existence to the plethora of more moderate Muslim viewpoints?
In fact, it is not confined to Muslim societies, at all. Far too many Christian and Hindu societies tolerate and even promote honor killing of women. So rather than a religious phenomenon, it very much appears to be a cultural phenomenon. (And we’re back to clitorectomies and women’s garb).
You want to condemn Islam and raise up the Forces fo Good to defeat Islam and you keep failing to demonstrate that it is Islam that is actually the bogeyman you need it to be.
Now are you trying to make some silly distinction that the Pope is not infallible in everything he says or does, just when he explicitly wants to issue an infallible statement? If so, that is technically true but only someone who wants to be annoyingly argumentatitive would mince words like that.
Neither you or I said “all” but for some reason you seem to think that when I don’t say all I mean it anyway, and when you don’t say all it means “some”. You clearly say that religions don’t teach hate, but you have not refuted the two examples I found within seconds on the web. Do I think “all” religions teach hate? No I do not, and if I did I would have said so.
I can’t believe you are trying to draw a distinction between my saying “The pope is infallible” and your cite saying “The pope can use his powers of infallibility”. So should we say “Superman can use his super powers” but not say “Superman has super powers”?
Next thread can be on how many angels fit on the head of a pin?
I did not highlight Great Britain, Sweden, Israel, or Uganda on the grounds that it might be Muslim immigrants who have been responsible, although that is not stated as such.
Similar killings have occurred in Orthodox Serbia, Catholic Croatia and Sicily, among the Rom, and among other groups not associated with Islam.
I am not about to attempt to explain what you initially intended or what Quiddity intended as a response. In the interests of the Straight Dope® I will make the following points and you may then resume your quarrel:
The first ever “infallible” declaration was by Pope Pius IX, that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven.
As a reaction against his declaration (made without a declaration by a Council), the subject became one of the biggest arguments of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), resulting, ultimately, in a declaration that in a limited number of cases dealing with Faith and Morals the pope has the authority, when he identifies his statement as originating ex cathedra (i.e., from “the seat” of the papacy), to declare a statement true and have it be held as free from error.
The origianl declaration that had prompted the dispute was quickly reaffirmed as an infallible declaration. Eighty years later, Pope Pius XII proclaimed that Mary had been conceived without Original Sin.
Those are the only two occasions on which the declaration of infallibility has been employed.
When Pope John XXIII was asked about papal infallibility, his response was “Well, I am not infallible.” When Pope John Paul II declared that the topic of the ordination of women was closed, then Cardinal Ratzinger hastened to publish a paper strongly implying the infallibility of the statement, to which Pope John Paul II had his secretary issue a statement that it was not the position of the pope that he had spoken ex cathedra.
You may now rejoin your dispute, already in progress (although I have not quite figured out the exact positions being held).
He’s not infallible. To put in as simple terms as possible, his religious ‘policy’ that is binding on all Catholics is only ‘infallible’ when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, which he almost never does.
