Well, American homophobic assholes, who trend Christian, tend to prefer to attack and kill gay people one at a time. And that of course is only a small sample of such incidents.
Yes, exactly! Treating religious ideologies as though they are separate and above other belief systems, and cannot be judged in the same way, is a major hindrance to enlightenment and progress.
Well, not exactly. But the ultra-orthodox who are rising in power there are prettybad:
Awesome about Frank. I’ve always liked him, and he just keeps impressing me more and more.
Manchin, OTOH…is not my kind of Democrat.
False equivalency. Gay-hating Christians are on the run. They are not in the current U.S. mainstream. Whereas, to quote Harris’s podcast again:
There is no equivalence between the state imprisoning and executing gays, as Muslim countries do, to a crazy demographic and political minority that is the Haredim. Yeah the marriage system is messed up there, but gays openly serve in government, military, culture, etc. Gay marriages performed abroad are recognized in Israel. There’s a reason Bill Maher and Sam Harris stand with Israel.
Spare me the parroting of the extreme right agitprop. Said, an anglophone voice among many may be reverred among the anglophone American Left, but he was an English professor and I have no care for what he wrote about… your obession with using him as some king of huge straw man to hang the obsessions on we are aware of.
citation to the exact assertion as we can not trust your lens of reading to be in any way accurate.
In any case that is pure rubbish and unfounded. A marginal figure who gets the most attention from a certain kind of bigoted discourse that tries to assert a conflation of the Nazis with the Muslims.
Do not pretend to tell me, my dear monolingual american who is “revered” among the arabophones and the Muslims - and enough of wide smearing.
Said had a certain following among the Palestinians and among the american academics, he was not a God nor the unique voice - however he is the voice that the American reactionaries have seized on.
Nor can you find serious people who will talk of an arab / muslim consensus - although hate mongering propapandist writers will assert. This is a ridiculous and disgusting strawman smearing.
[/QUOTE]
What about the Iraqi coup, anti british colonial coup it was? Or is this part of the fantasy history you imagine where the USA is riding to rescue the Japanese from the very Soviets they pushed to invade…
This is all irrelevant to the subject and merely a smokescreen of GishGallop smearing
I think it should be ‘taken back’ as it were. I find nothing objectionable as being defined as a warrior for social justice. Wear it as a badge of pride.
Btw, I’m not entirely sure an appeal to authority to Sam Harris is necessarily all that helpful. Personally I consider him an ignorant blowhard, and I know I’m not the only one. I mean he’s not necessarily horrible as Bill Maher, but he’s close. (FWIW, I grew up a Muslim and find the fundamentalists have indeed twisted the faith of my parents)
It’s probably be better if you told us what you personally find objectionable Obama’s and Clinton’s words (which is a good example of an appeal to authority mostly because we know that you support Clinton), rather than quote someone who is notorious for hating religion in general.
I’m not quoting him as an appeal to authority. I’m quoting him (after having painstakingly transcribed what he said) because I consider his take to be a far more perfect articulation of how I feel than anything I could write. So it’s a choice between (among?) essentially plagiarizing him, quoting him and crediting the source, or presenting an inferior version of my argument.
It’s funny that you mention Maher, because he is another favorite of mine. I think the stark difference in how high those two land in our respective esteems would probably be seen as “feature, not bug” by each of us.
I don’t think either of them understands even the slightest thing about religion. Considering that Hillary Clinton is a quite passionate religious believer (not to mention Barack Obama is very serious about his faith), I think you can’t really understand where they are coming from if you don’t ‘get’ religion (that is not to say an atheist can’t understand religion or how religious people view religion - plenty do).
You know, my immigrant ancestors also had an emormously high child-bearing rate. As they educated and acculturated and (perhaps more importantly) got access to birth control when it became widely available, the birth rate dropped. I see no evidence to suggest that Syrians will be any different.
The Koran is fundamentally NO DIFFERENT from the Bible when it comes to passages espousing hatred and violence. Muslims are no more required to follow their book slavishly than are Christians or Jews. If Westerners can have their religion and ignore the brutal, medieval aspects of it, Muslims can too. And most of them do.
Why is this so difficult? Muslims are people. People suck. Not because they’re Muslims, but because they’re people.
In theory, yes. But it may take them a few hundred years, just like it did for the West to get from the Inquisition days to the current state of things. Or maybe the pressures of modernity will make it faster, but I’m not optimistic I’ll see it in my lifetime.
Ehhh…no. Don’t I wish. But countless poll findings show otherwise, not to mention honor killings, imprisonment (or worse) of apostates, etc.
But you already are seeing it – in many ways, including tolerance of homosexuality, Muslim Americans (in general) are more assimilated and more progressive than evangelical and Mormon Americans.
Marginally, and the gap appears to be closing. Reminds me of that old SNL sketch with Bill Clinton bragging about Arkansas in a debate in the '92 election.
I think that’s a flippant dismissal of a remarkable fact – that Muslim Americans really are assimilating quite well, and are more open and accepting of homosexuality than very large groups of long-time Americans who no one denies are mostly assimilated into American society and culture.
The role and status of Muslim Americans is a remarkably positive American success story, and the existence of a very small number of murderous assholes doesn’t negate this.
Look at Europe where the large amount of Muslim immigrants can all cluster together instead of being forced to join everyone else. Why are there pro-ISIS ralliesin Europe? Why do these integrated immigrants think attacking an embassy over cartoons is OK?
Even for the fact all of the holy books say awful things, the ultra-majority of Christian nations (and the Jewish nation) don’t kill people who don’t comply with religious laws, nor do they have many politicians with the likelihood and ability to enact such laws.
Look at Orlando, or honor killings that are prevalent in the Muslim world and in Muslim enclaves in Europe. Or that most of the countries in which gays are executed as a matter of state law are Muslim countries. Or women are forced by law or society into hijabs. Do we really want that?
I also don’t want doctors and women attacked for abortions. I don’t want gays denied marriage or gay youth sent to camps for re-education. I don’t want transgendered people to be afraid of using a public bathroom. Christians are doing that. They are just as big of a problem as extremists from the Middle East, if not moreso, because Christians have tons of power here and are capable of enormous damage. This one guy killed 50+ people and that’s a big problem, 3000 died on 9/11 and that’s terrible too. But how much suffering has Christians created in the name of their book over the past few decades? I’d wager on anything else other than direct lives taken, Christians are a bigger contributor of suffering in the US than Muslims
I’m much more worried about Christians than Muslims. I’m more worried about shark attacks than Muslims. Muslims simply don’t cross my mind on a daily basis, unlike those intolerant Christians who still continue to fight for their proveably wrong ideology long after the SCOTUS already made gay marriage the law of the land. Why don’t you rail against the real problem in this country, Christian theocrats?