I am? How, exactly? You are making less and less sense as you dig yourself deeper into absurdity.
Again, how, exactly? This is the sin I would accuse you of, but, in any case, people are members of the religion they embrace. A man may be a Christian, in which case, where is the logical flaw in combining the person and his religion?
I have never “insisted” that Islam is “all inclusive.” The phrase doesn’t even have any meaning. Everyone here agrees that Islamic religious extremism exists. You’re the one who “insists” that all Muslims are members of a religion that “drives homophobic violence,” even though you have been presented with evidence that this is not true.
The “I’m rubber, you’re glue” form of debate is beneath you.
when you use broad brush arguments to dismiss the religion as the basis for the attacks. And speaking of attacks, I’ll add the latest one in Nice France.
So now you’re back to broad-brushing the religion, exactly the thing you accused me of.
My position is, and has always been, that the religion of Islam is the same as every other religion: only a small minority of its adherents commit crimes in its name. The vast majority of Muslims are good people, who do not commit crimes.
I’ve said this maybe a dozen times, so you’re very, very wrong when you say, “You have not” (stated a position.)
In the interests of full disclosure, I am a gay person. I’m not going to read this entire thread because, in my experience, this debate typically goes off on a tangent by revolving around whether broad denunciations of a particular religious group are valid. In contrast, I believe other factors should be considered. As far as scripture is concerned, the “word of God” isn’t much different between the three main Abrahamic faiths on this topic. The greatest difference is between the so-called New and Old Testaments of the Bible but Christians routinely dip into the Old Testament to find preferred arguments when convenience calls for it. The next consideration is the rhetoric. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Arabic. However, we don’t really need to because the Islamic State has an english-language magazine and an issue of it contains an article which speaks directly to this question. See Dabiq Magazine, issue 7. If you turn to page 42, you will find an article entitled Clamping Down on Sexual Deviance. The article is not solely about gays as it also addresses “loose” women. The images on page 42 depict a gay man getting thrown from a roof top and then stoned to death after he hit the ground. However, if we examine the rhetoric used to justify this, it is not fundamentally any different from the rhetoric Christians routinely use in denouncing gay people. The greatest difference is that Christians often blame gays for corrupting the morals of society, particularly the morals of children, whereas the Islamic State blames straight people for “allowing” us to corrupt society via toleration and our integration into society.
So, is Islam “driving” homophobic violence? I would say they drive it no more than Christians do. While these more extreme adherents of Islam certainly go farther with what is essentially gay bashing, it’s not like milder forms of it are not committed by Christians. Indeed, I would suggest almost all of it is committed at the hands of self-described Christians here in the U.S. … and they cite largely similar rhetoric to justify it as well.
The problem is that most religions, by their very nature, promote irrational thought and non-fact-based thinking. Once reason, logic and science have been abandoned, it opens the door to any “faith-based” ideas, no matter how irrational and hateful. Faith and force have gone hand-in-hand for millennia, and Islamic homophobia is merely the most recent manifestation. And yes, I’m including the more liberal branches of these religions. As long as their belief systems are based on faith, rather than reason, there’s nothing preventing their ideas from sliding back down that slippery slope of intolerance and violence.
I’ve cited 400 million muslims who support the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy. It was not a complete survey which means there are more to add to that number. That you cannot understand this barbaric belief isn’t responsible for generating the exponential number of terrorist groups and wholesale slaughter compared to the other major religions is nothing short of intellectual bankruptcy.
You’re argument is like saying smoking doesn’t cause cancer because not all smokers die of it.
Islam doesn’t cause violence. Specific parts and sects within Islam do – parts that are largely and thankfully absent in places like America, while present in larger portions in some other countries.
What’s wrong with being specific? Why must Islam be painted with such a broad brush when there are so many millions of peaceful Muslims?
And your argument is a straw man. From the biblical text:
It’s not the religion or the holy book. It’s what people choose to do with it…or, probably more accurately, what they’ve been indoctrinated to do with it. People routinely cite Leviticus to find a reason to denounce gay people. There’s nothing stopping them from citing this passage using the very same reasoning. Further, haven’t you heard of the inquisitions? It’s hardly like Christianity as well as Judaism haven’t had largely identical periods of extreme zealotry.
Ever hear the expression “the ends do not justify the means”? Is bigotry acceptable as long as no one is being killed? How about this historical analogy: Jim Crow was fine as long as no one was being lynched? That’s absurdly ridiculous, isn’t it?
Your point was ambiguous and not so obvious. I took it as a suggestion the set of reasoning cited may be used to justify one end but not the other (refusing to sell someone a cake vs. murdering a person). This was because of the particular passage you quoted and the fact that refusing to sell cakes to gay people has been a subject of news reports relatively recently.
In the last 100 years, almost all of the overseas invasions (i.e. not attacks on a neighboring country) and overseas military interventions were performed by majority Christian countries. There are numerous quotes in the Bible that can very easily be interpreted to support invading other countries for various reasons.
Is there something about Christianity that drives overseas invasions and military actions that result in hundreds of thousands and millions (far more than Islamic terrorism!) of deaths? Or does this have to do with other factors that aren’t related to the religious tenets of Christianity?
That’s a good one. The US “presence” over the globe has not to do with religion, but with power and money. Let’s be for real. We’re not in the Middle East to save souls or even Israel. We’re there for the oil.