“We had to destroy the village to save it.”
Actually, Islam is not. What you pretend Islam is has no bearing on the facts.
What you pretend Islam is is not what is practiced by the vast majority of people who call themselves Muslim.
:dubious: People who call themselves Muslim actually practice a wide variety of different forms of their religion.
And people who are not Muslim sometimes have extremely odd and ill-informed ideas of what constitutes a “vast majority” of Muslims. We’ve repeatedly debunked several such misconceptions relating to the well-known 2013 Pew report on Muslim views.
I’m sorta disappointed that nobody has come up with a hard number for the OP. So IMHO - 12,762,013. After that many attacks we can, as the OP posited, consider the proposal for France.
At that point I expect said proposal to be soundly rejected for a variety of reasons, sheer practicality being at the top of the list. But at least now we have a nice round number to wait on and we consider this matter tabled for the nonce.
“Debunked” does not mean what you seem to think it means. And that bit of massaging you did with those numbers was quite a piece of sophism. You tried to imply that only 13% of the world’s Muslims favor the death penalty for apostasy, leaving 87% that do not. But in fact, what those data indicate is that 12.6% favor it, 7% either oppose it or are not sure, and we don’t know what the other 80.4% think. But the list of countries surveyed (Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine) does not strike me as skewed toward the extremist end.
So it’s a reasonable inference that a majority of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries do favor it. Is it a nearly two-to-one majority, as in that sample of countries? Perhaps not. (Perhaps a little lower or a little higher.) But it would have to poll less than 45% among the rest of the world’s Muslims to make it less than 50% overall, and that strikes me as a forlorn hope.
(BTW, you also wrote “0.02%” in the last two cases when you meant “0.2%”.)
ISIS couldn’t ask for a better recruiter than you.
:rolleyes: No, I didn’t: I was pointing out to Fiveyearlurker that the specific data that he was falsely claiming represented “the vast majority” of Muslims worldwide actually referred to only about 13% of the world’s Muslims total. So yes, “debunked” is accurate in this case.
If you’d bothered to read any of the follow-up posts in the linked thread, you’d see that I’d already made the same point there in response to exactly the same kind of dishonest criticism you’re trying to pull here:
That objection, unlike your other ones, happens to be valid. Thanks for the typo correction.
I “bothered” to read exactly what you linked to, which went to a single post. It’s not my fault if you used the wrong URL. (Not that I really should be expected to read an entire thread as a cite: there’s a reason I only participate in a relatively few threads at a time.)
But there’s certainly nothing “dishonest” about my criticism. Let me ask you flat out: if every Muslim on Earth were polled, do you really believe there would be a majority opposed to the death penalty for apostasy? (And we’re not even getting into what a very, very low bar this is. Even those who oppose it are not necessarily enlightened in a myriad of other ways.)
That single post (which, in case you didn’t notice, also links on to the entire thread containing it) makes it completely clear all on its own what point I was making about ignorantly misinterpreting a specific set of data about a minority of Muslims worldwide as a “vast majority” of all Muslims.
Since your boasted high intelligence apparently wasn’t adequate to figure that out from the clear indications in that one post, you could have bothered to read a few of the immediate follow-ups where the same point was made repeatedly in different ways.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
It’s not my fault if you used the wrong URL.
[/quote]
I didn’t. But it’s not my fault if you’re too lazy and/or dumb to actually make sure you understand what another poster writes before imagining you’ve got a “gotcha” response to it.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
But there’s certainly nothing “dishonest” about my criticism.
[/quote]
Sure there is. I was clearly making a point about misinterpreting a particular subset of poll data, and you tried to spin it as though I was deliberately misrepresenting the remainder of the poll data. Admittedly, that might have been mere stupidity on your part rather than outright dishonesty.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
Let me ask you flat out: if every Muslim on Earth were polled, do you really believe there would be a majority opposed to the death penalty for apostasy?
[/QUOTE]
It’s not about my “belief”: it’s about the data. Since you apparently couldn’t be bothered or didn’t know how to look at the poll results that I linked to right there in that one linked post, let’s go back and help you with that. On page 23 of the linked report, there’s a handy table showing what median percentage of shari’a law supporters among Muslims in a given region support the death penalty for apostasy. Namely:
In South and Central Asia, which has about 32% of the world’s Muslims, the median percentage of the 84% who are shari’a supporters who favor executing apostates is 76%: 20% of the total.
In Southeast Asia there are about another 30% of the world’s Muslims, 77% of them shari’a-ites, median percentage who favor executing apostates 27%: 6% of the total.
In the MENA countries, about 20% of total Muslims, 74% of them pro-shari’a, 56% of those pro-DP for apostates: 8% of the total.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 15% of all Muslims, 64% of them pro-shari’a, no separate figure given for apostasy-DP supporters so let’s call it 100% to make absolutely sure we’re not underestimating: 10% of the total.
Among the approximately 3% of the world’s Muslims who live elsewhere, less than 20% are pro-shari’a and less than 20% of those are pro-DP, so the total’s not even 0.1%, but let’s call it 1% for a round number.
Adding up all those totals and remembering that they were estimated very generously, we get about 45% of all the world’s Muslims who support the death penalty for apostates.
So yes, contrary to your ignorant assumption, the actual data indicate that there is indeed “a majority opposed to the death penalty for apostasy” among Muslims worldwide.
As I said, ill-informed people who just go with their gut about what they “really believe” as opposed to examining quantitative data on the actual facts are apt to come up with erroneous estimates of what the facts are.
Now we can proceed to the usual goalpost-moving complaints about how unacceptably small that majority is, and how there ought to be a far higher percentage of Muslims who oppose the death penalty for apostasy, etc. Yup, and nobody here disagrees with any of that.
I’m just making the point that when it comes to understanding the concept of “vast majority” in the context of contemporary Muslim beliefs, you and most other Islamophobia-defenders don’t actually know your ass from a hole in the ground.
They do not. There are always going to be some “don’t know/refused to answer” in a poll. So the percentage that affirmatively state their opposition is also likely to be <50%.
In any case, you can’t preemptively accuse me of “moving goalposts”. I never made “supports death penalty for apostasy” my yardstick to begin with. That was all you.
How about these poll numbers, cited in a recent Sam Harris podcast responding to the Orlando massacre?
“And to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is, as a bigot.” Yup.
I wouldn’t dream of comparing myself to Sam Harris–as I acknowledge upthread, he’s got a few sigmas on me on the IQ bell curve–but I certainly consider myself part of that group he’s referring to there. How large or small a group it is, is hard to say. There aren’t that many people constitutionally capable of standing up to the kind of withering fury we see in this thread (and pretty much anywhere these opinions are expressed), so there have got to be lots of people nodding silently in agreement, but not keen to strap on an asbestos suit and jump into the fray. So I try to think of those people when I post. They need to see someone planting the flag–social proof and all that.
Good frigging grief! So of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, approximately 720,000,000 favor killing people for turning away from Islam. And to you this is a good thing?
And that’s the percentage on just one issue. I posted a comprehensive study of the world’s Islamic countries in the liberal apologist thread which shows the attitudes and beliefs of their various populations. It’s quite comprehensive and goes into considerable detail to show how the study was conducted and how it arrived at its findings. It can be found here.
The list below is only a partial recounting of what it discovered.
It’s no surprise to me that such a harsh, unforgiving and punitive religion as Islam should give birth to extremists who desire to take its tenets as far as possible. There is no major religion I’m aware of anywhere in the world that gets its lunatic fringe het up for violence the way Islam does, and in my opinion that’s because inflexibility and punitive violence are how its beliefs are enforced every day in most of the countries where its largest populations can be found.
:dubious: In other words, you choose to look at that heavily overestimated 45% of apostate-execution-supporting Muslims (which, you’ll recall, was produced partly by assuming that all shari’a supporters in all of Muslim sub-Saharan Africa are pro-execution), and make up a reason why you think it doesn’t indicate a number less than 50%. Based on no knowledge of the survey methodology whatsoever, but simply on what you choose to believe about it.
Gosh, how awfully rational of you.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
I never made “supports death penalty for apostasy” my yardstick to begin with.
[/quote]
But you voluntarily opened your ignorant yap to pooh-pooh the notion of anybody seriously disagreeing with your truthy (and, as it turned out, factually unsupported) feelings about it:
You can decide to throw out or dismiss the actual quantitative data in favor of your truthy-feelings if you want to, but you don’t get to pretend that rationality and evidence are supporting your decision.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
How about these poll numbers […]
[/quote]
It appears (though your cite doesn’t give a source for those poll numbers) that Harris got them from the same Pew 2013 report I already linked to. Of course, no liberal disagrees that all those numbers are way too low to be acceptable in a free and open society.
But where Harris’s bias or laziness or plain old Islamophobia is leading him astray is in singling out the homophobia numbers for various Muslim societies as though they were somehow different in kind rather than in degree from homophobia in other societies. (And sometimes not even in degree.)
For example, it’s not quite honest of Harris to loudly bemoan how awful it is to have such small percentages of homosexuality-tolerating Muslims in, say, Cameroon or Nigeria, while completely ignoring the fact that according to the same dataset that produced those survey results, Christians in those countries hold almost exactly the same views on homosexuality that Muslims do.
In fact, the actual survey results make it quite clear that tolerance of homosexuality, while very low in almost all African countries, varies much more by the country than by religion within the country. The Cameroon survey, for example, finds 0% tolerance of homosexuality among both Christians and Muslims, while both Muslim and Christian Ugandans are approximately 12%. Similarly, both Christians and Muslims in Egypt show extremely low support for gay rights, and so on for most of the other countries referenced.
So when you look at those numbers with a little more context, although they still represent very unacceptable levels of intolerance and repression in all the surveyed populations, they no longer support the insinuation of OMG Islam is so uniquely eeeeeeevil to have such low tolerance numbers and nobody but those benighted Muslims could possibly think this way in the enlightened 21st century.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
I wouldn’t dream of comparing myself to Sam Harris
[/quote]
Oh, I think it’s fair to say that you and Harris are quite comparable in some ways, including your tendency to sloppy thinking and/or bigoted distortions on issues involving Islam.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
There aren’t that many people constitutionally capable of standing up to the kind of withering fury we see in this thread (and pretty much anywhere these opinions are expressed), so there have got to be lots of people nodding silently in agreement, but not keen to strap on an asbestos suit and jump into the fray. So I try to think of those people when I post. They need to see someone planting the flag–social proof and all that.
[/QUOTE]
:rolleyes: Well, when you get done fellating yourself for exhibiting such courageous and inspiring heroism in daring to argue anonymously with nonviolent internet messageboard liberals, you might consider trying to set a better example in terms of honesty and critical thinking skills too.
After all, it’s not very impressive to try to mislead your hypothetical readers into imagining that Muslims are uniquely intolerant of homosexuality by waving around poll results from Muslims alone, while suppressing the fact that the large (in many cases large majority) Christian populations of many of the same countries hold extremely similar views.
(To be fair, of course, I shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that either you or Harris deliberately and knowingly suppressed that contexual information. Both of you probably just quoted the Muslim percentages from the 2013 Pew report (or Harris quoted them and you just quoted him), and were too ignorant/biased/lazy to bother looking up the Christian percentages in the original source for comparison.)
:dubious: What, are you trying to help SlackerInc look smarter by comparison? Of course it’s not a good thing, and not even SlackerInc appears to have imagined that I ever said it was.
It does, however, constitute actual data indicating that less than a majority of all the world’s Muslims favor executing apostates, which was the point under dispute.
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
I posted a comprehensive study of the world’s Islamic countries in the liberal apologist thread which shows the attitudes and beliefs of their various populations. It’s quite comprehensive and goes into considerable detail to show how the study was conducted and how it arrived at its findings. It can be found here.
[/quote]
Aw, isn’t he adorable, folks? Starving Artist has triumphantly presented a real live factual cite for our edification, which just happens to be the exact same Pew survey that was linked in my previously-linked post, and which we’ve been discussing here for the past four or five posts now. :rolleyes:
How about them? I don’t know whether this is willful ignorance on your part or just plain ordinary stupidity, but the numbers are being spun in an attempt to claim unwarranted and misleading blanket conclusions. And it doesn’t take a lot of research to uncover that fact.
Let’s consider the claims of your brilliant pal Sam Harris, who I understand from your bloviations is of such awesome intellectual stature that he is even more intelligent than your esteemed self, if such a thing were possible. Thank you for that vital information. Whenever I meet someone or read something someone has written, the first thing I always want to know is their precise ranking on the IQ bell curve. :rolleyes: Well, actually, no, it isn’t, it’s actually the last thing I could possibly care about because unlike you I’m not a pathetically insecure overweening pompous ass desperately in need of validation who is also probably a liar. Instead of offering bets about what clubs you belong to, you could much more credibly and usefully demonstrate your intelligence by actually saying something intelligent. Sadly, we haven’t seen much of it.
But back to the Sam Harris quote. One need not go into anecdotes about how it is that the Muslims I know don’t fit that hateful profile, but a balanced view of reality helps us understand why this is so. One need not point out that evangelical Christians are just as homophobic as their Muslim equivalents, but the facts help us understand that one doesn’t judge a religion by its extremist outliers – remember Kim Davis (praise the Lord!)?
Harris cites the homophobia of British Muslims and lists a bunch of Muslim countries where the same attitudes prevail. I’m not an expert on Islam by any means but this is so inconsistent with my anecdotal experience with progressive Muslims in Canada that a few months ago I did some quick research into those sorts of claims. Harris’s claim sounds pretty damning until one realizes that (a) British Muslims appear to be an outlier that are not representative of European Muslims and probably even less so of North American Muslims, and (b) all the other countries he mentions are third-world backwaters where cultural factors drive many of these beliefs.
As I said in another post I made at that time, while none of the British Muslims surveyed may support homosexuality, 35% of French Muslims do, and likewise French and German Muslims had radically different attitudes than British Muslims on other moral issues like pornography and unmarried sex. Only 3% of British Muslims believed that unmarried sex was acceptable, while 48% of French Muslims and 27% of German Muslims did. Cite.
Another finding – direct cut and paste from my earlier post – is that western Muslims strongly embrace western values in areas outside of sexual/gender issues where they tend to be conservative. The Gallup Coexist Index 2009 found that European Muslims “not only accepted but welcomed the freedoms, democratic institutions, justice, and human rights that characterized their societies.” It found that European Muslims perceive themselves as loyal citizens, and in Germany and the UK they have higher confidence in the police and judiciary than the general public (but not in France, and for good reason, because they’ve been subject to significant discrimination). In all countries surveyed, Muslims were more socially integrated than others, and much less likely than members of the general public to want to live in communities of their own ethnic and religious background.
We might be more impressed with your alleged intelligence if you actually showed some.
I don’t make any pretense whatsoever. I base my conclusions on factual evidence. For instance, your posting here, when taken as evidence of intelligence, would lead any rational person to conclude that the only “triple nine” club you could possibly belong to would be the 9.99 IQ club.
Then why your continued defense of the religion that foments it?
In context it also appears to be a point in favor of your continued defense of Islam. One can only imagine the spittle spewing from you and the rest of the left in this country toward Christians and their faith if only 45% favored, say, abortion clinic bombings or the death penalty for anyone who chooses to give it up.
As you might imagine, I spend as little time as possible reading anything you have to say. However your bolded line about how only 45% of the world’s Muslims favor death for apostasy did its job and drew my attention, and so it was to that line my comments were addressed.
And I’m guessing you found the study you linked to from my having posted it in the other thread. If so, you’re welcome.
It’s always laughable when people talk a good game but won’t put their money where their mouths are. I’m “probably a liar” but you don’t want to bet or anything. $500 on the barrelhead, c’mon–it’s “probably” easy money, right?
The rest of that just defines the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. They’re not quite as universally intolerant in every country as some statistics might make you think–awesome! I always laugh ruefully at people at people like Glenn Greenwald who love to attack Sam Harris for his alleged “Islamophobia” and “bigotry”, when the fact is that Glenn Greenwald is never going to go to any of the countries Sam is talking about. Greenwald is a gay Jew. Sure, Glenn: go to one of those countries and be open about your religion and sexuality, and just mingle with the people, no bodyguards. We’ll hang back here and wager on whether your life expectancy should be measured in minutes or hours. :rolleyes:
I’m gonna take your ascription of commonalities between me and Sam (a Stanford Ph.D., like my dad–go Cardinal!) as a compliment, even though you emphatically wished it to land differently. 
Wotta burn! I guess that could look like it could leave a mark…if you don’t know anything about IQ. Not sure a 10 IQ has ever been measured (seems like it would be tricky to do so), but I guarantee you such a person would not be able to speak or understand simple words, much less be able to read or write, operate a computer, etc. :dubious:
You’re doing a mighty fine job here of showing that you do not understand simple words.