How many more attacks before the West has to consider the previously unthinkable?

The BBQ Pit
461

I defend Islam and Muslims in general (and any other religion and its practitioners) from inaccurate and dishonest attacks, not from valid ones.

As I’m constantly pointing out in these threads, I do not in any way defend or excuse Islamist-extremist violence, oppression, bigotry, or any other illiberal positions that are all too common in many branches of contemporary Islam. I have always denounced and will continue to denounce the specific crimes and repressive ideologies of hardline Islamists that are sowing terror and misery throughout much of the world, and I have never criticized anybody else for denouncing them likewise.

What I do criticize people for are the sloppy, bigoted, inaccurate, and unDoperly habits of so many Islamophobes and Islamophobia-defenders on these boards: namely, shitty argument tactics such as

  • failing to distinguish between specific pernicious Islamist ideologies and the entire religion of Islam overall,

  • making ignorant generalizations about what they imagine “most” Muslims or a “majority” of Muslims think, based on a half-assed undigested sampling of data about certain subgroups of Muslims,

  • ignoring all historical, political, economic, racial, linguistic and cultural aspects of problems in the Islamic world in favor of a crude and ill-informed theological reductionism, and

  • pretending that their ill-informed braying of Islamophobic slogans constitutes a useful contribution to rational discourse.

[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
As you might imagine, I spend as little time as possible reading anything you have to say.

[/quote]

Then you shouldn’t be surprised that your deliberate refusal to understand what you’re talking about when you reply to my posts makes your remarks look unusually stupid, even for you.

[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
And I’m guessing you found the study you linked to from my having posted it in the other thread.
[/QUOTE]

You are, as usual, wrong: I found it in responding to this post by Fiveyearlurker who linked to it. Where Fiveyearlurker originally found it I do not pretend to know.

462

You haven’t mentioned your mom yet. Let me guess – doctorate from MIT, recipient of the National Medal of Science, and maker of the best peanut butter sandwiches ever! I actually feel a little guilty about having played at least a small role in precipitating these pathetic displays of puerile self-admiration for everyone to enjoy. Your desperate need for validation and complete lack of self-awareness makes it all too easy, and I only do it because you’re obnoxious. I’d feel bad if it turned out you were only 12, but if so you shouldn’t be in an adult forum.

I note also the complete absence of any attempt to address the numerous facts that I cited. The sure sign of superior intelligence is the attitude that “I knows that I am right and no facts are gonna change nuthin’ and not only that but a really really smart guy agrees with me also, so there. And my dad is smarter than your dad.” Brilliant!

463

My mom did some postdoc work at Harvard, but her degrees were all from state schools, albeit highly regarded ones. She is definitely disappointed about my “unfulfilled potential” and downward mobility. My dad was a tenured associate professor at a prestigious university, but he was unhappy in academia. He quit and was still unhappy, so I lost him to suicide in high school.

Your generic insults lack bite, but those personal details should provide enough specificity that you could probably come up with some genuinely hurtful remarks. Go for it, if that’s your jam. I will at least be able to console myself with the knowledge that I am not the kind of person who would stoop to that level.

Kimstu, what is “the entire religion of Islam” good for? That is, why should we not wish for its disappearance?

ETA: wolfpup, the Feb. 2003 join date prominently displayed on every one of my posts should ease any concerns that I might be 12. HTH :wink:

464

Why not indeed, if you’re so inclined? If wishing for the disappearance of religions happens to be your jam, I have no objection to that whatever.

It’s when you (generic you) start trying to assert some kind of objective justification for the disappearance of a particular religion by misrepesenting or distorting facts about it that I get a little bit testy.

Again, there’s nothing wrong at all with criticizing or denouncing specific negative things connected with a particular religion. For instance, if you, or Sam Harris or anybody else, says “Cameroon Muslims tend to be extremely intolerant of homosexuality and that’s a bad thing”, I won’t disagree with you in the least.

But if you, or Sam Harris or anybody else, tries to portray that particular fact as an indictment of Islam in general without evidentiary support, by saying or insinuating “Those high homophobia rates among Cameroon Muslims just go to show how especially terrible Islam is”, then you need it pointed out to you that in fact, the homophobia rates among Cameroon Christians are just as high as those among Cameroon Muslims.

Because what that important piece of contextual information indicates is that widespread homophobia in Cameroon is a Cameroon problem rather than specifically an Islam problem. Consequently, if you try to spin the homophobia numbers among Cameroon Muslims as a phenomenon attributable to Islam per se, you will be guilty of distorting the facts. And we don’t look kindly on that sort of thing around here.
If, on the other hand, what you have in mind is more just generalized wishing that Islam would disappear like you wish all other religions would disappear, then sure, knock yourself out. I would be the last person to want to interfere with your harmless amusements, or Sam Harris’s either, for that matter.

465

[Quote=Carl Sagan]
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
[/quote]

Ha ha.

466

Carl Sagan, another hero of mine. It’s true, having unpopular ideas is hardly any guarantee of being right. That it’s also not a guarantee of being wrong is good enough for me.

467

Hey, you guys! Shut up, you’re getting in the way of my learning more about the utterly fascinating character and family history of Slackerinc! Maybe some of you come to argue points and information, but have some regard for those of us who come here to bask in his awesomeness!

468

I’m sorry if there was tragedy in your life but your personal life has no relevance here, and the criticisms that many are directing at you are based solely on observations of the things you say on this board, no more and no less.

To return to the immediate item that was under discussion in #455, the problem is that Sam Harris was citing cherry-picked poll data in a clearly deceptive effort to smear Muslims everywhere as primitive, intolerant, and even violent. This kind of dialog poisons discourse and incites backlash against Muslims in western democracies who in no way fit that hateful profile.

Like Bill Maher, Harris bases part of his argument on a general anti-religion stance, but as someone who follows Maher closely I’ve never seen him engage in deliberate deception that way. Maher is cynical, sometimes hyperbolic, always funny, occasionally wrong, but never dishonest. What little I know about Harris isn’t particularly flattering. He does have some strange beliefs, some of which I consider utterly reprehensible. As one eloquent critic put it, “he dehumanizes Muslims to such an extreme degree that it verges upon bloodlust.” No wonder you like him! He describes himself as a liberal yet is aggressively militaristic on Middle East policy. That ought to score a few more points with you.

Harris strikes me as a threat to the proposition of peaceful multicultural societies in advanced western nations. Another plus from your warped standpoint! You may praise him as a hero and entertain the delusion that you and he are righteous warriors battling the ignorant masses, but that doesn’t make it so. Perhaps the critic writing in the above-linked article has a point when he describes Harris as someone who “… has passed himself off as a learned thinker despite being both ignorant of and incurious about the very issues on which he opines.”

469

Not necessarily. Your mom may have signed you up before you were born in anticipation of the Greatness that was to come. That would in fact make you just about exactly 12 years old and would explain a lot. I have not taken the liberty of examining the early posts to see if there is evidence of the first burblings of a very young but indisputably precocious SlackerInc first inflicting himself upon the world. :smiley:

470

Which page of the report is that on, please? It’s over 300 pages.

471

Just out of interest, did you hear the podcast Harris invited that guy on to? I did. It was a farce. Harris wrecked the guy’s shit like it was nothing. It was brutal.

472

No, I’m not a follower of Harris, I really pay little attention to him.

473

Why do you feel so comfortable criticising Harris without hearing his side? Omer Aziz is a puffed-up, intellectually dishonest hatchet-job artist who either misunderstands Harris’ arguments or outright lies about them. His opinions on Harris’ character and work are not to be trusted.

474

I was responding to the quoted piece based on what it was plainly saying which, as I noted, strikes me as intellectually dishonest and misleading, and it bothers me that diatribes like that feed anti-Muslim sentiment in first-world western nations where it’s not warranted and victimizes innocent people. If Aziz is intellectually dishonest so is his nemesis Harris. I did find his article persuasive though I have no idea how accurate his account of events is. If it’s at all accurate, Harris was acting like a total ass.

Beyond that I’m not really interested in getting into a long debate about Harris because I know little about him. It doesn’t help that from what little I’ve seen he uses weasel words to carefully frame support for things like judicial torture and a nuclear first strike, or that he’s oddly ambiguous about the paranormal and reincarnation. Also that SlackerInc likes him.

475

What Islam is is what Muhammad said it was, and his fellow travelers about his life and the way he lived. After all, the dictates of the faith are that muslims should emulate his example, and where do we find his example? The Sira and Hadith.

The most charitable defense of the rot and chaos contained therein was by Tarek Fatah, who essentially says much of the bad was made up by the muslims in power after Muhammad died. True? Who knows, but we do know what’s in the books now, and what takes precedent over what.

What apologists for Islam like to do is focus on Muslims, where the doctrines of the faith meet the hard reality of culture and individuals in filtered form. There Islam is literally all over the map. But the source material has enormous influence on the Percentages of the muslim population that descend into darkness.

You measure the teachings of Islam by Muhammad. You measure the results of those teachings in how they influence the muslim population as a whole around the world. And the results are not pretty.

I like to make flawed analogies, never perfect, but comparisons that capture a piece of what is going on. Think of ideologies and religions as a road, and the individuals traveling along that rode are human beings with their own nature and cars. Perhaps their culture informs the engineering of the car and the type of fuel and maintenance it receives. But the roads can be of wildly different quality.

I see Islam as one of the most pockmarked, pothole filled, gaping sections chunked out of the path roads in the world today. Driving along this road can be done without getting into an accident, and is done by hundreds of millions of people, but not everyone is such a great driver, and the pitfalls of that road compared to others and the lack of railing makes it so that a greater percentage of people traveling along that road get into accidents and crash into a ball of fire and death compared to other less obstructed paths.

Now consider that the travelers on that road, when told by others on different roadways that they should fix the potholes and worse, that there is no need. THIS ROAD IS PERFECT !!! And worse than that, the road as built in mechanism where any attempt to alter the structure of the road is met with a defense mechanism that kills the ones that try to smooth out the journey.
… This to me is Islam. And I’d just as soon have more and more people off that road. The fact that many are able to navigate it without troubles (coming from my liberal reference frame) is beside the point. That would be true on most roads, but what about the more vulnerable members of the population? The feeble minded? The people that rely heavily on the training wheels of religion for ethics and guidance?

There is so much bad and wrong to fix why even bother? It seems to me it would actually be more feasible to just try and switch muslims away from the faith. The biggest sign of hope in my eyes are the growing numbers of ex muslims, may their numbers well. Be free of the oppression.

476

So, where did you steal that stunningly ignorant screed from?

477

Then why have there been significant chunks of history in which the Muslim world was, in general, more open and tolerant and peaceful than the Christian world?

478

And not the relevant point, whether it’s a majority or not, it’s FAR too high, that is THE MOST important point. I don’t even know What % of muslim nations with significant populations were polled by Pew, were any left out? What percentage of them were for and against what?

Either way, the numbers we have are an obvious sh*t show, stop trying to polish that turd by trying to argue that possibly maybe it’s just slightly under half the muslim population that supports execution of apostates.

479

That’s quite apparent in your mistaken belief that there is significant daylight between him and Maher on the subject of Islam. The confrontation between Harris and Affleck occurred on Maher’s show, and Maher was distinctly on Harris’s side. But now I can actually say I have met someone who loves Bill Maher and strongly dislikes Sam Harris. That’s weird ,but ok then.

Salvor, I would actually disagree with any implication that the teachings in the texts of Islam are any worse than parts of the Bible. But as Harris says, Christians and Jews have had to abandon the really horrible stuff by the pressure of modernity. They have managed to resist that pressure so far in much of the Muslim world.

480

< hijack > My apologies:

SlackerInc you bastard … you just stabbed me in the back didn’t you … what the fuck?

Here’s the post, the little shit asked about “doesn’t” and after I climb this tall assed soap box he springs “slower” … dammit … you set me up didn’t you?

And here I did compare you favorably to the greatest chess player in the past 300 years … and now your knife sits between my shoulder blades … thank you …

Now get your ass over there and APOLOGIZE … tell them all you set me up for as a joke … this is YOUR fault … pay the price … or next time I’m comparing you to Emanuel Lasker …

< /hijack >