Welcome to Turkmenistan (93% Muslim)! Legal abortion. Oddly, male homosexuality is criminalized but female homosexuality is not. Sleeveless shirts and knee-length shorts or skirts are accepted but no thigh-baring shorts or minis, please.
Uzbekistan (97% Muslim): Legal abortion. Same gender-unequal homosexuality laws as Turkmenistan. Summer visitors to, e.g., Tashkent seem to dress about as casually and/or skimpily as Americans do, so tank tops OK. Winter visitors to Tashkent should know better than to wear tank tops in subfreezing temperatures, natch.
Middle Eastern and North African majority-Muslim countries, except for Turkey, mostly resemble each other in repressiveness concerning abortion, homosexuality, and female clothing. So stay out of there, I guess.
Of course, as I noted above, that whole region contains only about 20% of all the world’s Muslims, though that fact seems to surprise many people.
This is a focus on the relative non problems. It’s like saying Rio is a lovely city for the Olympics to be held at but ignore disturbing things like…
And of course the result of sewage dumping into the sea leads to…
But at least it’s not likely to cause infection…
People are not worried about the muslim population that will leave others alone and live their own lives, they are worried about the segment that will be so irritated by the other they will slit their throats while claiming Allahs blessing.
I’m pressed for time at the moment so this is all I’ll address for now, but where do you think I got the 720,000,000 figure from, hmm? I calculated it as 45% of 1.6 billion. The correction in post 502 was from a misspeakment I made while typing out the preceding post.
Where did the number “45%” come from? Can you point to a source? And why do you use 45% when you say “a majority?” And can you point to a source that lists 720,000,000 Muslims favoring the death penalty for apostasy?
You’ve made some specific concrete claims. Do you have evidence for them?
I apologize for snarking on your math error, if it was only a typo. Tyops shouldn’t be used against people. But, c’mon: facts, dude. Where are your facts?
That was me, back in post #450 (ooh, serendipitous multiple! I did not notice that earlier. :))
It was based on data from the 2013 Pew report that everybody’s been talking about here:
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And why do you use 45% when you say “a majority?”
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That, I’m guessing, was the math fail that SA corrected in post #502.
[QUOTE=Trinopus]
And can you point to a source that lists 720,000,000 Muslims favoring the death penalty for apostasy?
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Not to brag or anything, but I think that was me again. Or rather, ultimately the Pew Foundation and its sources with me doing the back-of-the-envelope data analysis and the typing.
I need a scorecard; I can’t tell who’s on first. I apologize to anyone who has not actually made a claim that I thought they had.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, no one has backed up the claim that a majority of Muslims are hate-filled, violent, or intolerant. Someone – two someones, if not three – have made that claim. It simply h’ain’t true.
(And, as you’ve noted any number of times, yes, 400,000,000 is way too high. It’s not a good thing by any means. But some of the people posting here have specifically said “a majority,” and I’d really like them to back away from this claim, because it’s obvious they cannot demonstrate it to be true.)
If I’m one of those two or three then you’ve another apology to make, as I’ve never said a majority of the world’s Muslims favor death for apostasy.
But two things:
One, what the hell difference does a 6% spread make? I don’t care if it’s 45% or 51%, both the percentage and the number of Muslims who favor death for not believing like they want you to is monstrous. Imagine, 720,000,000 people favor that! That’s 2.25 times the number of people who live in the United States!
And two, why the focus on apostasy only? Add in Sharia law for all, death by stoning for adultery, lopping off hands for theft, support for suicide bombings, homosexual disapproval rates approaching 100% in some of the more rabid countries, support for misogynistic practices that keep women covered up, required to obey their husbands at all times, unable to go out on their own and/or become educated, and you have well over a majority who believes in and supports these abominable practices.
Given all this, is it really any wonder that some of Islam’s more devout followers twist off into even more extreme interpretations of what makes for a good Muslim, and/or comes to believe the most heinous forms of torture/murder are appropriate punishments for not living up to what they feel are proper tenets of Islam?
And yet here we have America’s liberals, who, when called on it, find themselves obliged to acknowledge that, yes, all this stuff is bad, yet there’s nary a word of criticism or condemnation going from them about any of it. And then barring their being confronted with actual facts and figures about the horrors of Islam which they can’t refute, they gleefully leap to the defense of Islam any and every time someone criticizes it, hurling expletives like “racist” or “xenophobe” at anyone and everyone who dares broach the subject at all.
It doesn’t begin to make sense. You couldn’t invent a more anti-liberal ideology than Islam if you tried, yet here are our country’s liberals, defending it angrily and hatefully every time the subject comes up. Go figure!
Cool. I apologize. As far as I can tell, it was Magiver (in the Great Debates thread) and SlackerInc..
Nobody’s denying it’s a horrific statistic. It’s appalling, and frightening, and nauseating.
All I’m hammering on are those who said, “A majority of Muslims are violent.” And even “favoring the death penalty for apostasy” is not violence. It’s favoring repressive laws; it’s ugly as a shit sandwich. But it isn’t violence.
This is mostly Magiver’s fault. When asked about Islamic violence, he repeatedly brought that up. It doesn’t fill the bill; it doesn’t answer his claim.
You’re right again: there are other forms of horrific repression being practiced, and the Islamic World has plenty of bad laws. It just isn’t unique to Islam, and it isn’t a majority, no matter how many times this gets claimed.
When people are making their points, they need to keep them true.
Funny, though: nobody’s said any such thing. We’re saying that those who want to practice their religion peacefully get to. No one is saying they get to practice is violently. So this is kind of a foolish straw-man assault here. You’re blaming liberals for something liberals have never, ever, spoken in favor of.
Again, keep it factual. Contra-factual arguments are easy to debunk, and don’t advance your cause.
As shocking as it may be to someone of your inestimable intelligence, freedom of religion is not a defense against murder or mutilation. Your right to believe as you wish does not also grant you the right to impose your belief on others.
Mysogyny and homophobia? If that’s what you believe, the government isn’t going to be able to force you to think otherwise. We’re not in the business of being thought police.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. It’s not “moving goalposts” to point out when **you **are cherrypicking the best of one group to compare against the worst of another.
Here, I’ll use a similar structure to what you wrote, adapted and substituting a few words to flesh out my “women are as tall as men” analogy:
“What I am doing is pointing out that it’s obviously unsound to argue that greater average height must be due to ‘maleness’ in and of itself, since we see clear examples of male people who are nonetheless shorter than some female people.”
See the problem? Being XY vs. XX has a *strong *effect on height; and the mere fact that some people with XX chromosomes are taller than some people with XY chromosomes does not disprove this. Similarly, I submit that in the modern world, being predominantly Muslim has a strong effect on a society in terms of making it unfriendly to progressive values–a much stronger effect, in the modern world, than does being predominantly Christian. The existence of a few predominantly Muslim outlier societies that are more progressive than a few predominantly Christian outlier societies does not change this. This is not physics. In social science comparisons, you will always have outliers, or just people/groups who are on one tail or another of the bell curve.
You’ve also created a straw man, perhaps without meaning to. And if I’m generous to you, it may be that you’re getting me confused with **Salvor **when you argue:
I have *never *argued that the differences were baked in from the beginning, and I in fact do not believe that. As I argued to **Salvor **upthread, there are unambiguous commandments in the Bible (Deuteronomy is infested with them) that are as bad or probably worse than anything in the Q’uran. And Christianity was, for hundreds of years, as repressive as Islam is now, or–again–probably worse. So you can just scratch off this alleged point of disagreement, and if that was all you *thought *we disagreed about, I guess we don’t disagree at all!
Then why aren’t liberals assailing Islam for this and its myriad other human rights issues. Goodness knows they’ve been plenty vocal about every other thing they haven’t liked lo these many decades, and for far, far less grievous offenses.
