In this country, you have the right to believe whatever you want to believe. If you want to believe that apostates should be executed, then you may do so. We don’t make it illegal to believe things in this country.
You also have the right to practice your religion as you please, provided that your doing so does not infringe on the rights of others to practice their religion as they please. If you actually attempt to execute an apostate, freedom of religion doesn’t protect you, because your right doesn’t trump the right of the other.
If American or western Muslims hold beliefs that are antithetical to our secular democratic values, then the question we should be asking is “How do we change their minds?”, not “How do we get rid of them?”.
What about the beliefs of those in Middle East countries? Do we not care about the women and homosexuals and victims of stonings and whippings and hand loppings that go on there because it’s all going on beyond our borders? And do we not care that the barbaric beliefs that predominate in those countries are fomenting the terrorist attacks that are going on all over the world?
And if so, wouldn’t that make all the whinging about rights and feelings and offensiveness, etc., in this country ring hollow?
In other words, do we care about human rights, or just Americans’ rights?
Economic sanctions can only do so much even when they’re practically establishable, and we have neither the resources, the inclination, nor the right to go on some kind of global crusade to scourge the world of misogyny and hatred. The past 500 years have proven that attempting to conquer the world and impose our values by force results in nothing but the broken state of affairs the Third World finds itself in today.
What we in America have the power to do is to show Muslims through our words and actions that there is no inherent conflict between Islam and the west, to encourage them peacefully to come around to our way of thinking as regards human rights, and to build an alliance with them against fanatical extremists which threaten us all.
I’m going to have to call it a night, but before I go I want to let you know some of what you’re saying is starting to get through in terms of insight into liberal thinking on the subject. I’ll sleep on it and try to get back to you tomorrow.
And thanks to both you and Trinopus for the civil tone of our discussion, even here in the Pit.
Whoa, Nelly! Did I mention my progressive, atheist wife is a teacher?
:eek: That’s not gonna work. Even leaving aside the teacher angle, and looking at how things stood before the recent (alleged) coup attempt and crackdown, here’s a 2015 article on atheism in Turkey:
Sounds grrreaat. It’s not as bad as in other Muslim countries, I guess? Woo hoo. :dubious:
Interesting that you also talked about former Soviet republics like Tajikistan. On this or another thread, someone stated that only the communist bloc ever figured out how to tame Islam in the modern world (that would help explain Yugoslavia as well). Even Afghanistan, from what I understand, appeared to briefly have a chance to similarly emerge from the Dark Ages under the Soviet-backed socialist leader Nur-Mohammed Taraki. Per Wikipedia: “Taraki introduced women to political life and legislated an end to forced marriage.” Gasp!
I would beg to differ when it comes to mutilation.
Furthermore, while I agree that once someone is a U.S. citizen, you can’t (and shouldn’t) police their thoughts and expressions of belief no matter how odious you find them, that doesn’t mean we should keep importing people with those beliefs. No one born in a Muslim country, to non-American parents, has a constitutional right to come and live here.
How about we treat these countries the way we eventually came around to treating South Africa in the 1980s, even as conservatives (led by Ronald Reagan) dragged their feet the whole way? As pariahs. That means economic sanctions, refusal to play their sports teams, etc.
Let’s please acknowledge that this may be (sadly) a majority view among liberals, but it is not universal. I am certainly a political liberal, unless you apply some sort of tautology–as some people do to Harris and Maher–that defines us out of liberalism/progressivism precisely and solely because of our beliefs about Islam.
Duly acknowledged. In discussions like these it’s not only easier to talk in generalities but often impossible not to without the discussion grinding to a halt. I think all of us would be hard pressed to find a large group anywhere in this country where everyone behaves identically or is 100% in agreement on everything.
Simply not practical. As much as the US has made strides towards energy independence, cutting off oil imports from the Muslim world would have catastrophic effects on our economy and almost no effect on theirs, as they’d still be able to sell to Russia, China, and the other growing economies outside our sphere of influence. There simply isn’t enough common cause between the US/Europe and the other major world economies to make a global boycott stick, and the world of international sport is so nakedly corrupt at this point that there’s no way they’d turn down the money Muslim nations are capable of offering them.
That’s silly. What if someone said that in 1980 about South Africa? Things aren’t done until they are done.
A good first step would be to start actually acknowledging that it’s unacceptable for these countries to treat subclasses of their citizenry this way, rather than completely looking the other way and treating them as friends. This is exactly what we once did with South Africa, which was a Cold War ally.
I love President Obama, but the cordial way he treated Saudi Arabia (visiting there and receiving its leaders for state visits) is going to be a stain on his legacy when people look back centuries from now.
Perhaps he will, as will all the other American presidents of the past century who’ve done business with the Saudis.
And perhaps that condemnation will be tempered, as it has been with Chamberlain, by the sober recognition that, had they tried to fight at the time, they would have failed, and that by taking the diplomatic path they bought time that allowed for a greater triumph in later years.
You are correct that being unpopular does not make one wrong. You might also consider that being wrong often makes one unpopular. Make sure you know which way the causality goes.
Bill Maher isn’t a bald-faced liar. That’s a significant difference.
No, you could do much, much better than Sam Harris’s bullshit.
I pointed out here Harris’s deception in selectively quoting polling results and leaving out key facts inconvenient to his argument. And in your latest slavering quotation from your hero, he cites the Orlando shooting and refers to “the belief system that had just produced a massacre in their community” in yet another attempt to tar the entire Muslim community with the same wide brush of bigotry. Yet the shooter’s ex-wife described him as “mentally unstable and mentally ill” and “obviously disturbed, deeply, and traumatized”, was often physically abusive, and had a history of using steroids. Wow, sure sounds like a devout and prayerful Muslim to me! Likewise time after time the terrorist events in Europe turn out to have been committed by assorted reprobates and small-time criminals who had precisely zero religious interest and used Islam as a convenient form of political identity, much the way white supremacist skinheads celebrate the swastika. But according to Harris, it’s all because they devoutly read the Qu’ran and it’s their deeply religious “belief system” that is to blame!
The goalpost you moved was switching from discussing the reasons for heightened tolerance in a particular instance (i.e., in the European Muslim-majority countries of Bosnia and Albania) to discussing causes of **average ** tolerance levels worldwide and overall. That’s why your height analogy is irrelevant.
I’ll spell that sequence out for you again:
I noted that European Muslim-majority countries tend to have more liberal attitudes than the “fundamentalist hive-mind” stereotype that’s often associated with Muslim societies.
You suggested that maybe the more liberal attitudes were due to those countries being nearly 50% non-Muslim.
I pointed out that it’s logically unsound to assume that we can automatically explain greater tolerance by the presence of more non-Muslims, because we see plenty of examples of countries elsewhere which are less tolerant than Bosnia and Albania, even though they have a higher percentage of non-Muslims.
You went apeshit because you somehow interpreted that remark to mean that I was claiming that it’s invalid in general to explain intolerance in a Muslim-majority society as a result of Islamic ideology. :rolleyes:
:rolleyes: Gosh, if only somebody had thought to point out that important insight earlier:
If I had known that that obvious and undisputed fact about current religio-political conditions was all the point you thought you were making, I wouldn’t have wasted my time looking up all that information for you about conditions in more liberal majority-Muslim societies.
Tar the entire muslim community? It tars the entire FAITH and belief system when members of that faith murder others in Gods name, with the presumed sanction of Allah/Muhammad. THAT is what Tars Islam, and by extension, muslims as a whole by association.
Why? What does it effing say about your religion that this so called peaceful belief system is so piss poor and bringing fellow believers out of their own murderous thoughts? Worse, what does it say when these people call out to the greatness of Allah, as if their understanding of the faith says THIS is what they will be rewarded for, the wanton murder of the non believers?
If I had a mobile operating system (software) that ran on the hardware of humanity, where my software OS caused some % of the phones it ran on to explode and take out others around it… does that not indict the quality of the software running on the phones?
Not All !!!
#NOT ALL !!!
… Yes, but you apologists CONTINUE to miss the basic point I’d have seen at age 5. There are many version of software that are installed that yield virtually ZERO explosion of fire and death, this suggests there is something more volatile about the version I released into the wild does it not? makes sense to everyone with basic logic working in their brains right?
Ditto with Islam.
And even the mentally unstable can be pushed by dark souls within the faith.
Take a closer look at the profile of the Nice attacker.
He was mentally unstable, he was a nominal muslim, but he was in contact with Islamists who convinced him that a way to atone for his homosexuality and immoral acts and avoid eternal torture and death over and over and over beyond the end of time... was to commit an act of Jihad.
And so he plows into scores of people. His mental instability was not made more docile by ISlam, it added a dimension of guilt which some of the more evil members of the SHARED faith played upon to convince him to murder others. Is Islam off the hook here? Is the faith off the hook?
Why are you on your knees acting as a Vassal for Islam?
When a right-wing Christian nutjob fires his gun at an abortion clinic, do we demand that the President of the United States condemn Christianity? When a guy from Florida shoots up a nightclub, do we all say, “Florida is the problem?”
If Mr. Jones has cancer in his wrist-bones, we don’t bombard his entire body with radiation. (Okay, not the best analogy ever, because we do poison his entire body with toxic chemicals.)
I heard an interview on NPR today that I found very revealing:
When they hear about a terrorist attack, does it occur to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or atheists to worry that it may be their son or daughter who carried out the attack? I don’t think so. Very interesting and unintentionally revealing.