If radical Islam is violent due to culture and not religion

Great Debates
401

This charge comes up a lot in a lot of contexts, but particularly on this board with debates about Islam. Make an argument against over-broad assertions and suddenly you are an apologist. Either of the religious variety or some bleeding-heart-liberal-kumbaya-type who believes in a morality so relativistic as to be nonsense. It’s a caricature and a weak argument. Not to say apologists of various stripes don’t exist. But I haven’t seen a lot of naked apologia in this thread IMO.

The thing is I for one am perfectly willing to concede ( and have made the point more than once before in the longish history of this board ) that Islam is in fact an explicitly militant faith that arose in conflict and in light of this is almost certainly more easily twisted towards violent extremism than many others. Where I part ways with someone like you, whether you are willing to recognize it or not, is the degree to which I think that informs and taints the religion as a whole. To me it’s merely a matter of degree and not a large one. I’m no historian in a professional sense, but I was a student of history and if you really think other Abrahamic faiths are vastly different, IMHO you are deluding yourself. If you think Buddhism is vastly different, you are deluding yourself. If you think “good Muslims” are just those who conveniently reject the Qur’an, you are deluding yourself. If there is one takeaway from humanity and general and religion in particular, it is that we and it are endlessly malleable.

You can find pacifist Muslims, gay Muslims and interfaith-friendly Muslims and if you think they are twisting their faith in knots to get there, I might tend to agree. But hardly more than an Osama bin Laden, who made all sorts of gyrations and ignored standard religious exhortations to get to the place where slaughtering civilians and suicide were not great sins. Religions are not static and you see reforming movements all the time, whether it be folks like Amadou Bamba or Bahá’u’lláh.

I don’t believe in a sky god and have no interest in a legalistic faith that restricts my access to pork ribs. For example I find many aspects of the Islam-offshoot Baha’i faith more attractive than many of their competitors, but that ban on extra-marital sex is a deal-killer even if I could get past that little issue of not believing in God. But my stubborn atheism aside I’m perfectly comfortable with the religious majority in this world - there is plenty to admire and respect in sincere faith.

That includes Islam. Stubbornly insisting that such an enormous religion that encompasses such a large chunk of the population is inherently a font of badness is a bit ridiculous. You want to argue that the salafist-jihadists are scum? I’m right there with you. Think Farrakhan’s splinter NOI sect is irredeemably racist? No argument here. But when you start casting wide-net generalizations prepare to be challenged and it is not just apologists you have to worry about pushing back. The world just isn’t that simple.

402

I’m something much worse than an atheist.

403

1- I can’t think of any religious schools in America or Europe where girls are not allowed to get an education, they may have all boy schools and all girl schools, but I can’t think of any place in the USA or Europe where girls are simply not allowed to get an education. Yet in many Muslim countries women are not allowed an education. Now, certainly that is a mixture of factors: political, economic, cultural, but can you say religion has no effect on this situation whatsoever?

Where in the USA or Europe do you find that religion can be used by even 1% to deny a woman an education?

2- What about assassinated journalists and cartoonists? When was the last time you heard of some atheist getting killed in the USA because he went on FOX news and insulted Jesus or the Catholic Church?

3- What about the simple matter of attire? Even in the USA and Europe in Mosque men have to bow and pray - in front - of the women because if the women were in front of the men the men might get “lustfull”. It is common, not mandatory, but common, in the USA and Europe for women to dress distinctly different than men in Muslim populations. In the USA you have to look to very fundamental groups like Hasidic Jews or the Amish for that to happen.
I read your response, I thought it was a good response, but I just am not willing to “admit” there is - no - significant difference between Islam and other western religions.

404

Ok, forget about Cairo then, it is a better city culturally than Cincinnati… I see your point there.

Where do you think I am safer, running down the street in, well, any city in the USA saying “Jesus is a false prophet” over and over at the top of my lungs… or in any random city in North Africa yelling “Mohammed was a false prophet”?

405

Care to share some of these “many” countries? I think that was the case in Taliban-era Afghanistan, but I can’t think of a single other. Boko Haram kind of- but they aren’t a country and they are against education for anyone.

406

OK, look, if you tell me I’m wrong, I’ll believe you, because I really don’t know for sure, and first of all maybe it was wrong for me to say many countries.

Tell me where my thinking is wrong:

1- I get the impression that in rural Turkey or rural Egypt that men have higher status than women. Am I wrong about that?

2- So I would suppose in those areas, a young man wanting to go to school would be encouraged but a young woman wanting to go to school could often be… well she would not be not allowed to go to school but there would be lots of situations where it may not be encouraged.

3- I probably did overstate my case by saying women weren’t allowed to go to school at all.

407

You do not have to go back thousands of years. Protestants murdered Catholics in colonial America in the seventeenth century and in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Christians killing Christians massacres of Rwanda and Burundi were just two decades back. Christians have been murdering Muslims in Africa within the last couple of years.

408

Y’know strictly from a neutral debating pov this is a sterling example of how you keep stumbling into potholes in this thread. Whatever the merits of your argument you do it no favors when you shoot from the hip based on weakly informed assumptions. I don’t research every little thing that comes out of my mouth either. But if you’re going to make a naked assertion of that sort without being to sure of yourself in GD of all places, doing a little googling beforehand can save you some trouble.

Nice to give an impression of reasonableness. But if that supposed reasonableness keeps coming from saying something wrong and then having to repeatedly backtrack and concede errors, it doesn’t exactly buoy up your arguments.

409

well here is an article that says that in Egypt that illiteracy rates in general are higher for women than for men. Table 1. Higher Education rates in the country as a whole are more or less even but it appears in certain areas men have higher rates of higher education than women. Tale 5.

Article
It’s a non biased source

410

It’s not an overstatement, it just plain isn’t true. There are no countries currently where women are forbidden to go to school. You said there were “many.”

What you will see is people having to make hard economic choices about who goes to school. If there is only enough money to send one kid to school- do you send the kid who will work outside the home and support the entire family, or the one who will have limited economic opportunities and will likely not work outside the home?

This happens everywhere. Go to rural Guatemala, or Laos, or Zambia (or our own history) and you’ll see the same hard choice. Where educating girls does not being an economic return, people are less likely to make an economic investment in them.

In countries where economics change such that women have more economic opportunity (say, India and China), or in countries where there is enough money to routinely send everyone to school, this discrepancy closes amazingly quickly.

Personally, I believe a lot of this comes from agriculture. Agriculture requires child labor- even in the U.S., farms are exempt from some child labor laws. Child labor means lots of babies, which limits economic opportunities outside the home. Farms also mean that inheritance is a matter of life and death, so paternity (and sexual controls around ensuring paternity) become important

411

You know, your answer seems very well thought out to me. I will take it as point in fact that I was wrong.

412

That, does not equal…

…this. Hyperbole is not your friend in these sort of discussions. There is potentially a point to be made here, but you aren’t making it well. But I’ll drop it, as it is mostly a hijack.

413

look, I admit, I vastly overstated my case, I was wrong.

414

You know, when you say, “There’s lots of X,” and it turns out that there are, in fact, no X anywhere, that’s going a bit further than “overstating your case.”

415

well, at least it’s nice to know you’re paying attention to my responses!

416

Well, they know their ABC’s but they can’t drive cars or show their faces in public.

Whoop-dee-dee, Progressive Islam.

417

This is just stupid. You cannot actually argue the point, (since you are wrong on the one hand and you are ignorant of the facts on the other), so you pretend that I am being misleading just because you cannot provide a rational response.

The reality is that the Muslim capture of North Africa and Iberia was very much based on the traditional desires of people wanting to build empires. They were sincere in their proselytization of captured lands–just as the Conquistadors were sincere in their forced conversions of the Americas and Philippines, but the notion that it was Islam that prompted those wars is simply bad history.

Right. Christians just burned people for having the wrong thoughts or for homosexual acts.

Right. Now we get to re-write history and pretend that one of the primary mottoes for the Crusades was not “Deus vult!”

This is more of your fundy atheist thinking that tries to link all religion directly to scripture, regardless of the fact that no religion, (not even that of Fundamentalist Christians or Salafist Muslims or Hasidic Jews) actually base their beliefs exclusively on the scriptures.

Wiggle, wiggle. Even you admit that you have to fudge your claims with weasel words.

Nope. The current Taliban, (or, at least, the pre-2002 Taliban), is much worse the the vast majority of Christianity, today. So what? Wahhabists, today, tend to be worse than Christians, today. You draw from that the conclusion that one religion must be worse than the other while rigorously avoiding the fact that, at different times, each religion may or may not have been better or worse than the other. (And, you continue to pretend that Wahhabists represent all of Islam, despite the fact that they have been challenged by most Muslim scholars.

You are still confusing things things about which you should take the time to fight your own ignorance. Different religions, and different sects within different religions, and different societies at different times affected by different religions demonstrate a whole range of values and behaviors.

Making a claim about Wahhabist Islam, today, and drawing the false conclusion, disproven by history, that Islam is, itself, the problem simply indicates a love of ignorance where belief precludes facts. (A very fundy notion, of course.)

418

No, Christians hang them for being witches.

419

What are you hoping to gain from this?

I actually do think that Islam is a slightly worse religion than Christianity right now, but my historical perspective is a bit longer than yours. I just think you’ve done a very bad job trying to prove that point, resorting to massive amounts of fallacies, non-factual statements and hyperbole. I’m very critical against many aspects of Islam, but I have a nuanced perspective and can also see the good, the beautiful and the truth of that religion. I love some parts of the muslim culture and despise others, just the same as with every other culture and religion that I know of.

Islam has Wahhabism that is one of the most vile religious expressions on the planet, but it also has Sufism which is among the most beautiful expressions. I bet you know who Osama Bin Laden was, how about you find out who Jalal al-din Rumi was. Once you get to know Rumi, come back and we can have a discussion.

Until then, I leave you with this:

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.

420

You may very well be right, you may be right about 50% of what you just said, you may be right about 75%, 90% or even 99%. Maybe even 100%.

I did not know anyone who died in 9/11.

But I was jogging over the Brooklyn Bridge that morning. From my house I saw the smoke of the towers for weeks, well, from where the towers had been.

I was 100% against the invasion of Afghanistan. I was 100% against the invasion of Iraq. I protested against both wars. I did not view either country as my enemy. I viewed the actions of 9/11 as actions of crazy people, psychopaths. But what it did leave me with, was the idea that the Koran can lead to violence more easily than other religious books.
As I said, I didn’t know anyone personally that died on that day. I know one bad event is not a good reason for me to dislike a whole group of people.

Plus, my life as a whole has not been very successful. Even before 9/11 I was bitter about the idea of god/religion/a Higher Power.