If it were not for the further promotion of hatred, the thing than which nothing could be more irrelevant is the hatred spewed by an uninformed person who deliberately chooses to place opinion ahead of education.
(And I notice that you are still incapable of using the word apologist according to its actual meaning. So, on the one hand, you get to pretend that you (who reads no Arabic and has no concept of the actual historical context of the Qur’an) wants to declare that he knows the “real” meaning of the book, all the while demonstrating that he really does not even understand his own language.)
Interesting, the way you are so decidedly smug and condescending. All I need to know are two things (and one comment):
1- The people perpetrating the violence and oppression cite the Koran as their justification.
2- They are using actual passages from the Koran .
3- You, because you are religious, want to defend other religions. You are even more biased than I am. That is why I find your attitude so amusing. I, at least, can admit that I have a bias. You probably never will.
What persecution? Are they blowing stuff up? Cutting off peoples heads? Murdering their cartoonists? This supposed persecution you speak of, are they doing it because they happen to be Buddhist, but their actions are separate from Buddhist texts? Or do they use the text to justify their actions?
Religious people tend to quote religious works, (just as the uninformed quote hate sites).
That has nothing to do with what actually motivated them.
You persist in making silly claims. I am not interested in “defending other religions.” I am interested in promoting The Straight Dope, where we can distinguish between the facts regarding belief and non-belief and the fact that any philosophy, religion, or movement may have differing divisions or sects, and that condemning a major religion, philosophy, or movement based on the worst of its practitioners who do not even believe the same things as other is the same group, is simply an exercise in laziness.
Your position is pretty much the same as the fundy Christians who blame “atheism” for the violence of Stalin or the Khmer Rouge. It is the same logic based on the same level of ignorance.
Actually, I am one of the few Atheists who will admit that the influence of Atheism upon communism was a contributing factor to the way in which communists treated religion, religious institutions and religious people. And having no belief in a soul could easily cause you to view people as being disposable. Not that it - does - cause that, it could.
But religion pushes the bad actions further than they would of done otherwise. Don’t like gays? Lot’s of people don’t. But hang out in a church every sunday that preaches hatred of gays, all biblicaly (mainly old testament) endorsed and what not, God and Jesus hates them as much as you do!!! Suddenly your discomfort towards gay people has actually increased geometrically… and turned into book certified hatred.
So please stop pretending like a religious text can’t cause people to become worse than they would of been without said text. This would be, how did you say? A silly claim. Yes, that is what you’d call it. If, of course, you had the ability to look at the situation objectively.
Well, you could stop pretending that I have made claims that appear nowhere in my posts, although that might be a strain on you, based on the way that you have “interpreted” every historical or religious fact presented in this thread.
They assert that the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code of conduct taken from the Buddhist scripture known as the Vinaya Pitaka, permits monks to engage in public, governmental affairs when the Śāsana, the dispensation of the Buddhist religion, is being menaced, and that the very presence of Muslims in a Buddhist-dominated country represents such a threat. Therefore, by their interpretation, the Buddhist scriptures not only permit, but demand, that they act to exterminate the Muslims of Burma.
If you do not dispute the fact that a religious text can make bad people worse, that it can cause people to adopt attitudes and actions they would not normally take, if you actually believe this, then you would endorse my criticism of the Koran, instead of chastising me for it, insulting me, and talking about how stupid I am and what poor grasp of logic I posses.
If your concern is to compare chistian and muslim kill counts you will find this pretty interesting.
It was pre-Iraq, though, so add a few hundred thousand more on the christian side, and a few thousand for the muslim.