To add to what Miller said, lots, possibly even the majority of western countries don’t believe in seperation of church and state, or at least not to the extent the U.S. does.
You mentioned “the government funding of religious schools” which is done in Canada, Australia, the UK, and IIRC New Zealand.
And let’s not even bring up Israel which is certainly part of the West.
Turkey is a marginally decent place to live because they rejected Islamic ideals and implemented Western government and politics, enforced with frequent military coups. If the best Muslim majority country is also the most Western, that speaks very poorly about the value of Islam as a pro-civilization force or a way of life.
You’re comparing 49 Muslim majority countries to just a single Western nation. What’s more, the country chosen, the United States, was cherrypicked so as to have no female presidents. Moreover, your analysis doesn’t account for the greater instability of Islamic nations and the consequent greater total number of heads of government. Finally you falsely assume that the number of female heads of state is a good measure of the country’s attitude towards women. If we look at actual facts, we find unsurprisingly that Western nations are the best places in the world for women, with muslim and African nations rounding out the bottom of the list.
Even by the standards of debate on SDMB, this was an awful and shoddy argument.
You may be right that only a small number of muslim nations are explicitly Wahhabi, but the overarching point, that muslim nations are filled with antediluvian reactionaries, is still very valid. I’ve noticed a trend of you calling my arguments “bigoted claptrap” when you want to dismiss them, but don’t want to deal with them on the merits.
Yes.
It’s a small book, to begin with, so you could read it in a day or two. It isn’t quite as long as the Book of Psalms in the Bible. Like Psalms, its a big mixture of praise for God, poetry extolling peace and love, verses celebrating war and massacre and conquest, and then back to praise for God again. Quite a grab-bag of themes.
It is a pastime in Christianity to find a verse in Psalms that underlines what point you’re trying to make. The same game applies very nicely to the Koran. You can nearly always find a verse supporting you, whether you’re arguing for peace or war, mercy or vengeance, love or hate.
It’s worth reading, and better worth reading alongside a study guide, as it is a really mixed-up book – they shuffled the order of the verses! There actually are underlying cohesive concepts: part of it was written during time of war, and part during time of peace. Knowing which helps comprehend the whole.
Islam offers to the West a reminder that the humanist values of secular government and freedom of expression are worth fighting for.
No, it’s not. You’re attempting to shift the goal posts.
You began by claiming there were “several” Muslim countries run by “Wahhabi” regimes.
The actual total is probably more like one out of around 65 countries.
As for many Muslim countries having “antediluvian reactionaries”, sure.
Third World countries, whether predominantly Christian or Muslim tend to have lots of reactionaries.
You’ll notice in Sub-Saharran Africa there’s little difference when it comes to percentage who are “reactionaries” between the Christians and the Muslims.
Really, I don’t even remember you. That said, if you make statements that are “bigoted claptrap”, I will call them “bigoted claptrap.”
It’s not a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on your posts.
You’ll notice that I didn’t use the phrase “bigoted claptrap” to refer to your rather foolish claims about “Wahhabi reactionaries.”
The same is true, of course, for the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War – both of which helped inspire the U.S. separation of church and state.
Islam has no monopoly on the terrors of state-mandated religion.
Point of order: daughter of a previous male Prime Minister.
Point of order: related to a previous male head of state (Sukarno)
Point of order: daughter of a previous male President.
So what does this mean? We’ve had have a whole slew of male presidents with daughters. Did any of them become presidents?
Er… your point?
Miller wasn’t suggesting they were good leaders or even democratically elected or even that said countries had less sexism than the US. Just that several Muslim countries had had female leaders.
What occurs in the present bears more weight. People tend to forget the lessons of centuries past.
The implication, of course, that having a female head of state means a country has higher regard for women than the United States.
A laughable assertion, of course.
I’ll let Miller speak for himself, but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.
Isn’t
Isn’t some of Muslim extremism mostly a reactionary response to the successful ongoing Westernization of its people?
Well, has anyone come up with something it has to offer?
Well, the theory of standard alms paid to the poor on net worth is a good one. I also think the reliance on wealth taxation instead of taxing transactions is probably sound.
We can learn from those.
But the claims made about the nature of prophecy are a freaking cautionary tale. I am grateful to my youthful Bible study for teaching me that prophets are not perfect, and that any claim that a “Last Prophet” will give us the perfect revelation for all time is laughably wrong.
The Sikhs were historically known for their respect of other traditions, and the pre-Christian Romans were sort of theologically promiscuous. They still had enemy sects, but not in the same way.
Did they allow Same Sect Marriage. 
To be fair, that’s more of a question of transgender rights than gay rights. On the topic of gay rights, while many Muslim states have sodomy laws, not all do. Some that don’t are Mali, Djibouti, Bosnia, Albania, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Jordan. This doesn’t mean that all of these places are particularly tolerant of gays; most of them aren’t. But there are no laws.
Sorry, I evidently didn’t finish writing that post. Just as royalty are excluded, so these too should be excluded.