I suggest you threaten to burn a symbol of the Buddha and let us know what happens.
You’re grasping at absolutes in an attempt to explain proportion.
*I’m *grasping at absolutes ? That’s pretty rich, coming from you.
I think **tomndebb **has a great point there. If Islam is and was horribly terrible all the time, and it’s fundamental and intrinsic to Islam because of the Koran and Muhammad and whatever else, such that Islam is bound to be about all suicide bombers all the time ; then how come it demonstrably hasn’t been about that over the past thousand years, give or take a decade ? How come ISIS is a *new *blip on the radar ?
Surely we should have seen intransigent, ultra-dogmatic violence the whole time, in every place a Muslim community emerged.
Islamic Finance is…
Well, the Salafists have been around since the mid-1800s or so. There have been other traditionalist movements since Islam’s conception.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Islamic revival refers to a return to the pure fundamentals of the Islamic religion. Revivals have traditionally been a periodic occurrence throughout Islamic history and the Islamic world.
[/QUOTE]
And while ISIS is barbaric to the modern day West, which is culturally Christian and vacillating between moderate Christianity and nontheism, mass bloodshed on the part of those seeking to establish a polity is perfectly normal historically. In other words, ISIS is an abnormality now but would not be on a longer time horizon, especially for the ME.
So, totally entirely unlike any other religion ? 
'cause I dimly remember something about Reformation, and have vague recollections about something violent or other happening about that… over a few centuries…
That’s the crux of the issue. Nobody’s denying that there are Muslims today who are into troublesome acts because they hold troublesome ideas. That’s one thing.
Going from that to asserting that it is strictly because of the religion they practice, and further asserting that the religion itself is not only to blame but the *only *thing to blame and the root of all evil is another, much stupider and simplistic thing. And a dangerousthing.
I’m very ambivalent about you, of all people, making my point for me.
You think Jews are stupid?
Why?
No;see this post, for example.
Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ approximately one standard deviation greater than the average IQ of Whites. A controversial explanation for this observed phenomena explains that it is the result of selective evolutionary pressure on Ashkenazi Jewish populations.
The correlation is not definitive in the case of Islam. There are many hundreds of millions of gentle, genteel, ordinary, decent, kindly, and peaceful Muslims.
Also, there have been hard-core fundamentalist Buddhists! Around 1963, they took over Burma for a while, and, while they didn’t issue any death decrees, they did put a ban on leatherworking, which was particularly hard on the Muslim minority, many of whom worked leather as an industry. The Buddhist fundamentalists also banned insecticides and pesticides, and started a mini-famine when rodents and insects got into all the granaries.
So…absurd as it might sound to us, today, yes, there have been deadly harmful acts by Buddhist extremists.
“Controversial” is an interesting synonym for “untrue.”
Human intelligence does not evolve in that way. (Human intelligence can’t even be measured unambiguously, but never mind…) It takes more generations than Jews have even existed for major physical traits to appear and stabilize. The same would be true for large-scale behavioral traits.
There has never been any evidence for genetically linked human behaviors. Every human population has about the same proportion of heroes and cowards, moral paragons and thieves/murderers, and smarties and dullards.
You’re simply denying reality. Your belief – generally known as the blank slate - has been extensively debunked in Steven Pinker’s eponymous book. A host of behavioral and mental traits are the results of genetics; perhaps the best known individual gene is Monoamine oxidase A. Human intelligence can not only be measured reliably and accurately via IQ tests, but intelligence is the most reliably measurably psychometric trait, by a large margin. There are extensive studies on the nature of intelligence and probably thousands of IQ tests on various subgroups. A statement like “there has never been any evidence for genetically linked human behavior” flies in the face of established scientific evidence and indicates a close-minded and anti-intellectual viewpoint. If you’re going to annoy an entire field of scientific research, why not ignore something more disconcerting, like climate change?
It’s certainly plausible that Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is the result of genetic drift. I’m not an expert on that. But it’s indisputable that Ashkenazi Jews have higher average intelligence than do any other group.
I’m not sure courage and cowardice or morality is a measurable trait, but it quite probably varies by ethnicity. Intelligence is certainly an attribute of both environment and genetics; approximately 1 in 31000 people in the DRoC has an IQ of 130 or higher, compared to approximately 1 in 6 Ashkenazi Jews. The differences don’t merely exist, but they are enormous.
This is incorrect.
Also incorrect.
[QUOTE=Mainstream Science on Intelligence]
“Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments.”
[/QUOTE]
Where’s yours?
Here’s just one. A few seconds of Googling turned up hundreds more.
You’re linking to a single news article by a single unimportant writer based on one study. Mainstream Science on Intelligence was signed by 52 of the leading intelligence researchers. It’s not just a more valid source; it is one of the most valid sources in the entire field of psychometrics.
Quiet, you.
All ethnic groups are all exactly equally intelligent.
Any deviation is simply the result of error in the medium of test.
(Let’s not actually explain that logic. Let’s sleep comfortably in our PC bubble.)
And you are ignoring, (deliberately, perhaps?), that the letter that so impresses you was an effort by industry insiders to defend their industry and does not, itself, provide any serious scientific claims about ethnicity and intelligence.
Gee, psychometricists defend psychometrics (and their stipends and grants). That must mean something.
That’s certainly possible. But the letter is actually fairly moderate on some of the more critical issues – it refuses to suggest that genetic factors could account for racial differences in intelligence. Moreover, your opinion amounts to a conspiracy theory and is a much less plausible explanation than believing a group of esteemed researchers across the ideological spectrum at their word. You haven’t presented any evidence in favor of your belief, so I’m inclined to disbelieve it.
Let me ask this: if psychometric research could be utterly and completely invalid due to a psuedo-conspiracy on the behalf of researchers involved in the field, why could this not be so with climate change? Both make empirically testable conclusions, and climate modeling is much more difficult to understand with higher barriers to entry than psychometrics.
Believing that every ethnic group faced identical selective pressures, that founder effect was insignificant, and that all groups are consequently exactly equal in every way is a much less plausible belief than believing that different groups have (on average) different traits and abilities.
Islam isn’t a genetic group, nor is it confined to a single “race”. I fail to see the relevance of this tangent.
The point is to establish that intelligence differences between different racial groups, likely routed in genetics, exist.
I have made no claim of conspiracy and I see no point in debating point with which I have no agreement.
Intelligence is clearly something about which many people are interested. With that interest, people are going to study it in different ways–including trying to measure it. Once a method of measure was introduced, it directed all future behavior among those who study it. There are certain (disparate and inconsistent) correlations between the method used measure intelligence and other social phenomena, which have resulted in a reinforced view that the measure actually works. That the measure of what is regarded as intelligence and the measure of the other phenomena correlate due to other factors simply gets dismissed. The notion of g is simply accepted without any actual explanation of what it is. (Interestingly, there is no attempt to measure a g equivalent for athletic prowess as everyone recognizes that certain abilities preclude other abilities, but the multiple varieties of intelligence are blithely summed up in one number, despite the fact that they are also recognized as being diverse.)
Any claim that group X is “smarter” than group Y is suspect based on the issues that we still do not know what is being measured, that the various tests administered to different groups have not been demonstrated to actually cross cultural boundaries successfully, and that the tests administered to the same ethnic groups produce differing results when administered in different locations or in different years.
I have no problem with the idea that different groups might display different results on tests. When such tests are presented as evidence of group level intelligence, they are, for the reasons presented above, silly. When the test scores indicate of one group show up at levels that would be considered dysfunctional in another group, yet both groups actually function, the test results are clearly wrong.