Well, we’d better hope they are really marginalized, because if you call people’s favorite group “un-Islamic” you inflame those people even more than they already were. Although I doubt fundie Muslims care what an apostate US President has to say about the subject.
Well, to hear some tell it Obama is allowed to do this because he’s secretly one of them.
Thank goodness then that he’s not the first to claim to know so much about who is a Muslim and who isn’t.
Thats pretty much my point. They’re bad enough as it is. The government doesn’t have to lie about them to make them worse than they are.
I for one would prefer that the POTUS not tailor his speeches to the stupidest parts of society. But yeah, this is the same pablum Bush sometimes worked into his speeches to placate moderate Muslims.
I don’t think it’s intended for moderate Muslims at all. I think it’s more for the American peoples’ consumption. “Don’t hate Muslims, these aren’t real Muslims.”
Fortunately, the positive effect of this kind of talk has been to make American critics of foreign policy twist themselves into logical knots trying to explain how our foreign policy made the masses of Muslims angry but that we shouldn’t then blame the masses of Muslims for the blowback.
You think that is controversial? Go and ask people living in Islamic states whether they think such concepts are controversial.
They mean what a particular flavour of Islam wants them to mean at any point in time, as and when it suits a particular purpose. This includes both benign and harmful interpretations.
Do you think Sam Harris should be able to do what centuries of Islamic scholars have failed to do and give a clear description of what each concept means to all muslims?
You do accept that harmful interpretations exist and that they are not always marginal?
Pretty sure it is an opinion piece and a damn fine one at that. What part of it needs to be testable, exactly what do you object to in his writing, in what way is he wrong?
Oh it is a mealy-mouthed phrase alright because mainstream religion relies upon being mealy-mouthed. That allows everyone to take their own interpretation and for everyone to be right.
Yet you admit that the phrases have no set meaning, so how would it be meaningful to ask people if they believe them?
In my opinion, most Christians believe a vague metaphor will bring them love and happiness. Do you agree with my opinion?
His argument is that violence is the core of Islam, but all he says in support of his argument is that most Muslims believe X, where X is a set of beliefs that you admit are vaguely and differently defined. That’s what’s known in logic circles as a terrible argument.
Simple. Ask them what they take those phrases to mean. Or give them a violent interpretation and ask them if they agree with it.
Sorry, that’s too mealy-mouthed for even me to understand. What vague metaphor?
I’ve re-read his piece. That isn’t the point of what he’s saying.
He says quite rightly that the Koran verses and hadiths contain violent language (you cannot argue with that) and that taking a benign interpretation of that language is what modern muslims do but that the violent interpretation is also widespread.
But that’s missing the point. Harris is saying almost all Muslims support this thing. If most of them define it differently, then it is meaningless and useless to say they all support it. That’s what makes it a bad argument.
Exactly. You have to know the answer to that question before you can answer mine.
He’s not just saying it is widespread in the quoted passage. He’s saying it is the equivalent of not eating pork. That’s unsupportable nonsense, and demonstrated by the fact that he can only support it with a nonsense argument.
Does he though? I can’t find the part of the piece where he says that. I’d honestly be interested in seeing that if I’ve missed it.
You’ve lost me. I don’t know what point you are trying to make here.
But that is precisely it, according to the word of the scriptures it carries the same weight as the pork-dodging. Just as in the bible the bits about two types of cloth, beard styles and cheeking your parents are equivalent to the other laws, they are just as clear, just as divinely commanded and yet?..they are ignored or rationalised away.
Well, Christianity can boast the whole covenant crapola, “Jesus means none of this other crap is valid, all you gotta do now is say the words ! Because Jesus is magic !”.
Not that if ever prevented Christians from quoting the OT for support for dark stuff when convenient, of course. To this day, too - in some parts of Africa they don’t fuck around with “suffer not the witch to live”.
But that’s sort of the point, too. Christians in the Occident have, by and large, mellowed out. Part of it is due to tiredness with bloody internecine warfare, but then Islam is no stranger to that. A larger part of it IMO is wealth, distraction, and education. You don’t go out to stone adulterers when there’s a whole new season of *Galactica *to catch up with, and you don’t go out to stone adulterers when you’ve studied Kant.
I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that die-hard jihad motherfuckers mostly hail from the wrong side of the global tracks, be it the favelas of Saudi Arabia, the jungles of Malaysia or the goatherding hills of Afghanistan. These people are fully aware that something is fucked up with their situation, particularly in contrast with the rest of the world which they get glimpses of (as through a scanner, darkly…). They get somewhat misled as to the root causes, that’s all.
Although Dawkins can go fuck himself, with all due respect - their earthly woes are, in large humongous part, due to interference from the West. Look back a mere 50 years and Iran wasn’t quite so fucked up - until it became hastily necessary to fuck it right up for Reasons. Even Afghanistan used to be kind of chill back in the 50s. So reducing the problem to “it’s all because Islam ! Bad religion is bad !” is pretty goddamn simplistic, and Dawkins should jolly well stick to ethology without trying to throw an “n” in there and hoping nobody notices.
What has this got to do with Richard Dawkins?
good job no-one is making that argument then.
I’d suggest religion is very much a part of human ethology so no conflict there. But even if he does stray into ethnology so what? Is that area inherently bad, unproductive or evil?
All this is by-the-by though as Dawkins didn’t write the article I quoted from so I don’t know why you’ve brought him into it. I tend to see people using his name as a knee-jerk response, usually by people who haven’t read what he has written (and by “read” I also mean the paragraphs before and after the contentious quotes that are normally reproduced stripped of context and nuance.)
Sorry, that bit of my post wasn’t replying directly to you anymore, but to the quote from post #94. I also misread - so make that “Sam Harris as published on Dawkins’ site” (cf. post #94). But since it’s published on Dawkins’ site without comments or caveats, one presumes he endorses the article implicitly. So I won’t withdraw my comments viz. his pressing need to shut the fuck up.
Of course they are. The Harris quote is at least a somewhat cogent and academic expression of that retarded but fairly common sentiment.
I pray you won’t ask me to dig out cites on the existence of this notion in the West in general, or the Dope in particular. I can’t be having with no two minute searches on post content ! (even if I only have to trawl through Magellan’s or Magiver’s* oeuvres majeures*).
Of course not. But a) when [del]Dawkins[/del]Harris says the idea that militant islamism has nothing at all to do with Western fuck-fuck games with the geographical area and it’s all liberal, bleeding heart hand-wringing to avoid coming to grips with the notion that ISLAM BAD RELIGION, he’s *sorely *mistaken; and b) if the (or at least some of the) root causes of militant islamism have to do with economics, geopolitics, local beefs and so forth, then that means there are ways to do away with it others than the genocide of 1.6 billion people as advised by Fox News.
Well that’s an interesting stance, I mean…completely wrong-headed but interesting. Dawkins and Harris have disagreed before. I have no idea if they agree on any or all of these points.
You are throwing hyperbolic statements around and choosing not to back them up. Fine, your choice.
yep, that is the hyperbole I refer to. Do they say that? Do they make those sweeping claims? If so…quote it and lets discuss it. If not…you should have the intellectual honesty to step back from that claim.
and the lame attempt to link Dawkins and Harris to Fox new…priceless
I think the geopolitics part of it is overstated. There are countless peoples angry with the US, but only one foreign group looking to attack Western targets. Our foreign policies have contributed to the problem, but frankly if you want the one thing we did that made this the problem it is, it’s that we simply bought their oil.
But Islam is different than every other religion that has ever existed on earth. Sure, every religion on the planet takes and interprets texts within an inch of their lives according to cultural, economic and personal needs. But Islam is different. Just look at how Senegal, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Qatar are pretty much exactly the same.
There is only one group attacking Western targets?!?! Sweeeeeeeeet! Time to rebook my vacations to Honduras, North Korea and South Sudan!
You’ll have to explain. Honduran and North Korean terrorists are looking to attack Western targets?
When Dawkins, Harris, and many other popular atheist authors write on religion itself, they don’t do a very good job. Their insights are not particularly respected by academics and they perpetuate flawed assumptions.
However, they do serve a good cause as advocates for religious non-conformists, and certainly popular Western liberal discourse on religion in general and Islam in particular is shallow and patronizing, and critiques of it are welcome. So they aren’t useless. The problems in the article are not so much in the observation that the brutal actions of ISIS (sex slavery, beheading of captives, smashing ‘idols,’ etc) can also be found portrayed in a favorable light in Islamic sources (Qur’an, hadith, tafsirs, military histories, etc.), but in the obstinate refusal to place this observation in a context useful for actually addressing the immediate and structural problems that Harris claims to care about.
Looking for Obama to fix the broken way people publicly talk about religion is asking for a lot.