I have worked directly with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, Protestants, and Catholics. Nobody gave a shit about anyone else’s faith and we all got along. The terrorists of 9/11 no more represented Islam than Stephen Miller represents Christianity. If you want to point to barbaric laws in Muslim countries or portions of countries, it wasn’t that long ago that Christian nations executed people for theft or adultery or homosexuality.
You can’t point to small numbers of an incredibly large group and use that to justify bigotry and hatred. But we see people do that every day- I often see assholes posting on Facebook pictures of people supposedly murdered by “illegals” and using that to absolve the ICEtapo of any reason to feel guilty about executing people in the street. We have people who would gladly rebuild the Auschwitz gas chambers in the US (or more cowardly, in El Salvador) and send undocumented immigrants there.
I’m not going to post again in this thread or give it a second thought unless the OP tags me and publicly apologizes for calling my faith a mental illness when I have a mental illness that turns me into a racist, suicidal, homicidal maniac on my worst days. V You can just fuck off straight to Hell with that attitude.
I have read most of the Koran. I used to play a game, opening a Koran, a Torah, and the New Testament at random and reading a paragraph.
Yes, there’s a lot in the Koran about conquering and killing the infidels. And an awful lot is excruciating details about exactly how much of what wood was purchased from where to build the temple in Jerusalem in the Torah.
You know what, every religious person in the world reads their holy books selectively, no matter what they claim about it. Christianity has fairly uplifting core texts, and yet they used those texts to justify perpetrating the crusades, the inquisition, and lots of pograms against the Jews. And other people read the same texts and decided they had a moral imperative to free America’s slaves.
I am about halfway through the Koran (in translation of course) at the moment. If I’m going to be accused of ignorance of Islam, I will at least partially remedy that by going to the source.
Of course I guess there are as many interpretations of the Koran as there are of the Bible. Which I know pretty well, having been brought up in a Church of England primary school where it was a primary reading text. Not that I am religious these days, but everyone should be familiar with it as literature.
Yes, the only holy book I’ve read in its original language is the book of Mormon. Sadly, Joseph Smith was a terrible writer, and the whole thing reads like a parody of the King James Bible.
(Note: A more modern transliteration is “Qur’an”.) I have, for one, and parts of it in the original Arabic.
And, not being an ignorant Islamophobic bigot, I don’t automatically equate the harsher-sounding passages in the Qur’an with the entirety of the doctrines and ethos of modern global Islam.
Any more than I automatically equate Biblical passages about the slaughter of the Amalekites or stoning adulterers to death or calling homosexuality an abomination with the entirety of the doctrines and ethos of modern global Judaism or Christianity.
You are making it more and more clear here that you’re one of those self-professed “atheists” who use their occasional ostentatious denunciations of religion in general as a smokescreen for their real purpose of expressing Islamophobic bigotry.
And it’s giving serious post-9/11 flashbacks. I remember a lot of clueless Americans back then parrotting this same sort of Islamophobic broadbrushing smears, right down to the naive “but the Koran tells them to do these horrible things!” essentialism.
But dude, that was nearly a quarter-century ago. If you are still trying to pull this sort of broadbrush Islam-bashing under the threadbare cloak of ”hey I’m just a noble principled atheist who’s just SO MAD about ANY theocratic oppression (although I only bother to complain about the Muslim kinds)!!”, then in addition to being an Islamophobic bigot, you must be thick as shit.
Haven’t read that one, I suppose I should at least scan through it.
I should read more of the Buddhist literature too. Though it;s hard to know what is really ‘authentic canon’ there: it seems that even the earlier writings date from at least a couple of centuries later than the historical Buddha…?
Do you believe you, as a Briton, have the moral authority to talk to anyone, anywhere at any time, about barbarism? You were once the empire that the sun never set on. Literally.
No argument with that. I think he’s an incredibly dangerous loose cannon. Not that I could have voted for him, since I retained UK citizenship: but I certainly wouldn’t have anyway.
I agree. It’s not bigotry to condemn any particular dangerous or irrationally activist ideology. Bigotry happens when one condemns the entirely of a large and diverse group for having the characteristics of a small extremist minority. The 9/11 hijackers were pretty clearly motivated by Islamic fundamentalism, though there can be a fine line between religious and political ideology. But condemning all Islamic people for that reason is plain bigotry. Fundamentalist Christians can be just as bad, both historically and even in modern times.
One of my co-workers some time ago was Muslim, and was one of the kindest gentlest people imaginable. He later turned out to be back-stabbing asshole, but that had nothing to do with religion, and was all about office politics. The world is a complicated place, and so are our relationships with our fellow humans.
Are you even listening to yourself here? In one breath you’re holding moderate Muslims responsible for allegedly not doing enough to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, and in the next you bristle all over your white fragility because somebody dared to hold you responsible for not doing enough to condemn white supremacism and enslavement of nonwhite peoples.
Humph! Why, you as a white person are TOTALLY SEPARATE from the legacy of white supremacy and oppression, yes siree, you aren’t even personally descended from enslavers!
Nope, you should be aware of it, but not wrecked with guilt. And you are under no obligation to being it up all the time.
Moderate Muslims don’t like to be wracked up with guilt for extremists in far-away countries, either. And yet, you expect them to constantly do this for you.
Aw, did I hurt your feelings by using a personal insult in the Pit thread that you started so you could use swears and insults freely? Yeah, we’ve already seen plenty of evidence of your double-standard thinking process.
(That said, I will acknowledge that I usually refrain from directly applying insulting epithets to other posters even in Pit threads, and for the sake of my own more stringent etiquette standards rather than any nonexistent violation of official Pit protocol, I’m willing to hereby retract and apologize for that insult. Please do not feel in any way obligated by that to discontinue your prudent resolution of ducking further argument with me.)
