That paper’s the Daily Mail, right? How reputable is it?
This, and for nearly every discussion about Islam or any other religion. And maybe any other belief label.
Discussions about what “Islam” is (and whether “Islam is the enemy)” almost always come back to someone’s overly-broad distillation, or to one individual presented as the archetype for the whole.
The most difficult thing for a modern Islamic believer exposed to the general trend of western thought is a reconciliation of Islamic foundational text with the direction of the modern world. Christianity and Judaism seem to be over this hump for their sacred writings (and Christianity has the advantage of the New Testament which essentially blows off the entire Old Testament whether or not they admit it).
Islam, as a general practice, has not yet gotten there on average. Since sacred texts are typically the centering guidepoint for the practical execution of religion, it’s a tricky dance to throw off centuries of practical culture which have been influenced by the wholesale adoption of sacred texts. The Qur’an is very similar to the Old Testament wrt to misogynistic, believer-biased, culture-of-the-times-specific admonitions.
There is a reason Islamic-majority cultures suck for women, non-believers, and defenders of freedom for thought. The reason is the Qur’an, much as it would be for a society which accepted the Old Testament as the grounds upon which to construct laws. After you get past the good stuff (Don’t steal) you get to the shitty stuff (cut off the hands of thieves).
The reason Islamic-majority cultures suck is NOT “Muslims.” People are people; generally trapped within the belief structures within which they are raised.
One hopes the march of science and western education will undermine enough divine authority of these religious texts to permit a gradual segue from following them to precisely to using the religion mostly as a basis for holiday traditions.
One hopes.
Nothing I have posted suggests that the Wahhabist movement or Daesh or al Qaida are not serious problems.
When one moves from the condemnation of that branch of Islam to a general fear or hatred of all things Muslim or Islamic, one is actually supporting Daesh. The kids being recruited have generally been those who do not feel welcome in their own home country. Creating a situation in which a kid is seen as “the enemy” for doing nothing more than practicing his or her religion is going to inspire more of them to believe the Daesh propaganda that it is setting up a Muslim “paradise.”
Why would one presume that every Daesh recruit has “ten supporters”? Most of the families of those emigrants have expressed horror or sadness that their kids left. The Sun famously posted an idiotic, seriously flawed survey a few weeks back implying that 1 in 5 British Muslims support Daesh. The survey was dumb, the conclusion was wrong, and the answers to the badly worded question produced almost the same response from a different survey that was not aimed at Muslims.
Here is a different perspective.
You are going to be better off focusing on actual issues than lumping together all Muslims or acting as though all Islam is the problem instead of looking at the actual fringe that is a problem.
The Daily Heil? Really?
As any paper can be it depends on where you stand, it does lean towards the right, it can be provocative but this is a good thing. Most U.K. papers have quoted the Government saying there are no no go areas the D.M reported the police saying that there are nogo areas. To get a balanced view of the news, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, right, centre and left
Sarcasm really? Nothing constructive to say then
I agree with this. It’s what I’ve been saying all along.
You’re the one who blundered when you said that science has “falsified” God. It’s done no such thing. Science has ignored the concept of God, because it is, as you say, content free (from a point of view of measurable and observable reality.)
The concept cannot be falsified. That’s because it is content free. Can you falsify “Knobility essemes Pnobility?” No! You cannot falsify that statement. And Science cannot falsify God…for almost exactly the same reason.
You overstated the case, and that was your mistake. Since then, you’ve just been smokescreening, and you’ve also been damned insulting about it. Just admit you said more than you meant, and move on.
As reputable as any other Hitler-supporting, immigrant-hating, falsehood-spreading skeevy tabloid.
Not to someone who cites thereligionofpeace.com and the Daily Mail seriously.
You are obsessed with your determination to put forward that drivel cannot be falsified. But you have persisted in leaving an implication that something which cannot be falsified might somehow exist.
That’s your fundamental confusion.
Have you paused long enough to figure out whether or not the idea that non-scientifically based drivel is “non-falsifiable” is worth even pointing out?
What happened at the front end of this ridiculous sequence on what science is and isn’t is that I submitted that science and western education will drive away religion because science falsifies the supernatural.
And it does.
Contrary to your best hopes for the possible existence of my Tooth Houri and eternal sexual pleasures for someone, somewhere, her probability of existence according to science, is exactly zero.
I hope that does not bum you out, and if you want to make a scientific case that her probability for existence is greater than zero, not only will I listen to it, I will upgrade her yet again to a feature of your choice!
Just let me know what feature you would love the most. (Your permanent erections, and her double set of really good boobs plus a dingle-berry free double vagina’ed perineum are already included, at absolutely no extra cost.)
You gotta like me for that, right??!!
Your move. Non-falsify away at your leisure, scientifically speaking. 
This is supposed to be a debate that means that there has to be more than one opinion If I am in a meeting I will sometimes play devils advocate to open up a discussion so that the subject will be fully explored. Yes I am a man who leans to the right of politics that does not mean that I ignore the left, being of the right does not mean that I am a racist far from it. In the new year I hope to read some Hebrew scripture, I already have a copy of the Quran beside my Bible. Even my own religion (Christian) has problems with me, I question everything, For me to accept anything I do not understand by faith is worse than no faith at all.
No, he really hasn’t. And I’d suggest that your inferences are not his fault.
On the contrary; your confusion comes in inferring what has not been implied.
No. Science falsifies specific claims made about the supernatural. Science falsifies claims that science can address. It fucking well ignores everything else.
That is, frankly, one of the more insulting things you’ve said in this thread. And it’s in plenty of company. You are coming across as extraordinarily rude, and your continued obsession with graphic depictions of your strawhouri are almost as repulsive as your continued insistence that your interlocutors desire its existence. Stop it.
If some of the many statistical claims relating to Moslem family sizes, Islamic polygamy, Islamic license for Moslem males to marry with non Moslem females (not visa-versa) et al. are to be believed, in 100 years - if no ‘abatement measures’ are taken - the ‘Moslem ratio’ will be a lot higher than 1:5. (…there is a ‘one hundred years from now’.)
I like how you backed up your unsupported assertion about unidentified “statistical claims” with a link to a fact-free racist cartoon graphic.
Silly me, I clicked on that link thinking it might contain some actual statistical data that could contribute to a reasoned debate. You’d think that with all the Islamophobes we run into on these boards I’d have learned better by now.
To be fair, I sort of have, and sort of haven’t. I put forward a kind of hypothesis – “We live in a sim” – that is not exactly spiritual, and is no more than an extrapolation of existing technology – in which a “Tooth Houri” might exist, because the sim operator could program it in. So, I’m actually guilty of this to a minor degree.
I raised the separate question of whether the “this is all a sim” hypothesis is “supernatural.” It doesn’t belong with ghosts and spirits and gods…but it is still operationally nonsense.
Anyway, Kimstu schooled me on it…rightly so…and in any case it is not in any way important to my schooling Chief Pedant for his own blunders.
Chief Pedant: Is your argument now that because I may have made a mistake, your mistakes are “okay?” Bad reasoning!
Yes: because it contradicts your erroneous claims about science.
That’s your central blunder. No, it doesn’t. It cannot, because it lacks any kind of tools with which to make that kind of assessment.
This is exactly correct. Science can (and certainly has!) falsified the claim, “The world will end on October 21, 2011.” (It didn’t; the claim is clearly false.) Science cannot falsify the claim, “God is everywhere, but cannot be seen.” As you say, science ignores this claim. It is operationally meaningless, which is not the same as “false.”
Agreed. He’s not advancing his credibility in any way by that kind of language.
Holy crap, that was offensive. And, as you say, absolutely fact-free.
They are not to be believed.
The Pew Research Center studied Muslim growth across the world and throughout Europe. If current (2011) rates continued, Muslims would expand from 4.5% to 7.1% of the population of Western Europe by 2030 and expand from 6% to to 8% of all Europe (including Russia and Muslim majority Albania and Bosnia). And that was at then current birth rates. However the birth rates are actually dropping for Muslims who immigrated as they followed the historic trend of fewer children in industrialized societies.
The U.S. Congressional Research Center, also in 2011, came up with a projection of 7%.
And those numbers were based on the assumption that Muslim birth rates would not fall. Yet the opposite is true. As places such as Turkey and Iran have become more urban, Iran’s average family size has fall from nearly 7 children per family in the 1980s to 1.7 children per family (lower than several European nations) while Turkey’s family sizes fell from 6 children per family to 2.15.
The current wave of refugees/immigrants will certainly change the lower projections, but as the immigrants become urbanized, there is no reason to believe that they will maintain higher birth rates.
Yes, well, our opinions on how much respect ought to be given to non-scientific beliefs differ, and you don’t think much of my opinion. I’m ok with that. I think relativism in terms of epistemology is harmful when you have only one demonstrably useful system for establishing common ground in terms of knowledge, and disrespect and disdain have their place in bringing about social and behavioural change, so we’ll part ways on the topic here.
You will recall that the (Hadith-based) Islamic Houri is enormous (90 feet tall), beautiful-breasted, hairless except head, and pleasured by the permanent erections of the dead faithful.
It’s not clear to me that my Tooth Houri is more repulsive than the Islamic one. In fact, although she has some upgrades, she is basically the same paradigm, no?
Perhaps you can clarify how my harmless substitute is insulting. I was hoping to find a parallel a bit more neutral so that we could avoid insulting a religion.
As to science: It easily addresses and falsifies my Tooth Houri within the scientific approach to establishing what exists. Science can reasonably prove–to the satisfaction of science–that consciousness is dependent on a living, active brain, and that neither consciousness nor permenent erections exist for the dead.
Again, if you want to argue that there is a non-scientific epistemology within which the Tooth Houri might exist, enjoy. But I still await your explanation of why science thinks she may exist, and what potential above zero science would assign to that possibility. Feel free to use any scientific principle you want to coax me into thinking science assigns her a non-zero possibility for existing.
I fancy myself a cult-free supernaturalophobe.
I am a scientific laser into the darkness of epistemologic nihilism.
And don’t be taking my sunshine away just because you are smarter and more articulate. I know when I’m right, and I’m not caving on this one. The straightness of the entire Dope hangs upon a slender thread of linguistic nuance, and I’ll not see it broken to protect anyone’s religion. If we lose falsifiability by championing a dadaist epistemology over the practical advantage of scientific rigor, the conspiracists will overrun the Board tomorrow.
God help us all. 
I was not intending my complaint about Islamophobes to be a dig at you in particular, although I’m willing to consider you one of the Islamophobes if I see evidence for that hypothesis.
The usual symptoms of Islamophobia include:
1) some variant of “I condemn all religions equally, especially Islam”,
2) making essentiallizing claims about the inherent nature of Islam somehow being intrinsically and fundamentally bad in some way,
3) employing True-Scotsman arguments to claim that oppressive and violent groups of Muslims are somehow more “truly” Muslim than other Muslims are,
4) cherrypicking isolated Qur’anic passages for literalist interpretation entirely divorced from historical context and the rest of the Islamic scriptural tradition such as hadith,
5) ascribing anything bad done by any Muslim to the pernicious influence of their faith rather than to their personal shortcomings as a human being, whereas the bad actions of non-Muslims are blamed on the perpetrators as individuals,
6) evaluating events in Islamic history by anachronistic absolutist modern ethical standards while treating the history of other religions more contextually,
7) spreading outright lies and deceptive fearmongering about Muslim groups and individuals who aren’t actually guilty of anything, usually with some degree of racism thrown in.
I will leave it up to you and other posters to form your own opinions about how well that shoe happens to fit you.