No, it rests on the fact that one of the world’s five or six major religions, which has been with us for centuries and has hundreds of millions of followers, is going to be with us for a while yet and the rest of the world can do nothing to change that short of genocide. That would be the case whether any acts of terror were committed in its name or not.
I never said that. I object to Yahvism as such, the notion of a single unappealable spiritual authority defining our morality and truth for us and demanding our exclusive worship, and, in some variations, threatening eternal torment for failure to comply; the aggressive history of the Abrahamic religions is a secondary consideration. (At least with polytheism you can play one god off against another . . .) It is that which the world would be better off without, regardless of whether it had ever led to religious wars or not.
Force-feeding will only provoke ever stubborner and fiercer backlash. Has that not happened every time it has been tried? To the extent Western secular liberalism is better (and it is), the only way to teach Muslims that is by example. Invading their countries does not set a good or persuasive example.
Indeed I meant to force-feed our ideas (primarily through Western media) but certainly not through physical force.
Also, having leaders with the testicular fortitude to speak openly for human rights rather than kow-tow to political correctness would accelerate the process.
One more reason why Trump is not qualified for any public office.
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He said, “if mosques were indeed radicalizing their members.”
I suppose you would allow such mosques to crank out terrorists. But what if they tried to open a charter school? I mean, there are some lines a liberal just won’t cross.
No human institution stays in its “current state” forever, so it’s a completely meaningless statement to say that Islam, in its current state will change. Besides, there are any number of “current states” that Islam is in right now. It is, in fact, nonsensical to refer to “Islam’s current state”, in the singular.
This is just way to simplistic to be meaningful. There are vast swaths of nominally Muslim humans, who probably value secular liberal freedoms more than you or I. There is no need, or ability, for us Westerners to teach anything, other than just a bit by our example. The Koran commands us to read, and dares us to find another book that compares to it. All Muslims have to do in order to discover the superiority of science, reason, and secularism is to follow those instructions. And so many have, past and present. Any intervention of any kind, rhetorical, military, economic, ect, at any level, (or non intervention) will have the effect of joining forces with some segment of Muslims as they exist today. The right thing to do is choose who we side with and support more based on our valuesthan our interests. We can afford it.
It is without the comparisons I gave as context. Islam will likely change such that it’s doctrine is less important both to it’s adherents and their societies, as have other religions.
No it’s not. We can even refer to the current “state of the universe” and everything in it when discussing the future, without ignoring that the universe is very complex.
Not true, I don’t think. Today there are 1.6 billion Muslims, which is more than one fifth of world population. I don’t know what the figure was a hundred years ago, but every source I’ve ever read about related demographics agrees that the share of world population that is Muslim has grown significantly over the past few generations.
That said, what matters for world events isn’t just numbers, but also fervency. In that category, the trend is towards more extremism and fundamentalism. 50 years ago, nearly the entire Middle East and North Africa was under secular governments. Leaders may have given lip service to Islam but were generally uninterested in killing apostates, banning liquor, or funding Madrassas worldwide. Over time, fervent religious groups have either taken over countries (Iran, Palestine), formed rebel movements (Boko Haram, ISIS), or had rising influence within a government (Saudi Arabia).
To simply believe that Islam, or the more extreme type of Islam, will naturally and automatically decline, as Hank Beecher or Chief Pedant say, does not match the facts. Radical Islam is growing quickly in size and power.
Well, I don’t know about that. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims live in South Asia and Southeast Asia, where religious feeling sometimes gets kinda nasty as Lady Gaga can tell you, but jihadism as such has yet to gain very much traction – some, but nothing like in the MENA. And you know what? Those are also the parts of the Islamic world where Western powers have done the least meddling as of late. A connection, perhaps?
I wish I could travel through time to tell Israel to not worry then.
Seems to me that it is mostly the current concentration of power and money in the middle east that is distorting this, and IMHO a lot of the power we are seeing from these extremists will disappear once the wealth of many of their supporters begins to fade.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel
-Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (Don’t think he is a supporter of the extremists, but there are many rich guys in those places that do and were also a reason for the rise of DAESH/ISIS )
To the past, although any time in the future will do, I was thinking of the 6 days war, when the so called secular rulers of Egypt and Syria wishfully thought that there were going to have lunch in Tel Aviv in a few days.
Originally Posted by** Chief Pedant** “Islam is going away. At least, it will go away if we can keep government and religion reasonably separate.”
What pulpit are you living under?
Can you think of a developed country (no fair saying, “Vatican City” )where religion is not on the wane now versus, say even 50 years ago?
And particularly so for the kind of religion that has this idea its tenets derive directly from the mouth of an Almighty whose dictums for behavior supercede mere earthly inventions.
I repeat: Religion is well on its way to becoming a variety of holiday traditions.
That’s why the influx of deeply religious Muslims inclined to put Allah above state is so disturbing to so many westerners, who privately think that Allah’s dictums were a bit of a scam, and that Mohammed was full of shit. Having relegated their own beliefs to customs around marriage and funerals, they aren’t inclined to be tolerant of people who get marching orders from Above instead of Washington.
In all fairness, Ann Coulter really has no objective other than to pander to the millions of idiots who believe that “dropping a nuke on Japan got them in line” so she can sell her books and get paid for spots of Fox News.
The whole anti-Islam thing is a bit of a red herring anyway. What percentage of the 1.5 billion Muslim’s are radical extremists? What percentage just support them? The Paris attacks were carried out by 8 guys with perhaps another 20 providing direct support. The Boston Marathon bombers were 2 guys. It doesn’t take a lot of lunatics to create a lot of trouble.
Certainly not, there are no entire countries where this is true generally. But then again it could be said that the entire Earth is not a good place to be a woman, with some sections and subsections that are better than others. The same is true of Islamic majority countries; there is substantial dissent from the general misogyny, with large numbers of men and women with strong, liberal secular ideals. Look, for example, at the support for Malala in Pakistan, or the protests in Egypt against the refusal of the Islamists to recognize the UN Declaration of Human rights. An example of the dissent: WE’RE ALL RAPE ACCOMPLICES.
Entire countries, no. But large social cohorts where this is acceptable, and even considered admirable? Yes. Absolutely.
Of course, part of the discussion is merely semantic. Muslims who are critical of Islam generally, Mohammed particularly, or of other Muslims, are very likely to be labeled apostates by their coreligionists, and even self hating bigots by other Muslims and regressive leftists. This is not the only reason, but it is certainly one of the reasons that you are more likely to encounter a Jew who self identifies as a Jew, who won’t even blink at the notion that the stories of Moses are fairy tales, than you are a Muslim who openly admits that the foundation of Islam is myth rather than fact. Ali A. Rizvi: Why I Call Myself an ‘Atheist Muslim’
)where religion is not on the wane now versus, say even 50 years ago?