I hope you are not trying to pretend from this post that it’s as bad to be a woman in a western country as it is to be a woman is a Muslim majority country. There is absolutely no comparison of the oppression and general hideousness of it.
I also hope you are not pretending that any sector in any Muslim majority country is permitted to openly condemn Islam or insult the Prophet (PBUH). Expressing an opinion that Mo was basically a demented asshole is a trip to the executioner.
Then why is the UK so much less religious than the US, even though it has an official church?
You’re wrong too though. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that fewer and fewer people are religious, especially in the developed world. As other societies get richer and more educated, there is every reason to believe they will follow similar trajectories.
I went through a number of articles and while they’re good at satirizing Pakistani and Muslim attitudes, I didn’t find a single thing that I could classify as blasphemous(or even attacking the religion, as opposed to fundamentalist followers of it). A more specific cite would help your case.
The US comes to mind. Even though there’s a higher percentage of Americans identifying themselves as non-religious now than there was fifty years ago, the depth and impact of religious belief on our culture is in many ways much more profound. We’ve got massive evangelical Christian movements significantly affecting children’s education, women’s access to birth control, the Christian-radicalization of large chunks of the armed forces, and so forth.
I definitely wouldn’t describe religion in the US as being “on the wane” now versus, say, in 1965, when lots more people went to church but most churches weren’t so vigorously engaged with de-secularizing American culture.
Similar Christian-conservative upsurges in political and cultural activism have been occurring in other countries, such as New Zealand and the Netherlands. So really, what you describe as a “waning” of religion seems to be in many developed countries more like a simultaneous movement of religion in two opposite directions: a decline in superficial religiosity among moderate and liberal believers, and an increase in religious fervor and activism among conservative believers.
Religiosity has a strong heritable component anyway, so talking as if it’s going away is kind of dumb, unless maybe large-scale genome editing starts to happen.
No, of course I am not. I am saying that, like the world as a whole, there are parts of Muslim societies where women are far better off than others.
Correct, generally. But there are pockets all over of entire communities that are very secular, and just as opposed to the misogyny in Islam and Muslim countries.
Well, you are both right and wrong. It certainly can get an author killed, but it is still done. These types of things might not usually be said completely openly, but there are whole sub-communities where these sentiments are tolerated and quite common.
My point here is that no matter what we do, there is no way we are going to just parachute in and drop our ideals on their heads, since there are already hundreds of millions who already share them.
Not at all close actually. Satirising the state of Muslim women in Pakistani society is not nearly the same thing as criticising the religion or Muhammed.
Much closer is this article that satirises attempts made in the Pakistani media to vilify Charlie Hebdo. Closer, but it still doesn’t come actually close to criticism of Islam as a belief system or of Muhammed as a ‘prophet’. Given that there is a death penalty for blasphemy in Pakistan, it isn’t surprising that such is the case.
This. Coulter is a troll. She has admitted that many times. The fact that some people choose to follow her and believe what she says she really means shows that some people want to have an enemy to oppose. That goes for people that agree with her and those that disagree with her. We’d all be better off to just ignore her.
So you think religion is on the rise because the waning number of adherents are more tenaciously strident?
LOL on that twisted logic.
It’s on the wane. The remnant that clings may be becoming more strident. I don’t know how to measure that. Certainly within Christianity, the newer generations are vastly more tolerant of various belief systems as nearly as I can tell.
Here’s a Pew study graph showing the rise in “unaffiliated,” e.g., for Christians.
Well, you could prove it to yourself by going to any Muslim majority country I can think of and publicly proclaim that Mohammed was a complete asshole while handing out cartoons of him looking ridiculous.
I can’t personally think of any Muslim majority country where you would not be immediately stopped by officials (if you had not already been stopped by a citizen), and where there would not be a demand for your execution under either official or Sharia law.
I don’t know where you get the idea that religion can’t be undergoing two different kinds of trend simultaneously.
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Here’s a Pew study graph showing the rise in “unaffiliated,” e.g., for Christians.
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And that study bears out what I said:
In other words, some more mainstream and tolerant Christians have been redefining themselves as (or being replaced by) the religiously unaffiliated. My point is that that’s coinciding with more intolerant Christians more aggressively pushing their beliefs into secular culture and government.