that’s not a logical statement to make. It presumes all-or-nothing and is an argument of absolutes.
It’s like saying cigarettes don’t cause cancer unless everybody dies from lung cancer.
No, I am not making the all or nothing claim. But if violent jihad against infidels is part and parcel of the Islamic faith, wouldn’t you expect a higher percentage of Muslim terrorists? Compared to the whole religion, the fraction of terrorists is vanishingly small.
and the young males of the extremist bent are striking out.
Islam has been attacked and some are returning the violence.
re; 9/11. no muslims attacked the WTC.
No. You’re just restating the all or nothing argument. Just because the majority of Muslims aren’t slaughtering everything that moves doesn’t mean the significant number of them who do are not doing so based on the religion. It’s not a valid argument because it assumes the jihadists are not driven by the religion which is clearly not the case.
compared to other religions it’s outstandingly high. The vast majority of Muslims approve of blasphemy laws. There is sharia law and the deeds of Mohammad that treat this as a serious offense.
yes, by their own religion. When they’re not busy killing infidels they’re killing each other.
you’re barking.
You know, you can repeat that as many times as you want, but it won’t make it true. I know what I said, even if you don’t want to.
You really can’t resist the straw, can you? Mmm, straw, tastes like losing.
Yeah, like “communism” was the enemy and before that (in the U.S. and earlier in Britain) “Catholicism” was the enemy, etc.
Piffle.
I prefer to follow genuine history instead of the nonsense that is promoted by Islamophobes. There have been times and places where Muslims have promoted all the terrible things that you claim. At other times, Muslims have promoted openness and tolerance. Every major philosophical movement has had its periods of evil and periods of good. The claim that Islam has done it more or more persistently than other belief systems is an invention of those who are more interested in promoting fear than actually studying history.
Utter nonsense. If what you claimed was true, then we would have been watching Islamic terrorism throughout the last fourteen hundreds of years. Such terrorism has only begun in the last couple of decades and every instance of terrorism can be traced to specific political or economic events. It is true that Islam has provided the rallying cry for many of the terrorists. Most of the places that have erupted in the last few decades have been primarily Muslim Third World countries where Islam had been suppressed by the First and Second World powers until they began pulling back as the Cold War became too expensive to maintain. Claiming that Islam is actually “the direct cause” is just silly and is in direct contradiction of the facts.
I am trying to separate Muslims as a people from Islam the shitty religion.
I’m not claiming relativism of any kind for one religion versus another. I don’t know how to even measure that.
I do claim that RIGHT NOW muslim majority nations suck as places to live for women and non-believers–particularly apostates–when compared with western societies.
And the reason they suck is Islam; not their inhabitants per se.
That is, people are more or less people; more or less caught up in their society/belief structure etc. I don’t think humans are intrinsically that much different from group to group for what makes us tick.
But…Islam as a religion, with its particularly hideous tenets, is what is driving those Muslim nations to be so sucky. The nations have been caught up in actually practicing Islam, versus relegating it to holiday traditions and the bookshelf. When you do that, what you get is a very shitty society because it is basically a very shitty, misogynist, paranoid religion. Much the same as if you took the Old Testament and made out of it a society actually built around Mosaic law.
Islam is the enemy of a decent society, as the Old Testament is the enemy of a decent society. They are hideous, hate-filled, atrocious structures by which to create anything resembling a modern western democracy.
Want to build a decent society? Relegate Islamic and Old Testament laws to the bookshelf where they belong and teach people how to participate in an open, democratic, participatory democracy where religious beliefs drive holiday traditions and not public policy or law.
Uh huh.
Blasphemy laws have always been taken seriously and that’s what you’re seeing every time they go crazy over a cartoon. That didn’t start last week. Trying to equate Islamic terrorism to political events doesn’t explain why all the other religions aren’t bent backwards crazy. There is no modern equivalent to fatwas or the religious training camps.
Protecting any semblance of western democracy requires being an Islam-ophobe.
You just need to be careful not to become a Muslim-ophobe.
No one should care about a private belief system freely chosen that affects only a personal mechanism for worship or a holiday tradition.
No one should should support an individual who thinks their make-believe paradigms should be the gold standard for society.
I think that in general we should encourage believers of all faiths to live and let live, and let their God do the punishments or sanctions that democracy missed, with the caveat that democracies need to protect freedom of expression and belief.
Many conservative Christians in the US believe this. Does preserving western democracy demand that I become a Christophobe and place restrictions on all Christians?
Which tenets of the New Testament do you propose are worthy of rejection in terms of how we should govern?
Certainly the Pauline injunctions against women’s roles are bullshit and should be rejected. Perhaps some others, including passages that support slavery and so on.
But generally; yes. Be a Christianity-ophobe as a mechanism by which to build a decent democracy.
Separation of church and state, and all that.
What we should do is make a modern enlightened choice about how to build a decent society. Nearly every religion has some good points from which we might draw, but we should generally be religionophobes.
Not sure what you mean by the restriction comment…feel free to expand. We should restrict any and all religions from being the arbiter of what laws should be created.
You mean like not slaughtering people for blasphemy? We’ve been over this a million times. It’s odd that people start threads on religion in Western countries that would get them jailed or killed in a Muslim country yet cannot seem to grasp the relevance of it.
This in a nutshell.
Religion by default is a belief system with no basis in scientific reality. To believe in a religion means the suspension of reality and when that occurs it’s open season for whatever fantasy the religion dictates. It would have been great if Mohammad had stated the best way to get to heaven was to jump off a cliff. It gets the true believer out of the picture and the sinful can just plod along with the guilt of sin to worry about. But when the true believer starts taking sinners with them then there’s a problem.
Applying the same restrictions proposed by Republican candidates on all Muslims because some Muslims are terrorists: block Christians from immigrating, close some churches, censor Christians on the internet, that sort of thing. If they want to impose Christ-aria law on America, that’s only one step away from slaughtering us all. Do you really want to take that chance?
except that nobody proposed what you said.
Trump: ‘Absolutely no choice’ but to close mosques
Donald Trump calls for ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims’ coming to U.S.
Trump Wants to Close the Internet
In fact, there are so few Muslims in the US for the Islamophobes who outnumber them to attack that the Islamophobes are having to branch out to attack non-Muslims as well, just for looking all brown and Muslimy.
But I suppose that’s “understandable” too.
Yeah, no.
Actually, in Europe non-Muslim terrorist attacks vastly outnumber Muslim terror attacks. (less than 1% of European terror attacks have been committed by Muslims ). And yet, strangely, you insist on calling Muslim attacks a bigger deal.
It seems hatred skews one’s perspective.
You still can’t bring yourself to condemn the attacks on Muslims, can you?
Here, then how about an article about the vastly increased rise in hate attacks on Muslims just since San Bernardino, with a quote not from the CAIR boogeyman, but the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, about the increase.
Ad hominem that.
Oh, like minimizing shootings and firebombings by implying they’re exaggerations and best, calling the lack of attention paid to these violent hate crimes “understandable”, and playing up the victimhood of those purportedly reacting to all those Muslim crimes?
Yes they are.
And yet, I’ve never seen you once refer to the likes of ISIS as “cafeteria Muslims” despite the fact that they cherrypick as much, as not more, as those Muslims you deride. In fact, you’ve gone to some length to quote justifications for why ISIS’ cherrypicking is “legitimate”.
You don’t believe that non-violent Muslims are following their religion correctly. Period.
Of course you did. :rolleyes:
Yes, I called her out for her whining that some Muslims don’t like the fact that she consistently sides with Islamophobes on even the most bigoted positions they take.
So she can fucking suck it.
And you believe his nonsense. Which speaks volumes.
So what are you disagreeing with? Shutting down a mosque that advocates jihad? Vetting refugees to avoid using taxpayer money to bring them into the country? Jihadists using our own communication system to recruit people? It’s sad that we have to rely on illegal hackers to take down their websites but that’s the current state of affairs.
Trump is using sensationalized headlines for free publicity. You might as well have sent him a check.
This is the perfect example. Thanks for posting it.
You just posted a response to the senseless slaughter we’ve seen recently (Russian airline shot down, cartoonists murdered in France, people murdered in French deli, attack at soccer stadium and concert, Christmas party in California etc…). Those are just a few of the senseless killings.
Lets add up the body count of these atrocities. 383. Now lets look at the those killed in the backlash of frustation. Zero.
Compare that to a Florida preacher who threatened to tear pages out of a book. Number of people killed tearing the book. Zero. Number of people killed rioting over it. 20.
Your post just points out the violence associated with Islam versus other religions.