Sure, there have been a lot of changes since Martin Luther. What I’m disputing is how many of those changes are attributable to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The rise of Protestantism wasn’t a gentling or moderating influence on Christianity, it was a theological and social schism no less violent than the one between Sunnis and Shiites today. You seem to have confused the Protestant Reformation with the Enlightenment. While it’s arguably true that the former caused the latter, it did so by triggering over a century of brutal sectarian violence.
This is a little unclear–do you mean some Christians, all Christians, Christianity as a bloc, something else?
The fact that there are places with less freedom than the U.S. doesn’t detract from the fact that there are also places with more freedom than the U.S.: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are examples, specifically in the area of religious oppression. The U.S. has, currently, more religious oppression (from right-wing fundamentalist, pseudo-Christian ninnies) than those countries have.
The fact that my neighbor has cancer is no reason for me to pay no attention to my other neighbor’s influenza.
I mean this exactly with the same specificity as:
“Muslims are not our allies”
“Muslims are not our allies under any circumstance”
“Muslims operate on a retrograde, patriarchal, anti-Enlightenment basis”
“Muslims get a pass because they’re not western and non-Caucasian”
“There’s a group of dedicated Muslims who want you dead”
“Muslim countries would reduce my lifespan to a matter of seconds”
“The non-vast majority of Muslims resemble 15th-century crazy”
“Little has changed in the Muslim realm”
That is, if Muslims get a pass because they’re not western and non-Caucasian, then clearly Christians get a pass because they’re white and western when they kidnap or rape children.
My point is to make Magiver and SlackerInc acknowledge that yo, what they’re doing is pretty shitty. There is nobody actually on here defending Muslims. In fact, the liberals they’re railing against seem to be a lot harsher on Muslms than they seem to be on Christians. I don’t know much about SlackerInc’s posting history, but I know for a fact Magiver is willing to give people a free pass on bigotry as long as they’re Christian, yet turn around and claim liberals make excuses to defend Muslims, with absolutely no evidence backing that claim.
I mean, there are a group of dedicating Christians who don’t just want me dead, but have specifically gotten laws passed in other countries to murder homosexuals. Yet the media totally gives these people a pass, refuses to acknowledge them as hate groups, nobody holds them responsible, etc. Why is that, and why is the “liberals are allies to all Muslims”, which can’t even be supported with a shred of evidence a bigger deal?
Seriously? What religious oppression do you find in America that’s so absent in Great Britain or Canada? ISTM more of a cancer versus a bad cold situation.
CarnalK: The U.S. has a pretty substantial Bible-based and organized opposition to abortion rights, just to begin with, which is able to translate their dogma into actual legislation. The U.S. also has a very long history of using zoning laws to block the construction of non-Christian churches, while permitting very similar Christian churches to be built.
(There was a very long-running case of that in Escondido, California, where a Hare Krishna church was prevented from obtaining a construction license, on entirely spurious grounds, where Christian churches were not being blocked.)
This isn’t “Nazi” level oppression. But it is a level of religious oppression that doesn’t happen in Canada.
And…yeah, I don’t mind saying it’s like a bad cold instead of influenza. I just want it acknowledged that it does happen here, and that there are places where it isn’t as bad as it is here. Magiver’s “Go to Saudi Arabia” jab was out of line. The fact that there are worse places in the world doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement right here at home.
First, you’d be hard pressed to find me on the inside of a religious building, Christian or otherwise. Second, I’ve taken on bullies in HS who where picking on what can only be described as effeminate males. And I’ve made my position clear about any clergy member who would harm children.
I do claim somebody in this thread made a broad brush statement regarding conservatives and it appears you’re starting to walk down the same aisle.
You want to cite that they were denied a permit because this is what I get when I google hare krishna escondido CA
Pick any Muslim country. Better yet, pick wherever you’re standing and make a public statement about burning Qurans or pissing on an Islamic anything and see what happens. We can and routinely make fun of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism etc… in the United States. We’re darn good at poking fun at ourselves but Og help the schmuck who draws a cartoon or writes a book or makes a movie that blasphemes Mohammed. It literally becomes a death sentence.
I notice no one has anything to say about the Islamic version of “Book of Mormon”. Just sayin’, the silence speaks volumes.
Right. And while the majority of Muslims may not personally participate in riots or terrorism, there does not appear to be a lot of social opprobation for those who do. ISTR opinion polls from a reputable group like Pew showing bizarrely high levels of support in the Muslim world for Al Qaeda, for instance. And didn’t a poll show that a large number of *British *Muslims supported suicide bombings?
Straw man, big time. I am not proposing “glassing” them. How about treating them like international pariahs, as progressives rightly fought in the 1980s to do to South Africa? Republicans were on the wrong end of that one, saying we shouldn’t meddle in another country’s internal affairs. Democrats were right. IMO we should be doing the same to countries like Saudi Arabia until women and gays there have full legal rights.
And yes, of course the same applies to those African countries that oppress gays under the aegis of Christianity, with the support of the American religious right. But just because I don’t talk about every other thing that’s bad in the world doesn’t mean I can’t talk about why Islam is bad news.
The permits were approved in 2003…then deferred again and again and again, due to neighbors’ protests. The putative grounds were that the temple would increase traffic in the neighborhood. But Christian churches of equal size in identical neighborhoods were approved and weren’t delayed for ten years.
No, the guy was probably right. It would not be a happy day in Stalingrad.
However, “the silence speaks volumes” is fallacious. Maybe no one responded to you because the way you phrased the challenge put people off. It might have been your breath. The point is, you can’t say, “Tell me why I can’t have a cookie” and then claim, “No one said I couldn’t…so I did.”
Silence doesn’t “speak volumes.” Silence is silent.
OK, you want to back that logic train up a bit. What’s an “identical neighborhood”? And how are you comparing this to … anything? If someone asked me if I wanted a large church/school/store/airport/park/whatever built next to my community my vote would be no unless the roads were improved to accommodate traffic. I’ve seen a number of lovely neighborhoods turned into traffic nightmares over this.
So far you’ve built a mountain of national condemnation out of nothing.
You’re entitled to hold that opinion, of course; but just asserting it, when it is not widely shared, is not worth much. A Google or LEXIS/NEXIS search for “silence speaks volumes” or “silence speaks louder than words” etc. is illustrative.
And I continue to maintain that if any of my critics in this thread had a rebuttal for the thought experiment, we would have heard about it by now.
But getting back away from that meta-issue, the thought experiment really hits at the heart of why I just seethe about these riots. I am the type of person who really enjoys engaging in, or observing others engage in, a nice round of cheeky blasphemy. And it enrages me that if it’s done about Jesus, it will mostly just make the devout wrinkle their noses or whine to Bill O’Reilly; but if it’s done to Mohammed, it’s cause for riots in the Muslim world which require the blasphemers, even living in the West, to take extreme security measures. The death threats tend to be supported by other Muslims actively or tacitly (another example of why silence isn’t just silence).
For me to think that I can’t dare voice these opinions except behind an anonymous handle online really galls me. There is pretty much nothing else I say on this board that I wouldn’t stand behind in a signed letter to the editor; but I value my life and that of my family too much to do it on this issue. So pardon me while I vent my spleen in the only manner I feel safe doing, while getting caught in a feedback loop of aggravation at being reminded of this fact.
I agree that Muslim extremists are extreme. Muslim extremists are extreme, and they are more extreme than most (or all) Christian extremists.
The leap I don’t get is why “Muslim extremists are extreme” must equate to “Islam is bad news.” That’s the leap I don’t get. I mean, I’m an atheist, so I think Islam is silly. But why does the existence of extremists within Islam make Islam itself contaminated? Does the existence of extremists in America make America bad news?
From my vantage point, we tend to lump foreign things together and tease domestic things apart. All Muslims, then, seem the same, while Christians come in many flavors. So one Muslim represents many or all, and one Christian represents only herself.
I noticed you haven’t said a single word in condemnation of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Your silence speaks volumes…
Agreement. The opposition is trying to leverage the matter farther than they would for other religious outrages. They are seeking to convince us that Islamic extremism is intrinsic to the faith, while making sure that Christian extremism is widely separated from the faith. It doesn’t work both ways.
Many Christian extremists wish to bring about the end of the world - so many of them that that they are only “extreme” in an absolute sense, they are a major force in the religion. It’s not really practical for extreme Muslims to be more extreme than that.
Riiiiight, because a failure to respond to a germane point is just the same as not spontaneously bringing up every subject under the sun.
Same logic you used. “You didn’t say X,” therefore…chocolate chip cookies.
Bad logic. Bad rhetoric. Bad all around.
Something you said earlier in the thread makes a bit more sense: “But just because I don’t talk about every other thing that’s bad in the world doesn’t mean I can’t talk about why Islam is bad news.”
So…give the rest of us the same break you give yourself. Just because we don’t talk about something doesn’t mean we’re “speaking volumes” with our silence.
And, anyway, FWIW, I agree with the hypothetical. If someone tried to produce “The Koran” in the same style as “The Book of Mormon” – the sarcastic musical – some extreme elements of the Islamic faith would go apeshit. Same as the apeshit elements of Christianity that reacted in anger and threats to “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
What you haven’t successfully done is shown that extremism is any more intrinsic to Islam than it is to Christianity. Crusades, pogroms, inquisitions – is Islam really that much worse?
So your defence is that they are 500 years behind in terms of civilised modernity. Um, okay…I would hate to live in the West 500 years ago, but this is not 500 years ago, this is 2014. I am very thankful to live in a modern world that has become ever more progressive during my lifetime. I would much rather live in the modern day West than even that of 50 years ago (Mad Men era) as so much has improved for women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians; and it is beginning to shift also for those who smoke weed and the nonreligious. Good times.
And so maybe the Islamic world will get with it eventually–that would be great. But the fact that they are currently dragging their heels and lagging so far behind is not to their credit; quite the opposite in fact. The Europe of the Inquisition era was awful; but they did not have the example of a large and highly visible progressive sector of the planet that they were thumbing their noses at. The Islamic world does have such an example before them, and they very strenuously reject it–which is doubly damning to them as I see it.