I did respond to you. I noted that your fabricated comparison of the entire world of Islam to a small and circumscribed pacifist sect was irrelevant to ant serious discussion of the world.
Clearly, my sarcastic use of Northern Ireland destroyed your silly analogy, but we can modify that easily enough. Let’s use your analogy and substitute Christianity for Islam and Saudi Arabian Sufis for Amish. Would you accept a million dollar bet that the terrorist was a Sufi instead of a Christian?
When you answer questions I asked of you, I’ll entertain answering what you pose. If you don’t like the first question I asked you, how about the second regarding ranking.
Ready, set, let’s GO again. Let’s see the slitherin’ and obfuscatin’ of which you are the Master.
Doesn’t your belly hurt by now, or is it completely calloused?
Nah. I wouldn’t want to interfere with your xenophobia. My question was rhetorical to get you to look at what you were actually doing, but I see that your shields are up and you are not able to actually examine your position.
Too bad, really.
Jesus is a cunt and your a nutjob, and that’s all the time your going to get out of me. So sorry.
Sorry, but you’re saying that Amish and Quakers aren’t christians? A quick scan around indicates they certainly think they are.
Magellan’s just attempting to justify his prejudice by selective choice of samples, pure and simple. Rather than saying “Pick 100 christians and 100 muslims at random, which group has a terrorist in”, he’s picking a particular sect of Christianity that’s renowned for pacifism. Tom’s correctly pointed out just how stupid this is, but obviously Magellan’s not likely to start listening to argument at this stage of the game.
I’m going to pick 100 nominal Christians from Glasgow who just happen to attend old firm matches, have ICF tattoos and sing various songs about the Pope, then I’m going to pick 100 children under the age of 6 from Indonesia, then I’m going to ask which one of the groups contains a football hooligan. There you go, undeniable proof that christianity leads to football hooliganism.
I believe there must be a point where it seems that one or some posters are not at all interested in having ignorance fought or fighting ignorance, but rather engage in constant games of ‘let’s see how inane a thing we can post and still prod someone to answer it as though it were a serious rejoinder’.
Just a theory. A theory which is mine.
Well, sort of, but it just isn’t that simple — not because the concepts aren’t simple, but because there’s so much equivocation with “Christian”. The Amish may technically be Christian in one sense, but the Log Cabin Republicans are technically Republicans. The Progressive Democrats of America are technically Democrats. I think that for some discussions — especially discussions about non-violence — the Amish and Quakers should be separated from the Christian Coalition and other advocates of violence. Those groups specifically abhor violence, even in self-defense. They condemn no one for anything, and they forgive everyone for everything. They’re just very different. A class all their own.
It’s a pity that you abandoned your years-long policy of ignoring me only to come out and make such a fool of yourself. The questions in my post will stand until you answer them.
That seems only fair. It’s just the other day that badchad was posting one of his screeds against Polycarp and serving notice that, until each and every one of his questions was answered to his absolute satisfaction, he was going to continue pestering Poly for an answer. Be done by as you did and all that.
(Emphasis added.)
badchad has come to believe in the Resurrection. Praise God.
Regards,
Shodan
Pet peeve of mine - why the hell is it disrespectful to women to call a person a cunt, but not similarly disrespectful to men to call a person a prick or a cock? And if I call them an arsehole, am I disrepectful to everyone?
She simply asked me specifically and in a nice way if I would stop using misogynistic pejoratives. I’m refraining for that reason. You are free to do as you wish, and I hold no grudge against you.
Then I can only assume there is no such thing as “overwhelming” evidence in your world.
Except that 30% figure has already been debunked in this thread, and countered by another study that found Muslims are less likely to be approving of terrorism than Christians. So, yeah, still easy.
Also, that’s a bong, not a hookah. Honestly, don’t you know anything?
You’ve narrowed down your list of suspects to one billion people. Yeah, I feel safer already. :rolleyes:
The question wasn’t “Why won’t you use this misogynistic phrase,” it was “Why is this phrase misogynistic?” Try to answer the question that was asked, not the question you want to answer.
Wow. Very well said.
Except, of course, that the Amish all live in a relatively small geographical area, under the same stable, democratic, economically prosperous political system, and their small numbers allow them to form tightly knit societies that make it easy to enforce their core values. Muslims can be found all around the world, often in nations that are unstable, tyrannical, and impoverished. If the Amish all lived in Darfur, they either wouldn’t be pacifists, or they wouldn’t be alive. And if there were a billion Amish in the world, they wouldn’t be able to maintain their close-knit society: Amish living under adverse conditions would be more open to unorthodoxy and extremism.
So, all else being equal, yes, you’d expect the same distribution of violence in all relgions. But all else isn’t equal, so the comparison is meaningless.
I don’t think either “side” of the issue is right here. On the one hand, magellan01, people are correct to point out that correlation does not equal causation. It may be completely coincidental that so much bad shit is done “in the name of Islam”. It may just be an accident of history that the regions of the world where the seeds of terrorism and hatred are so brewing are largely Islamic.
At the same time, however, I feel that the other side of the argument is starting with an unfounded belief: “Islam is a religion that teaches peace and love and is just as ‘good’ as any other religion, certainly as ‘good’ as Christianity, and any violent-seeming quotes from the Koran are irrelevant outliers”, and then, because it’s very hard to disprove that statement, continuing to believe it. Trouble is, the reason they believe it in the first place is not because it has been proven, but just because it would be nice if it were true. The world would be a wonderful and multiculturally ideal place if Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism all were basically equally happy and peaceful and loving religions, all totally balanced and equal and equally good. Thus, we assert that that’s the case, and treat it as so, even though a statement as vague and broad as that can’t really be tested or proven at all. We believe it because we want to believe it.
Ask yourself this: suppose there WERE a religion that was exactly the way magellen01 thinks Islam is. That is, it contains seeds in its teaching which make it more likely, but not definite, that its believers will believe bad things about women’s rights, gay rights, use-of-violence, etc. So among adherents of that religion, the rate of “bad things” would be causatively and predictably higher than among the rest of the world, but would not be 100%, or even 50%. Would your reaction to this religion be any different than your reaction to Islam?
I think it’s a tough question. I mean, what do you actually do? What if you realize that this hypothetical provably-bad-not-universally-bad religion exists. How do you respond to it? I mean, there are still plenty of people following it who are NOT bad. Do you refuse to be their friends? Refuse to let their places of worship into your community? Refuse to let them fly on planes? Have security clearances? Become teachers?
What about Saudi Arabia, the subject of this entire thread?
Dang Liberal. If I’d been schooled like you schooled badchad, I’d run away too.
Pathetic. Remember how P.R.R. used to admire badchad’s “knowledge of scripture”? It doesn’t exactly take much knowledge of scripture to cut and paste lists of problematic Bible quotes from some anti-religious webpage or another.
Woah. I’m sorry my response triggered that sort of reaction. I didn’t intend either to evade you or to anger you. I may even be using the wrong word altogether. As best I recall, Zoe’s request was worded something along these lines: “I just want you to know that I stopped using ‘fundie’ because you requested it, and I wonder whether you would stop using insults that refer to women.” I asked her for clarification, but I don’t believe she ever provided it. So I took it upon myself to interpret her request as best I could. I think “cunt” is misogynistic in the same way that “nigger” is racist. That’s my opinion. Like I said, if you disagree, no sweat. What I agreed to do has no bearing on you, and should be of no concern to you.
ETA
On posting, I see that you tagged Gary. My apologies for the mix-up. The essence of the post stays the same.
I remember it well. I do acknowledge that Poly doesn’t need me or anyone else to defend him. His knowledge of scripture is orders of magnitude greater than mine. In the case of Badchad though, I’ve always thought that my primitive arguments would be more effective than Poly’s nuanced ones. Badchad is a swine, and tossing him pearls is a waste of time and resources.
I would not have called Saudi Arabiua stable. Everything I’ve heard about it has indicated an oppressive society in which the very rich use weapons and the importation of (effectively) foreign slave labor to keep large numbers of their own population from having the wherewithal to rebel. Osama bin Laden first went to Afghanistan because he could work out the hostility he felt at home on poor kids drafted by the Soviets to get killed in Afghanistan.
(Iran is a similar example. The people appear to be held in check by religious police and most of the more savage displays are carried out by the cadre of true believers recruited by the ayatollahs to impose that order. As a nation, the people were inching away from that sort of government until some idiot called the nation part of an “axis of evil” and gave the ayatollahs the excuse to ban opposition parties and bring out their terror squads, again.)
I am not quite willing to make this an absolute declaration. I suppose I would have been better off making it a general trend, but since we do not see the same sort of babarity in Indonesia (when they are not fighting for power), Malaysia, Turkey, and similar countries, I suspect that as a general rule it still holds.