and what does that say, that when the “rules” are in place you are nice and civil and when the rules are not in place, every other word from you to someone you disagree with:
is an insult
it’s not just me
you’re insulting - everyone - who disagrees with you
Whether or not religion is inherently stupid, I’m comfortable with saying that when it get mingled with politics, religion’s opportunities to seem stupid multiply exponentially.
Yeah, you’re right. I completely misread that paragraph.
I remember a part in The Most Human Human where Brian Christian describes a particular chat bot attempting to pass the Turing Test. The book, for those unfamiliar with it, describes the annual attempt to write chat bots that could seem so human as to trick human testers. Anyway, this bot would reply to you - regardless of what you said - with insults and attempts to pick a fight. It was a surprisingly effective strategy. The bot didn’t have to handle context awareness at all - it would never have to look back any further than your most recent comment, and wouldn’t have to understand that comment in any kind of context. It could just pick out a few words, twist them into an insult, and reply. This so effectively mimicked human fights that human testers had trouble telling if they were talking to a bot or not. However, in the end, it wasn’t effective enough, since it was nothing more than a one-trick pony. Human testers eventually realized what was going on and corrected labeled it as a bot. I think - and this is the part where my memory is most fuzzy - the bot was named something like ‘remora’. Anyone remember?
Hooleehootoo
The Grand Mufti
The Saudi Elite
Wahhabis
Salafist
Saudi Preachers Do Not taunt Hooleehootoo
The Wahhabi Salafiste Hooleehootoo and Do Not taunt
The Grand Mufti
Does Islam have a person whose job it is to speak for all ( the right kind of) Muslims everywhere? Does that person have a title or is Ramira just a name?
Well, you are a bit better behaved today than normal. I’ve seen you positively vile and bitter.
Never, however, have I seen you act in comportment with the following. Not even on your best day:
“If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. …
To me there seems to be a bit of fuzzy sets here. A lot like asking if a semi truck is a car or a hamburger is a sandwich. (Or if you want something more extreme, if an airplane is a car). They’re clearly different in many ways, but they have shades of similarity.
In English we often use “priest” to mean “religious leader”. You see it in fantasy all the time, where priest is practically shorthand for “devout person of a given religion, who possibly head an establishment of that religion.” They often very rarely have any real relation to catholic priests.
So a rabbi might be like 0.1 a priest, or 0.5 a pastor or theologian. Just like 26C might be both"warm" and “hot”, or an airplane is in some respects the same as a car. Of course, lack of specificity can lead to misunderstanding, but I think it’s a disservice to discount all analogy between the fuzzy set of “religious leaders”. Monks, priests, imams, muftis, rabbis, pastors, nuns, friars, popes, patriarchs, elders, and bishops all have some degree of similarity to each other, even if when directly compared one on one they have various degrees of striking differences.
Coremelt was making a bad point, because the differences were important in this context, but I don’t see anything wrong in the general case with using “priest” as a shorthand for “nonspecific religious leader”.
Well, you have to be careful, you do not want to end like that soviet antarctic scientist that was killed with an axe by another fellow scientist after a game of chess in the 1950’s, the tale goes that the Soviets did ban chess in their Antarctic facilities because of that.
Well, the interesting discussion can come by noticing that some books did report that incident and banning. But the mods at Reddit marked it as unverifiable. I tend to agree because chess is one of the great Russian obsessions so I do wonder if that piece of Antarctic folklore was true.
I think that, similarly like propaganda that was set against Russia, then that tale feels made up. Almost like the one one made by the sources from the OP. It mat be true that the cleric did made that fatwa, but it is more likely that the Saudis are mostly ignoring him.