That’s fucking sick.
Well…then, we’re agreeing. But what you describe seemed to me to be well summed up by “they make up their religion as they go”.
A while back there was a study which showed that 15% of Spanish teens confused “being an abusive ass” with “being manly”. The press started collectively raising its hands in a wave of RO, until someone asked “ok, and what was that same stat in, say, 1980? You know, back when a husband beating his wife within one inch of her death was still viewed as normal?” That question turned the subject from “OMG our teens are morons!” into “how can we better educate that leftover minority?”
The evolution of those uncomfortable stats is quite good, I’d say.
Ibn Warraq, what would your personal take on the main question be?
Call me when the percentage of people in Pakistan who support execution by stoning for adultery drops to anywhere near 15%.
We’ve talked about what kind of mechanism would bring about such a change. Not sure what it would be but the internet is certainly playing a part in the transfer of thoughts. It’s why we see attempts to control facebook and other types of social media. The same thing that links terrorists overseas may bring about a change in the general consensus.
It might happen rapidly as older generations fade away.
I’m not sure why all Muslims are being blamed for the beliefs of Muslims in Pakistan.
We generally don’t blame all Christians in the world for the beliefs of Christians in Uganda or Nigeria.
Beyond that, you’ll notice that Pakistan, Jordan, and Egypt are all post-colonial countries with rather ugly histories involving colonial elites and missionaries so they would have particular antipathy towards people trying to convert Muslims away from their faith.
Similarly, Christians in communities with long histories of being conquered and/or exploited by Muslims take a dim view of people trying to convert Christians to Islam.
In fact, in Iran, many of the Evangelicals arrested for proselytizing weren’t turned in by Muslims but Christians furious that they were trying to convert people away from the Armenian Church.
I strongly suspect that a poll of Egyptian Christians would have found their own views of people who “abandon Christianity” aren’t terribly different than that of Egyptian Muslims.
For that matter, Greece, has long taken a dim view towards missionaries and jailed Jehovah’s Witnesses and others who attempted to “spread the word”.
I don’t approve of such laws or beliefs as should be obvious based on my family history, but I can understand why Iranian Armenians and Egyptian Muslims disagree.
Well you’re welcome to post more examples for discussion regarding apostasy in any of the religions. This is what I got from Wiki:
Iran – illegal (death penalty)[7][8][9]
Egypt – illegal (3 years’ imprisonment)[9]
Pakistan – illegal (death penalty[9] since 2007)
United Arab Emirates – illegal (3 years’ imprisonment, flogging)[10]
Somalia – illegal (death penalty)[11]
Afghanistan – illegal (death penalty, although the U.S. and other coalition members have put pressure that has prevented recent executions)[12][13]
Saudi Arabia – illegal (death penalty, although there have been no recently reported executions)[9][14]
Sudan – illegal (death penalty, although there have only been recent reports of torture, and not of execution)[15][16]
Qatar – illegal (death penalty)[17]
Yemen – illegal (death penalty)[17]
Malaysia – illegal in five of 13 states (fine, imprisonment, and flogging)[18][19]
Mauritania – illegal (death penalty if still apostate after 3 days)[20]
Morocco – illegal to proselytise conversion (15 years’ imprisonment)[21]
Jordan – possibly illegal (fine, jail, child custody loss, marriage annulment) although officials claim otherwise, convictions are recorded for apostasy[22][23][24]
Oman – legal in criminal code, but according to the family code, a father can lose custody of his child[25]
The majority of Muslims are in the Middle East. Apostasy seems to frowned upon in Islam more so than other religions. I could be wrong.
There’s certainly some of that in there.
Interesting articles on Jihad from Islamic websites:
JIHAD EXPLAINED
The Institute of Islamic Information & Education
Brochure No. 18
http://www.irshad.org/islam/iiie/iiie_18.htm
On Terrorism & suicide-bombers
http://salaf-us-saalih.com/2013/04/17/terrorism-see-how-shaykh-al-fawzan-floored-suicide-bombers/
Having been born and raised in an Islamic state, and lived as a Western adult, my observation is that most Westerners do not understand the depth to which Islam penetrates daily life for a Muslim–particularly Muslims in developing countries.
Muslims in these areas are Muslims first, and all else second. This is true for many religions, but it’s not true for most practitioners of those religions the way it is true for most practitioners of Islam. Here in the West, one’s religion tends to be viewed as a personal philosophy, with emphasis on “personal,” and an increasing acceptance that any given philosophical paradigm (personal or religious) might contain elements of truth. This is extraordinarily different from the majority of Muslims.
The very religious right wing extremists in the US are are similar in this approach to religious belief as are the vast majority of Muslims in developing Islamic countries. So what happens is that you get very high numbers of people who believe very radical things because the baseline percentage of “conservative” believers is so much higher.
Perhaps 20 to 40%-- **20-40%! ** --of Muslims in many Islamic countries are OK with suicide bombing as an acceptable technique to defend Islam. A majority are OK with political oppression of any “blasphemy” which can include simple “crimes” such as trying to persuade someone that Islam is wrong, or that Mohammed might have been just another religious nutcase. This latter might get you executed, with relatively minimal public sympathy for the defiler of Mohammed’s good name.
There isn’t any point in defending Islam by pretending that it’s a religion of peace, or that no one speaks for all of Islam, or that most Muslims are good and decent people. All of those might be true, but they are irrelevant. It’s a numbers game. The percentage of people who identify themselves as Muslim, and who are willing to kill and be killed in defense of any and all “attacks” against their religious philosophy is hugely greater than any other large-scale religion.
I am not aware of any large-scale religion that has anything close to the percentage of violent faith-defenders as Islam. Mock Jesus or Buddha openly in a predominately “Christian” nation, and then try the same thing with Mohammed in a predominately Islamic nation to understand the difference.
It doesn’t matter that “jihad” can represent a non-violent struggle as well as a violent one. What matters is what percent of Muslims accept the violent interpretation, and those numbers are very very large because such a high percentage of Muslims are the Western equivalent of extremists in the first place.
In an odd way, I find it sort of admirable: many Muslims actually believe their personal religious views represent absolute truth, and are willing to die for that belief.
No, they’re not. Only about 20% of the world’s Muslims live in the Middle East/North Africa, and the three countries with the largest number of Muslims (Indonesia, India, and Pakistan) all aren’t in the Middle East.
In fact, if you look at the top ten countries in terms of Muslim population, only 5 are in the Middle East/North Africa (If you consider Turkey the Middle East), and if you want to use a strict definition of the Middle East, only two are, Egypt and Iran.
The majority of Muslims live in Muslim majority countries. Define it how you like. It’s the same religious mentality as described by Chief Pendant.
The majority of Christians live in Christian majority countries. What this or your above quoted statement have to do with you being factually incorrect in your statement “The majority of Muslims are in the Middle East” I don’t exactly understand.
Actually, there is a point in defending Islam on the grounds that no one speaks for all Muslims and that most Muslims are good and decent people.
Noting the distinctions between “the religion” and the large numbers of people who practice it in a wide variety of nations and cultures allows us to avoid making stupid mistakes that lead to intolerance and breeds more hatred. It would have dampened the enthusiasm for de-funding Islamic studies departments and casting loose Muslim scholars in our colleges that occurred following the WTC/Pentagon attacks so that we would now have more, rather than fewer, people trained to study and engage with Muslims on their own territory. (Something that both the State Department and the CIA could use, to say nothing of international trade.)
It might reduce the number of hate crimes against Muslims and would have shown the ridiculousness of the nonsense opposition against the imaginary “WTC Mosque” and the Murfreesboro, TN mosque.
When one sets up to condemn the religion, one eliminates potential allies within the religion. One cuts oneself off from actually being able to understand the motivations of adherents to that religion. It is simply a plea to embrace ignorance.
whatever. You want to whine about the boundaries inferred by “the middle east” knock yourself out. But the majority of Christians don’t live in Christian countries. They live in countries. Muslim majority countries incorporate Islam as their official religion.
Yes, that’s a coherent argument.
Some do, but not all. There are only about four or five which could be considered theocracies and ever that’s a disputable number.
However yes, many, possibly even a majority will have some official recognition of religion but that is true of most predominantly Christian countries as well as the world’s only Jewish country as well.
I certainly wish that more countries believed, like the US, Turkey, and France, in the complete separation of Church and State, but they’re in the minority. Most countries in the world, including ones like Canada, Australia, the UK, Norway, and a host of others believe in some mixing.
I’d suggest though, that for quite a few of these (my own NZ included), while the official separation is less than that of the US, the actual mixing is at about the level of having “In God We Trust” on the currency.
That’s my point.
The same is true in much of the Islamic world.
I know quite a few people think Saudi Arabia and Iran are typical, but what’s more common is something like Assad’s Syria which was regularly described in the media as being “secular” which had a clause in it’s Constitution declaring rather vaguely “All laws herein are inspired by the Holy Quran.”
Rather more religious than I would be comfortable for a secular country, and the problem with statements like that in ones Constitution is that it doesn’t help defuse the wing-nuttery. 
(Despite not having any statements like that, and despite Christians being at most a bare majority – and of that 50% perhaps only 1 in 5 actually church attending – we still get the occasional wing-nut claiming that this is a Christian country; much as the US does. Having a public statement that would support them really wouldn’t help).
But yes, it would rather matter more what this means in practice than the words.
Uh huh. There isn’t even the tiniest comparison between how Islam is held (politically and socially) in Islamic nations and Jesus in other nations. You want to shit on a picture of Jesus in this country, no problem, we call it art. Suggest burning a Quran in this country and people 6000 miles away go apeshit and start killing people.
Considering the fact that you were so ignorant about Muslims that you believed that most lived in the Middle East, you don’t inspire much confidence in your ability or qualifications to make such a judgement.