If they are doing it in the name of a particular religion, I think it’s relevant. The real war we are fighting is one of ideology if you don’t understand the ideology that is at the root of the violence (or being used to condone the violence), you are missing most of the equation.
I’d argue that the very concept that death is an appropriate punishment for difference of opinion is the biggest threat to civilization one could possibly come up with.
If Affleck is saying that (and I don’t think he is from my memory of watching the show last Friday), I disagree. I’m fine with criticizing such beliefs in ways that don’t malign vast swaths of people who may not apply.
If you want to accuse someone of a difference of degree, why not look at the victims, the people who kill unborn children for a living. You believe that unborn children have no right to not be killed on a whim by their parent, and are fundamentally incapable of comprehending the opposing view.
The only difference between Christianity and Islam is amount of power. Christianity is not as bad as Islam is now because WE DON’T LET THEM, not because they are any different. Islam is the only religion that can openly practice their repressive beliefs.
I’m somewhere in between. I agreed with what Reza Aslan said on TV recently, that Islam as a religion isn’t inherently violent–it’s about how people interpret it and act on their own will. That is true, and I think that is true of all religions. The way all major religions (and most minor ones I’m vaguely familiar with) work is you could justify great evil with them and really not just that you can justify anything or denounce anything. Usually secular powers like to use religion to do just that when it furthers their interests–fortunately much less so in the developed world.
At the same time I agree with Maher when he said that “if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea or drawing a cartoon or writing a book or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS.”
Especially because unless you’re just wanting to slur Maher (and I hate the guy), he’s not saying all Muslims have too much in common with ISIS. He’s saying there’s a problem in the Muslim world because too many of them have common beliefs with ISIS. The number of Muslims around the world that support violence is simply troublingly high. Is it a majority? Of course not, but if 5% of people in the United States thought it was okay to kill people for their beliefs and only 10% of those acted upon it by joining terror groups we’d have a cataclysmic crisis on our hands. I would argue that the % of Muslims around the world who seem to think violence is okay is probably higher than 5% of all Muslims, and those willing to act on it is probably lower than the 10% of those persons from my example but it’s still too high.
Is some of it cultural/societal? Absolutely. But part of it is a strong thread of internationalist radical Islam. Again, like Reza Aslan says Islam isn’t really intrinsically anything, but there is a significant international movement of hyper-violent hyper-radical Islam and it is an Islamic movement and needs to be considered as such. It’s not just Muslims who are dispossessed in poor countries who are doing this (and largely the really violent Christians are mostly relegated to that category in Africa) but first world Muslims raised in secular, liberal democracies who get enthralled with this stuff and leave comfortable lives behind to go saw people’s heads off. Even white Americans who were raised as either secular persons or Christians have signed up, so there is something appealing about the message and it’s a type of Islamic message (just like “suffer not a witch to live” was a Christian message.)
Well, and the whole Mohammed thing, too. 
With Bill Maher. I’m a secular humanist but Islam is more destructive to the planet than christianity.
Christianity had the reformation, enlightenment and scientific revolution. The middle east has had massive cultural shocks due to the oil boom over the last century. It isn’t the same thing.
Back in 2001 Freedom house documented the giant gap for human/civil/political rights as well as functioning democracy in muslim vs non-muslim countries.
http://freedomhouse.org/article/new-study-details-islamic-worlds-democracy-deficit#.VDMrz_nibAA
However there has been some improvement since then, mostly nations going from ‘not free’ to partly free.
Reza Aslan was asinine to claim women are 100% equal to men in Indonesia. There isn’t a country on earth where that is actually true (the Scandinavian countries probably come closest but I doubt there is anywhere where misogyny doesn’t exist).
In parts of Indonesia, women can’t ride motorbikes because it is sexually suggestive. What kind of wimpy ass PC apologist calls that ‘equality for women’.
There is always bigotry to contend with though, and bigotry is part of being human. If a black male commits a crime it is used to paint all blacks badly. If an arab commits a crime it paints all arabs badly. If a white male commits a crime it is an individual thing and doesn’t say anything about white males in general. Nobody asks white people to stand up and apologize for Tim McVeigh the way people ask moderate muslims to apologize for extremists. This meme is popular in our country. If you go back 80-100 years white christian nations and east asian nations were among the most evil on earth (imperial japan, USSR, european fascism, etc) Now many of those parts of the world are among the most humane.
Nonetheless, I agree with Maher. Contemporary Islam is a problem as it impedes human rights. According to freedom house non-muslim nations do better in all metrics of human rights (although part of this could be the fact that some muslim nations are oil rich has made them more prone to authoritarian abuses). It is nice to see liberals who aren’t apologists and multiculturalists. Secular humanism and western society are morally superior to the available alternatives.
To what degree the human rights issues of muslim countries is due to Islam or oil or a dysfunctional middle east (half the muslim majority nations on earth are in the middle east/north africa region) I don’t know.
I noticed that the YouTube video was removed. Here is another link to the exchange.
Crap. It’s getting pulled down everywhere. I’m not sure where to find it. Maybe HBO’s site.
A political movement is like a pyramid with the largest number people being the moderates forming the base with a smaller number of extremists emerging from that and a progressively smaller number of extreme extremists emerging from that, until you get a very small number of people crossing threshold to violence. This model can apply to most religions as well as things like the Vietnam protest movement, the pro-gun movement, the anti-abortion movement, even the environmentalist movement.
But some pyramids are more, shall we say, inclined toward the violent extreme. So compared to other movements, Islam can be portrayed as a skinnier pyramid that squeezes a larger percentage of its adherents up towards the violent extreme. That plus the very large number of mid-level extremists who support the death penalty or other harsh penalties for apostasy or blasphemy, or who think someone should have been prosecuted over the Danish cartoons, or who simply applaud the latest terrorist attack against the West and you’ve got some grounds to criticize Islamist culture as a hotbed of hotheads.
Piffle.
When they come out with bullshit that “they are going to kill you,” they are setting up the beginning of a syllogism that is going to end up with, “We need to get them first.”
And if we stuck with going after the crazies, I would support the movement. However, as soon as Maher or anyone else drops the word “Islam” into the equation, it immediately changes from an opposition to violence and “the crazies” to a bunch of nonsense about all the rest of the Muslim world.
= = =
What is the point of “It’s about whether it is true or false” if we are not going to do something about it? And if one believes that it is true, than just what does one propose that we do?
The current evidence is not that Islam is a problem, but that various social conditions are a problem and, for various odd accidents of history, the majority of those social conditions currently occur in the Muslim world. The Hutus and Tutsi are primarily Christian. The Tamil, (who appear to have taught Muslim fanatics the “benefits” of suicide bombing), are primarily Hindu. Muslims who have moved to Europe and North America have overwhelmingly moved away from the views associated with Islamists and Fundamentalist Islam.
In fact, it would seem that the most productive way to bring “Islam” into the 21st century, (for those who believe that necessary), is to make sure that Muslim countries are given access to Western economies. Neither Turkey nor Indonesia have been hotbeds of Islamist unrest or Islamist philosophy and the locations in Indonesia where such attitudes do prevail are the areas subjected to forced modernization and suppression of their religion during the anti-Communist hysteria. As long as Maher and his ilk continue to pound the drum beat of “Islam,” we are likely to see conflict prolonged.
It also does not help the situation when people fail to take the time to educate themselves so that they continue to spout these errors as if they were Muslim issues:
Both honor killings and genital mutilation are phenomena that occur in specific cultures crossing religious boundaries. They are not “Muslim” in any sense of the word. Proclaiming them “Muslim” out of ignorance or malice is nothing more than rhetoric that pointlessly inflames the discussion.
To me, religion is just a distraction. If you could wave a magic wand and make religion disappear, that whole region would still be a bloody mess. And the west would not be completely with out fault because of it.
Not meteors?
In all seriousness, I agree with the general sentiment here–just not the hyperbole.
I don’t agree with either side on the issue, but I feel Afleck almost demonstrated Maher’s position by attempting to shut down the conversation with accusations. Maher would have dug himself his own bigoted hole if he was allowed to finish.
The polls they refer to isn’t a fair assessment. If you polled Americans "is it OK to commit acts of vigilante justice against pedophiles?’ you’d probably get 90 percent of people saying yes. That does not mean 90 percent of people are encouraging or are actually OK with vigilante justice.
It doesn’t? 
What does it mean then?
Are you going for the literal “well it only means that 90% of the people who responded to the poll support vigilante justice against pedophiles”?
Islam is a violent religion.
And Catholicism is a religion in which mothers and fathers willingly give their young boys like modern-day Isaacs into the hands of their child-fucking leaders, to be raped and molested in the name of God.
But when Catholics do shitty things, they know it’s shitty, so they hide it.
Unlike Islamic beheadings, they don’t do it publicly on TV.
And then proudly announce that they intend to do it to the whole world.
See the slight difference?
To quote someone from a Muslim majority country via Reddit:
And why aren’t there Christian theocracies?