Why the obsession with Sri Lanka? There are plenty of majority Muslim countries (and plenty of non-Muslim countries, like much of Central and South America) with much higher murder rates than British Muslims.
None of them. Individual Muslim assholes did, but the vast majority of British Muslims (just like the vast majority of every group in the UK) don’t commit bombings or support bombings.
Why don’t you prove your claim instead of asking me ridiculous questions.
Vast majorities of people don’t commit any crime anywhere in the world.
However, individual Hindu immigrants did not explode bombs in London based on the teachings of the Gita.
Already did – poor and troubled places like Iraq and Palestine have far higher murder rates than British Muslims.
Give the man a cigar!
But that is not true for poor and troubled Sri Lanka Muslims vs British. Hence my obsession with Sri Lanka.
Were you in doubt? Vast majorities of people don’t steal, kill, rape, etc.
Sri Lanka is not nearly as troubled as Iraq and Palestine, among other places.
This has been my primary point throughout the thread – that it’s individuals, and not communities or religions, that should be judged for bad behavior.
Why let you reiterate? You chose a single statement and tried to put words in my mouth and now you are upset that your weird claim has been demonstrated to be wrong. I have dodged nothing.
In a general discussion of the ways in which different religions and cultures wind up treating women better or worse, you claimed it was “foolish” to compare India and Pakistan when I had never done any such thing. I noted that a specific complaint against Islam could be lodged against a number of other places, notably India.
Your “objection” focused on a problem with a single country, Pakistan, as though that had any bearing on a general discussion of Islam. Does the same law about which you are so upset occur in other Muslim lands? Which ones? (You have not yet provided evidence that it occurs anywhere else.) If it does occur in other Muslim nations, do they have similar tribal, paternalistic cultures? Pointing out a single state that has a bad law says nothing about Islam if the same problem occurs nowhere else. And if a similar law occurs in multiple places, but it always occurs in Muslim Middle Eastern societies with a long tradition of tribal and paternalistic cultures, but it does not appear in Muslim countries with no similar tribal and paternalistic cultures, that would indicate that the culture, and not the religion, prompts the behavior. So, where is the evidence that the law about which you are upset occurs elsewhere and where does it occur?
My reply did not dodge the issue, it pointed out that your specific claim regarding India was in error and you still have failed to provide evidence that the situation in Pakistan can be generalized to all Muslim places.
I have not attacked you, personally. I noted that your statements were hogwash, factually inaccurate, and logically deficient. I am sure that you are a prince among men, kind to your mother and small children, and a good tax payer. Nevertheless, your statements regarding India were not accurate and your attempt to generalize a situation in Pakistan to all Islamic places is not substantiated. And since I never compared India to Pakistan, you are also guilty of a logical fallacy of presenting a straw man argument.
You are wrong. Honor killings–which occur in several societies: Muslim, Christian, Hindu, (perhaps even Buddhist)–are not religious acts, either. They are cultural expressions that are only loosely correlated with religion, not caused by it. No religion calls for honor killing and the correlation that you perceive between such killings and Islam have more to do with the reporting of such acts in regard to specific societies than an actual association with a religion. Your attempt to pretend that similar acts carried out in India are “different” is nothing more than special pleading to make a case that is not supported by the evidence.
In other words, in your opinion, as India embraces more democratic traditions and becomes even more economically advanced, its more barbarous cultural practices will be suppressed–which is what I said.
As to being a fool to compare India and Pakistan, I was not the one who made the comparison. (I would also note that direct personal insults are prohibited in this forum.)
Of course they are relevant to this discussion. I made the following assertion:
You then attempted to refute that statement by pointing to a handful of British Muslims who had committed a terrorist act, ignoring the fact that far more Muslims have neither engaged in terrorist acts, nor even supported some of the other acts of violence that are more common in the Middle East. I noted the logical error of your claim by pointing out that a number of people with no ties to Islam have also committed terrorist acts. If you want to pretend that Muslims in Europe are still being barbarous, based on a single terrorist event, it is quite fair to point out that the Muslim terrorists in Europe are not behaving much differently than any number of non-Muslims in the same Western societies.
A single act, or a small collection of acts, carried out by a tiny group of people from within a group, cannot legitimately be used to condemn all the people of that group, (unless you are willing to say that all non-Muslim Yanks, Brits, and Norwegians also share terrorists tendencies).
Your logic fails.
(It is also a bit amusing to see Sri Lanka brought up in this thread. In terms of violence, one should note that it was Tamils, rebelling against the Sri Lankan government, that initiated the practice of suicide bombers that has been adopted by several Muslim groups. The Tamils, of course, are primarily Hindu with a strong Christian minority.)
And the LTTE were explicitly secular, IIRC.
Well, while your one example may go to show that Christianity can also be violent, your cite falls miserably short of disproving the claim in the OP—that Christianity today is no longer as violent or openly discriminatory as Islam—which you state was your reason for citing what you did.
You failed to provide any debate for why it fell miserably short outside of just asserting it so.
The Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act called for the murder of gays. How does this fall miserably short of demonstrating my point? It’s extreme violence for the most trivial of reasons. There you go; Ultraviolence with ultimate discrimination.
Now to find a comparison for warring factions like ISIS who participate in war-like activities including torture and brutal executions; You would need to find a self-identified Christian militant movement. Enter Lord’s Resistance Army; A militant African-based movement who’s stated goal is ruling Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments. LRA’s modus operandi includes rape, torture, and brutal executions.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/lra.htm
Honestly, the entire OP’s premise is just silly in light of evidence and reason. Religion explains almost nothing when you compare more than just the predominately Muslim Middle-East with the predominately Christian West. Both ISIS and LRA are warring factions in impoverished, ignorant, and war-torn countries that wealthier nations manipulate into having proxy-wars. In addition to religion as a factor (icing on the cake, really) you’ve got poverty, ignorance, land disputes, power vacuums, limited resources, manipulation by wealthier nations, stress, rage, greed, and fear, and the OP, and so many others, believe it’s because ISIS is Muslim and not Christian that we see these terrorist acts; Utterly unbelievable. Islamaphobia is a substitute for any understanding of geopolitics.
I think you are all missing something about that debate. Because the discussion was about Islam, Maher and Sam Harris were of course attacking Islam. Had the discussion been about Christianity, they would have been vigorously attacking Christianity. They both believe that religion is an evil in the world, all forms of it. I have to wonder how Ben Affleck’s side of the discussion would have gone had the discussion been about fundamentalist Christians.
What you offer goes to showing instances where today’s Christianity is violent and discriminatory. That does not mean it is AS violent and discriminatory as Islam. And since you claim that it is, the burden falls to you. You’re not even close.
There’s so much conflation that happens in these threads that it gets really hard to follow what people are actually asserting. And I suspect that a lot of posters don’t even really know themselves what point they are trying to make. It could be any of the following, or some combination of them:
(a) Regardless of their individual motivations, lots of Muslims are doing violent and bad things in the world, out of proportion to the overall number of Muslims in the world when compared to Christians.
(b) Lots of Muslims are doing violent and bad things in the world because they understand their religious tradition to command this, but they would just as easily have found these commands in Christian tradition if that were the prevalent religion. In other words, political and social gripes are why they are interpreting Islam in a certain way, not vice versa.
© Lots of Muslims are doing violent and bad things in the world because they understand their religious tradition to command this, but if they had a different religious tradition, they would not be doing these things even if the political, social, and cultural circumstances were the same.
(d) Lots of Muslims are doing violent and bad things in the world because they understand their religious tradition to command this, and that is the only reasonable way to interpret Islamic tradition.
It seems to me that (a) is transparently true and (d) is transparently false. And I suspect that accounts for a lot of the illusory disagreement in these threads. I think the real disagreement is over whether (b) or © is correct. There’s obviously no way to objectively get at that question, because it involved a counter-factual, and because world religions played a big role in setting up modern political, social, and economic circumstances. But I think it is helpful to at least identify the real dispute here.
This is a good exercise. I would question D as being transparently false. The question goes to “Lots”. But it is my impression that there are Muslims, particularly those who see for to commit the worst atrocities, who believe D to be true.
I also offer: E) Lots of Muslims are doing violent and bad things in the world because they understand their religious tradition to command this. They might have found these commands in Christian tradition if that were the prevalent religion, but that is far less likely. Going to the foundations of the religion, Christ was a carpenter who instructed to turn the other cheek. Mohammad was a conqueror/warrior. And those differences can be found in the texts people look to. Sure, the Old testament is pretty violent, but there IS a New Testament, and that is what is more instructive to today’s Christians.
Of course there are Muslims who believe D is true. All religious people, pretty much, Muslim or otherwise, and especially the ones who commit extreme acts in the name of their beliefs, believe that their interpretation of their religion is the correct one and others are incorrect. This is probably necessary, psychologically speaking, for one to commit such acts.
But D is objectively false (when looking from outside) because there are plenty of Muslims who don’t believe such violence is supported by Islam, and that believe such violence is specifically denounced by Islamic teachings.
This might be more convincing if we didn’t have a horiffically violent history of Christianity to look at. The stats now are skewed – Richard Parker’s “A” is correct – but in the past, this wasn’t so. In the past, Christians were as violent and brutal as any group in history, including the justification of murdering and raping civilians.
Since we know that, for centuries, Christians were as violent as anyone, I don’t buy that there’s anything intrinsic to Christianity that makes Christians necessarily more peaceful (or more violent, for that matter) than any other religion.
Well, yes. Just as there are other Muslims who believe that it is not reasonable to interpret Islam the way ISIS does. The question isn’t really whether there are Muslims who think their interpretation is the only reasonable one–the question is whether the Hamas (or ISIS or whatever) interpretation is in fact the only reasonable one. I think anyone with sufficient knowledge of Islam would agree that there are lot of materials–from Quran, to hadiths, to jurisprudence, to reason itself–that reasonably support interpretations of Islam that do not call for death for apostasy, etc.
I don’t dismiss this idea out of hand. I’m a rank amateur when it comes to learning about Islam, but I think there may be something to the idea that early Muslims venerated their success in key historical battles as evidence of the righteousness of Islam, in a way that is not unique to Islam but perhaps more prevalent. Of course, Christians and Jews have also done this, but it is arguably more central to Islamic tradition than those others.
That said, there’s also huge parts of the Islamic tradition that are about the exact same values that Christ purportedly espoused–including turning the other cheek. There’s plenty of Quranic support and support in the hadith for the notion that violence is only justified in self-defense and a good historical argument that Muhammad’s battles (if not, perhaps, those of subsequent caliphs) were justified by self-defense. When Muhammad gave his last and most famous sermon about the goals of Islam, do you know what he said? A bunch of stuff about being nice to the poor, treating women (relatively) well, and how people are equal in the eye’s of Allah.
Just as modern Christians choose to adopt the parts of the New Testament that accord with modern values, so to do many modern Muslims choose to adopt parts of Islamic tradition that accord with modern values on violence, equality, and the rest. So I doubt the effect of the differing religious traditions is as strong as you suggest. Don’t forget there was a period of centuries in which the Christian world was much more violent than the Muslim world, and in which people of Abrahamic faiths lived in relative peace in Muslim lands while they were being burned and persecuted by Christians.
And if we were living in the 5th century, this might be a good point. But we’re not. And no one has claimed that the violence and barbarism are due solely to the teachings of Islam. If someone did make such a claim, your commentary would be apt. But no one did. Now if your position is that Christianity and Islam are equally violence-provoking, please point to those Christians living in Gaza who have killed innocents with suicide bombs and the like.
The fact is that the Koran and the Bible are different. They champion different men that were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to conquest and violence. The religions are worlds apart when it comes to how adherents should view and treat those not of the religion. Christianity suggests that one spread the word of God. Islam suggests that Muslims should kill the infidels.
Any attempt to equate the two religions as to how they exist in the world today is ridiculous.
You made the claim that because Jesus was not a warrior and Mohammad was, that has influenced the relative violence committed by Christians and Muslims. I reject this claim, because there were times in the past that Christians were as violent as anyone (including times long after the 5th century) – so I don’t think the difference in professions between Jesus and Mohammad has anything to do with this.
I could easily point to times in the past that individual Christians behaved with just as much (and more) barbarity, in large scale actions.
So Christianity and Islam certainly can be, and have been at times, equally violence provoking. Though I don’t believe most of the violence was “provoked” by the actual religion – I believe it was provoked by other factors (mostly geopolitics and economics) – and then justified (sometimes in advance) by the specific religious interpretations of those who committed the violence.
This is way, way wrong. There are Muslims who believe they should kill the infidels, but obviously Islam as a whole does not do this, because there are millions of Muslims who explicitly denounce this belief. And at times in the past, there were Christians who believed that the proper actions were to kill heretics. But it wasn’t Christianity that suggested this – it was some individuals’ interpreations of Christianity. Just like it has been now and in the past for all religions, at times, including Islam.
I was equating the two religions as to how they have existed in world history. There were times when Christians were as violent, as a group, as any group in history. This, to me, eliminates the possibility that there is something “special” about Christianity that necessarily means people will be more peaceful.
If I were Christian, I probably would be incapable of believing that Christianity is not special in this way. But I’m not Christian, so it’s not hard at all for me to believe this.
To me, the fact that Christians statistically might be responsible for less violence tells me nothing about the intrinsic teachings of Christianity, because in the past this was not so, and these teachings (or the texts behind them) have not changed significantly.
So even though Muslims are disparately represented among terrorist violence today, that doesn’t provide to me any indication that there is something especially violent about the teachings of Islam as a whole and the texts behind these teachings.
We can compare this to times in the past when it was Christians who were disparately represented among brutal forms of violence (for example, during some of the Crusades when the Muslim rulers of the time were relatively liberal and allowed Jews to live in peace)-- this, to me, didn’t mean that there was something more violent about the teachings of Christianity and more peaceful about Islam at the time – it just told us about the geopolitics and other factors that drove the behavior of the people who happened to be Muslim and happened to be Christian.
If I were a member of either religion, it would probably be very difficult to say that my religion is somehow not especially peaceful. It’s probably nigh-impossible for anyone (except perhaps for those who relish violence) to be a part of a religion unless they really believe that it’s the best and most peaceful religion.
Christians make up 0.2% of the Gaza Strip.
If your claim is the Christians don’t use terrorist tactics to achieve political goals, you are mistaken.
Which one’s from Jesus, and which from Muhammad?
Ahem:
Just like with the Bible, there’s enough text available, that a person can find support for pretty much any position that they seek to justify.