Can you provide any quotations that support the idea that they claimed that simply being Muslim “leads to” extremism?
I watched the show; like others here, I’ve found snippets of quotations online (though not yet a whole transcript). I do see Maher and Harris saying things along the lines of: larger proportions of Muslim people believe in death as an appropriate penalty for leaving Islam, than is generally reported.
But I don’t see anything that supports your parallel construction (that Maher and Harris were supposedly saying: ‘simply being Muslim leads to extremist conduct’).
Religions make claims on history, science, ethics, and the rest. I can challenge these claims, which are nearly always wrong, without being a bigot. If people hold wrong beliefs (Mormons claim Native Americans had chariots and swords), those are fair game.
Being a religious moderate makes no sense. You only “sort of” believe it? Either the books are holy or not, without any cherry-picking “interpretation.” Put up or shut up, believers.
Maybe not to you, but to some people it probably does. All holy books require interpretation.
Being a religious extremist makes far less “sense” to me than being a religious moderate.
Of course, I’m an atheist, so religions are all equally mysterious and nonsensical to me… but I can understand the motivations and reason of the moderates much better than the extremists.
Tricky, tricky. While they might not have been leading people in the Christian faith, the vast majority of the leaders were, in fact, Christian. As far as your “many of them were in no sense Christian at all”, I’ll have to ask for a cite. That seems to be gross exaggeration on your part.
I’m an atheist also, and I’m flabbergasted at all the cognitive dissonance displayed by those who don’t seem to see their holy books as actually holy when they find it inconvenient. Most believers, from any religion, do indeed cherry-pick, and I think that pointing this out is crucial to breaking the power of religion, hence my calls for them to put up or shut up.
Wait. Wait. How is that not LITERALLY saying, and I don’t mean implying, but literally saying that those who “take the faith seriously” become extremists?
I mean, that’s what Harris is saying unequivocally in your quote. There’s, like, no other interpretation possible.
Because, as I’ve been pointing it out, extremism is the only stance possible when one takes it seriously. The Koran either means what it says or it doesn’t. It’s either holy or it’s not. I respect fundamentalists and extremists, as they are at least displaying the courage of their convictions, rather than acting in bad faith.
Isn’t that a “no true scotsman” argument? If you define the true believers as extremists, then yeah, sure, the extremists are true believers.
So, according to that, there are no “real” Christians either, since you’d have to refuse to do a million things to act according to the Leviticus. Or any other practitioner of any religion who doesn’t take seriously every little thing. All those are “false” practitioners who don’t take their religioun seriously, and that includes practically every religious leader, including the Pope.
Oh, really? It’s “just like” “extremist Christian” belief. Well, you’ll have to back that up. Like with a poll that shows that the same proportion of Christians see their religion as mandating or supporting the killing of abortion doctors as the proportion of Muslims who see their religion mandating or supporting the killing of innocents, murdering gays, stoning adulterers, mutilating girls, killing those who leave the religion, etc.
Still waiting for that.
And without it, all you have is a knee-jerk leftist fantasy shared by Affleck.
You’re ignoring that these murderous savages are not just random individuals. They are not Charlie Mansons or Malcolm McDowell’s character from A Clockwork Orange. They share something deeply: a religion. Explicitly. Not only do they share it, they point to it as the reason for their fucked-in-the-head savagery. They TELL us the reason.
As some one else brought up, it’s akin claiming that a bunch of good old boys from 1940s Alabama who donned white sheets and separately killed a bunch of black people did so just because, well, any reason at all…as long as you don’t dare think their KKK membership had anything do do with it.
Nonsense. It raises the degree of the threat. Significantly. Just imagine if the poll showed that only .0001% agreed with the outlook of the savages. The fact that so many do agree with them means that the religion writ large is way too accepting of murderous savagery. And it increases the likelihood that another innocent Muslim will be the next radical savage asshole.
It made wonders for the Communist countries, did it?
Face it, the problem is not religion, is people. People will always find some excuse to be monsters to each other. Bronze age mythology, money, tribalism… you will never get rid of the basic human need to be jerks… and least of all becoming a jerk against a particular group yourself.
If I believed that the creator of the universe was going to torture me forever if I didn’t do X, Y, and Z. I’d be up early doing them.
Extremists believe that, so they go balls to the wall.
I’d say that moderate believers don’t believe that X, Y, and Z are actually necessary. You just need to do X when you can, and Y as your conscience dictates. And Z is just silly. They can still believe hard, and even be extremist, but their beliefs are mushier and easier to live with.
Those idiot Mega-Church Christians that live here can be extremists, it’s just their beliefs are mushy pap designed to be easily salable in today’s market. They don’t get the “stone adulterers” stuff fed to them. They get treacly nonsense about love, and hating abortion.
I don’t think it’s quite that unequivocal. Look at the quote: Harris does call those people (who don’t want to kill apostates, etc.) “Muslims.” (He says “hundreds of millions of Muslims,” in fact, fall into this category of being against killing apostates and of being horrified by ISIS.)
So he’s saying you can be Muslim (albeit nominal) and not extremist. That’s not the same thing as saying, as you alleged Harris and Maher were saying, that simply being Muslim “leads to” being extremist.