Well, that’s not quite true. There was certainly a religious component to the conflict (aside from the religion-as-identity aspect). Look up any of Ian Paisley’s sermons or speeches about the Pope.
On second look at my comments, I agree that I overstated it. But I do maintain that there are many people, especially in the United States, who assume that the conflict is/was about religious dogma. To the extend that propaganda was used to illustrate the other side as being corrupt and awful, sure, I guess religion had something to do with it.
But beyond the propaganda, the conflict simply wasn’t about religion, as many many experts have written about extensively.
Yes, in general I agree. The Orange Day parade marchers were not chanting Bible verses.
No, but the Orange Order does not allow Catholic members (or members married to Catholics), and they specifically describe themselves as a “Protestant fraternity” and “the world’s largest Protestant organisation which exists to promote the principles of the Reformed Faith.” Certainly religion-as-identity is bound up in The Troubles.
But in this case, religion is the proxy for an ethnic identity. The dispute is not about differences in religious doctrine.
The Old Testament and the Qur’an are similar for promoting tenets at odds with western enlightened thought. Specifically they contain texts which specifically promote oppression of women and oppression of unbelievers (among other idiotic notions).
The difference currently between Islam and Christianity is the percent of believers who think societal laws should promote these antiquated tenets.
The belief that laws which govern the public should parallel these shitty texts is much, much higher among Muslims than among Christians.
The reason is lack of proper education. Muslim countries are virtually all poor countries where half the population is under 18 and going to school. You can’t possibly give all those children a proper education with the budgets they have so you end up with a less educated society.
Combined with this, self-identified Muslims are more devout on average than self-identified christians (you have to be to pray 5 times a day and fast for a whole month) and more devout people have a pronounced tendency to think that all the important answers are in their holy book and this reduces their scientific curiosity and critical thinking.
Another possible factor is that, unlike the Bible, the Quran was written “on the fly” by Mohammed during his lifetime and this influences the text because it was written while he was besieged by plots to destroy him and his nascent religion.
The Quran was not put together until years after Muhammad was dead. He didn’t “write it”.
Anyway, what the Quran says on the matter is far less relavent than people think. Most Muslims don’t read the Quran and frankly most can’t because few speak any form of Arabic and even fewer can read Quranic Arabic. Instead, they depend on experts who’ve devoted years of their life to study to determine what the Quran and various Hadiths say.
Muslims right now have harsher attitudes towards apostasy than Christians because they generally see the Ummah as something you’re born into so they see converting to another religion as rejecting their entire family and culture. To them, or at least to many of them it’s like treason. Christians who think of seeing Christianity as something you choose to join don’t feel the same.
Additionally, Muslims in many ways feel far more under siege than Christians do.
This wasn’t always the case. Bernard Lewis, who nobody is going to see as an apologist for Islam, and who’s name will cause Ramira to slap me, wrote an essay once talking about how Serbs, Greeks and some other Balkan groups, in the 19th Century, referred to this who converted to Islam as “turning Turk”(even though of course none of the Muslims in the area were in any meaningful way “Turks”) and how it was seen as treason and how such converts were viewed and treated(hint: not well).
Of course by the logic of many people on this thread, what Lewis should have done was start comparing theological differences between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church or the Roman Catholic Church.
I would disagree.
I still don’t get it. All of the above could be said of Judaism, but Jews don’t advocate killing apostates. As for feeling under siege—true, there’s a lot of hateful bullshit out there about Islam, but it is the world’s fastest growing religion. It’s in no danger of dying out any time soon.
Hehe. It doesn’t change my point. He “wrote it” in the minds of his followers (who memorized verses and wrote them through the years) and it was compiled after his death, as you noted.
So, in other words, what the Quran says is relevant because it determines what those experts tell the unwashed masses? So it’s relevant in a slightly different way, just like representative democracy is different than direct democracy.
Very true and everybody would do well to remember it.
Must be true to some extent since there is no baptism (or bar mitzvah?) equivalent in Islam.
That’s true. They are acutely aware of the inferiority of their technology, military or otherwise. And technology is everything these days.
Can’t they read it in translation? I’m aware that translations are considered inferior, but surely they’re better than nothing?
The reason it’s popular is because it’s a long-standing and mainstream position to hold - at least in theory.
The reason it’s unpopular because it is not the only long-standing and mainstream position to hold.
Why the percentages break down the way they do - both numerically and geographically - is primarily the result of the modern conflation of Islam with Islamic Law. Without going too broad, I would argue that it is today typically more of a statement of allegiance to one popular notion of a “pure” theoretical Islam and Islamic Law than an actual desire to kill apostates personally. This can be theoretical because, AFAIK, the number of open apostates in most Muslim communities is pretty low. Why the embrace of this kind of Islamic identity over other Islamic identities has gained traction in some places and not in others varies depending on the place and population.
It’s important to remember that even when “Apostates should die” is an identity-proving statement, it still does a huge amount to normalize violence - not just physical, but emotional violence, disownment, stigma etc. - in communities and so is not benign. In too many cases, it is also a literal statement and that leads to terrorism, vigilantism, government oppression and other evil actions. It needs to be challenged, but in challenging it, the situational factors that greatly, greatly determine how/if violence is manifested in particular contexts must all be considered, and they include many things not directly related to “Islam.”
Much like knowing gay people was a catalyst for changing public attitudes, I believe greater positive visibility by apostates can lead to positive and needed change that builds on the good that already exists.
I know in this post I didn’t go into the historical background of the apostasy punishment and why it has so much credibility for many as a mainstream historical position, and what it meant to people before the modern era. This is the kind of thing to go into if you want to know why British Muslims and Tajik Muslims and American Muslims differ in attitudes, rather than why the different attitudes currently exist.
Unfortunately, it’s much easier to live your life as a secret apostate (just pretend you’re a nominal muslim and don’t eat in front of people during Ramadan) than it is to do as a closeted homosexual. This means there is much less incentive for those apostates to become visible.
no because it is not written in stone.
besides the fact that there is no such thing as a single sharia code and that in fact there is not any clear Quranic injunction on this you mean? Dawkins and people like you erect the most Wahhabite reading of the religion as the true one, like secret allies of the extremism.
This discourse of the hidden beliefs has been used before by nominally christian europeans about the religious minorities, both the Jews and the muslims. Each time it ended in what neither the Jews or the muslims have done, but the europeans have several times repeated over the centuries, the eradicationism of the minorities.
yes and like the idea of the sharia, few ever give this any thought. I have heard more about anything around the apostasy here on this board than in the forty years.
this is a wise comment and the historical socilogical background is something the angry prejudiced discourse ignores for the permanent essentializing. It is harder to look at how the initial experience of the secularism in the arab region, for example, was a failure and the popularity thus of the secularism that was high in the middle decades of the 20th century collapsed. The narrative of the othering becomes harder. No easy declarative sentences.
In any case, it is useful to point to the statement of desire for the sharia law as symbolic without any clear idea of content.
I would not expect in a situation where we feel under assult and prejudice from the nominal christian euro-americans, and I think not without reason, that there is any utility in promoting any idea of leaving the islam, this has only like the clumsy self-serving discourse the americans adopt on other issues of throwing fuel on the flames.
the lesson the negative results of the clumsy self-serving and self-regarding interventions pro and anti on gay rights in Africa(outside of the islamic context, indeed in christian africa) shows to me that i
the phobics pretend there is no history…
But among the christians outside of the rich countries the attitudes on this are not differing so much at all (or indeed one can see similar attitudes among the hindu supremacists or the myanmar budhdhist supremacists towards both the muslim and the christian.
yes
Yes, again history, and not like some of the bigots here pretend, ancient history, but recent history illustates well. (I have no thing against Lewis although I think he does not understand modern politics or the modern arab world at all, or perhaps the modern politics contaminates his thinking, his historical writing is admirable even if there are other views
by the logic of many of the persons in this thread, they would read a webpage summary of these things and then make declarations generally about the entire body and close their minds to any history and rational analysis, in the name of fighting ignorance of course.
Where Muslims have been free to build their own society, they have been most in favor of severe sanctions against apostasy.
I do not think this is from an external cause of feeling under seige. That creates a circular argument since the major reason they are under seige is an assortment of oppressive tenets which are at odds with the western notion of freedom for all individuals–including the freedom to denounce and ridicule whatever belief system you were born into.
If being under seige were the reason for Muslim oppression of apostates, the percent would be higher for Muslims living in the west than in Muslim-majority nations.
See Pew studies quoted elsewhere for specific numbers, but as a typical number, about half of Muslims in Muslim-majority nations are in favor of the death penalty for those who abandon Islam.
“A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center between 2008 and 2012 found relatively widespread popular support for the death penalty as a punishment for apostasy among Muslims in Egypt (86% of respondents in favor of death penalty), Jordan (82% in favor), Afghanistan (79%), Pakistan (76%), and Malaysia (62%), and relatively minor support among Muslims in Kazakhstan (4% in favor) and Albania (8%).
Another survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2012 among Muslim populations in many Islamic countries found continuing support for the death penalty for those who leave Islam to become an atheist or to convert to another religion. During this survey, Muslims who favored making Sharia the law of the land were asked for their views on the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. The results are summarized in the table below. Note that % apostasy figures do not include Muslims who may not support sharia but do support the death penalty for apostasy.”
An Islamic apostate publicly proclaiming his apostasy would have good reason to be Islamophobic in any Muslim majority country, and even in Denmark or France, one should take care not to piss off the wrong Muslims by casting Islam in an unacceptable light. 
There are so many Muslims who hold to a very negative view about ridiculing Islam–much less turning away from it publicly–that your chances of pissing someone off who is going to try and hurt you for it is very high.
Correlation does not equal causation. I doubt you can show evidence of causation.
Muslims in america feel free-er than in their home countries, the opposite of being under siege. Do you know muslims who have told you they felt under siege? 
Yes.
Terrorists use all kind of excuses to do what they do (ie: Charlie Hebdo massacre) but that doesn’t mean anyone should take care not to piss off the wrong people. That’s what they want you to do. Don’t let them scare you.
Yes, there are.
There are many violent assholes out there, and over 20% of the world’s assholes are muslim. That much is true. However, can you say what kind of % you have in mind when you say very high? I feel you might be off by an order of magnitude.
People bringing up Christianity…how pointless.
“Your apples are meaningless, here I present oranges for my argument.”
Honestly, anyone who think Islam is merely a religious construct doesn’t know anything about Islam. It is the whole thing…religion, law, government, even economics. When the original Muslims made the religion up, they went whole hog. It is not merely just a religion, it is an entire culture.
If you can understand that, then you will understand the problem.
You don’t think Islam is correlated with the laws in Muslim-majority countries?
I am confused. Islam has people called Imams, who are “authorized” to issue edicts called “fatwas”. If a fatwah is issued, which says it is permissible to kill someone who writes something critical of Mohammed, that is OK? What if another Imam says the fatwah is invalid?
Frankly, in all countries (even Islamic ones) murder is still a crime-regardless of the offence. Does Sharia law trump civil law?
Is that what you understood? :smack:
I’m arguing that maybe poor under-educated people are more likely to hold intolerant views…
…and maybe 70%+ of the populations of 90%+ of muslim countries are under-educated, poor muslims.
It would be interesting to find out how these views break down by education level, income level and other societal markers. Maybe then you can rule out the objection I raised.