Why Do So Many Muslims Want to Kill Apostates?

Great Debates
101

Let me help you by putting it in a more familiar context with some find/replace:

“I am confused. Christianity has people called reverends, who are “authorized” to issue edicts called “sermons”. If a sermon is issued, which says it is permissible to picket gay servicemen funerals and hurl insults at their grieving relatives, that is OK? What if another Reverend says the first reverend is full of shit?”

Islam has no central authority. You can right now decide you’re an imam and issue a fatwa to have me force-fed bacon until I die. No less valid than any other fatwa.

I should also note that most muslims spend their entire lives without ever hearing the word “fatwa”, much less listen to some, acknowledge them or act on them, with an order of magnitude of unlikelihood added at each of those 4 stages.

102

Yeah, the problem is every single Muslim-majority country is exactly like all the other Muslim-majority countries. Wait a minute. Nope, that’s not the case at all.

By the way, for quite a while Christian-majority countries in Europe really did have their society based on their own interpretation of Christianity. You might, perhaps, recall the whole issue of Christians not being allowed to loan money at interest, or even that nifty little bit of executions for heresy.

And, then there’s the case of the Philippines, which fairly recently amended its marriage laws to permit divorce but only for certain people (Muslims residing in the Muslim autonomous region). Of course the ban on divorce in that Catholic-majority country has everything to do with the Roman Catholic stance on the issue.

103

I was bought up in a Christian Anglican family with a strong distrust of Roman Catholics (a distrust with good reason) I do not keep digging up the history of that distrust to beat Roman Catholics with, it is buried it is past. And so with history it is there for us to learn from so we do not repeat our mistakes not to beat others with. all the things you have mentioned were committed by the church NOT Christianity. The slaughter of the Cather’s was not about Christianity but about power and greed, the Crusades was more about business that Christianity. The Pope in reality was running a franchise charging knights and their armies to enter the crusades and then demanding a percentage of the loot on their return. The crusades were not about Christianity it was about power and greed. Enough of Pope bashing we have our very own King Henry who did not like the rules of the church so founded his own church and in doing so destroyed much of England’s written History and art by destroying the monasteries, again nothing to do with Christianity just because a king could not get his own way he through a temper tantrum. Again in England we had the persecution of witches (not to be confused with Satanist’s) mainly these woman were Pagan but many were Christian they had the gift of healing and this scared the church who thought that this gift of healing would lesson the miracles of Jesus and reduce the power of the church again power and greed not Christianity where Jesus teaches ask the father in my name, so if I ask God to heal someone in the name of Jesus and it is done, Should I be burnt at the stake? Sit down the boy at the back and put the matches away

104

If I may add to that thought, sure L. Ron Hubbard was just a hack sci-fi writer, and sure the leaders of Scientology exploit the gullibility of celebrities to get rich, but that doesn’t mean that Scientology isn’t true.

105

T.M., for many centuries the Roman Catholic Church all but was Christianity. Any definition of Christianity that doesn’t include them is a pretty odd and contrived one. Anyway, I don’t think Monty’s point was to insult Christianity, but that Muslims aren’t unique in wanting to base a society on their faith.

106

Was there some point to this comment? Directed at anyone in particular? Have any bearing on the rest of your odd view of history?

[ /Moderating ]

107

I read that as a joke: he’d asked the rhetorical question if he should be burnt at the stake, and was whimsically imagining a boy in the back of the crowd standing up with a book of matches offering to light the fire.

108

This is pretty much the worst No True Scotsman in history.

109

The CIA Factbook states that 99.8% of Turks are Muslims.

110

So, about 20 years ago, some imam told his flock that they should go out and murder a writer named Salman Rushdie (because his book insulted the prophet). was such a fatwah valid, or was it “un-islamic”?

111

That was Khomeini, not “some imam.” And it had the same validity as any other declaration of religious dogma, which is to say none.

112

Well, that depends what you mean by “valid.” If Joe Bananas puts out a contract on you, it doesn’t mean the Virgin Mary agrees, and it doesn’t mean that everybody in the Outfit is coming after you, but you are still in very real danger.

Also, in Rushdie’s case, the fatwa was officially supported by the government of Iran for almost ten years, so there’s that.

ETA: and I think it might have been Norm MacDonald who said that anybody who writes a book like that is obviously in a rush to die.

113

Sure. But Gozu’s point is that there is nothing in the hadiths or Qu’ran that requires Muslims to do as they’re told by Ruhollah Khomenei. I think he has some kind of authority among Twelver Shi’a but otherwise he’s just a guy.

Also, MacDonald was wrong. The book was actually quite respectful towards Muhammad even though it was in some sense a parody, and it was not seen as objectionable in the Muslim community until Khomenei spoke out and some other clerics noticed that he was getting attention for it (and thus joined the bandwagon). Like Christianity, Islam has a long tradition of historic and theological criticism and discussion.

114

I don’t say the people in this video do what they do because they are Muslims, or Afghans, or Pashtuns, or because the third letter of their surname is “H”. If such a video existed from 900 A.D. showing the burning of a heretic by Christians, I would be equally appalled… But that was 900 A.D., and this is 2015.

115

Dang, I guess I’ll have to get my theological insights somewhere else.

116

It was also backed up by a monetary award, which kind of undermines the religious purity of the decree. If someone had succeeded, we’d never have known if it was out of faithful obedience to the command of the Imam…or he just wanted the money.

117

In fact, since it comes from the shiite spiritual leader, and since the shiite are only about 10% of the global muslim population, that means its audience is only 10% of muslims, while the remaining 90% think worse of him than lutherans about the pope.

And that’s the “imam” with the biggest audience, by a an order of magnitude at the very least.

bottom line: Islam is very decentralized.

118

He’s a guy with an army of soldiers willing to kill themselves to do his bidding. The calls to kill people are an ongoing problem. I’m surprised you didn’t go airborne with all the hand waving away of Fatwas.

Unlike Christianity Islam is stuck in the 7th century.

119

Cite, please?

I’ve often been told that the US is definitely not a Christian country. But let’s ignore that for the moment. And the occupation of Iraq was not conducted solely by the the USA, but rather by a coalition of dozens of countries. But let’s ignore that as well. Let’s just focus on your claim that the invasion of Iraq killed “hundreds of times as many civilians” as the entire number killed by Muslims in the past quarter century.

Here’s the Iraq Body Count database, attempting to collect all reports of civilian deaths in Iraq. It gives a maximum total count of 170,277 recorded civilian deaths up to today. Now the number of recorded deaths may be much smaller than the actual number of deaths.

The important point, though, is that if you sort out only those civilian deaths caused by the coalition forces, that turns out to be a very small portion of the total. So the number of civilians killed by coalition forces in Iraq can’t be more than 100,000 and is probably much less than that.

According to you, this is “hundreds of times” as many as the total number of people killed by Muslims anywhere in the past 25 years. Yet the numbers of people killed by Islamic militias battling each other during the Iraq War is probably much larger than the number killed by coalition forces. ISIS has added many thousands more deaths. The Taliban has killed tens of thousands in its wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Countless others have died in fighting in Muslim countries that we don’t pay much attention to: Mali, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, … The headline-grabbing terrorist attacks by Al Queda, ISIS, Hamas, Boko Haram, and so forth have also killed thousand upon thousands, but probably a small number compared to the other conflicts I just listed.

So yeah, your argument that the eeeeeeeevil Christians have killed hundreds of times as many as the Muslims have is not true.

120

Wow. So you really think you’re saving the day if it’s only 99 times as many?

I didn’t say Christians were evil, let alone eeeeeeeevil, so you’re obviously not concerned with the truth. And your entire argument, defending the guy who cherry-picked his starting date (and your little Quest for Truth seems to have ignored his claim that Muslims caused more deaths than Christians straight up, not more than 1% as many), is a master class in cherry picking.

You cited the one study that is guaranteed to give the lowest number of Iraqi deaths, because it only tracks registered deaths. If the US dropped a daisy-cutter bomb that wiped out a whole block, there was nobody to report the deaths. Other credible studies put the total between 500K and a million. But you stick me with your lowball total, and then proceed to wave your hands and pull figures out of your ass for ISIS casualties, with nary a cite in sight.

Plus, you include civil wars. A superpower invading a 3rd world country – a country with no air force and with pickup trucks for armored cav – is qualitatively different than rival tribes shooting it out in Afghanistan or Syria on more or less equal terms, and I do not accept those as part of the total. If you’re going to go there, then I’ll just back up a few years and include WWII, and get my total up to tens of millions.

Born-again Bush (who I DO think is evil) explicitly called his war a crusade, and said God told him to do it, so the context of my remark was Christians killing Muslims versus Muslims killing Christians (and I’ll even extend it to Muslims killing any non-Muslims, including Israelis). Since the US deliberately didn’t keep track of how many people it killed in Iraq, I feel free to pick the estimate I want, not the one you want, so I’ll take a million. 1% of that is ten thousand. I’ll wait for your cites showing that Islamic terrorists have killed ten thousand Christians and Jews combined in the recent past. Hint: despite your claim that groups like Hamas have killed “thousands upon thousands”, which you probably gathered from the way rocket attacks from Gaza are portrayed as a devastating rain of fire by the press, the total number of civilians killed by all rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in history is 30.

So you have 3000+ in the WTC, 1500+ or so total in Israel since 1993 (that’s military and civilians combined), and looks like around 500 in Europe since 1990. About 5000.

Which is 1/200 of a million.