I don’t see a whole lot of Liberals complaining about Christians (some, but not many). I do, however, see a whole lot of Christians complaing about Liberals.
What the connection is to “murderous Muslims” I have no idea.
You hit on a lot of good points here. The problem is not Christians or Muslims. It’s the “extremist” or “fundamentalist” of both religions that are the problem. Neither are about compromise or acceptance of others. It’s either their way or the highway. Both are also guilty of painting their enemies with a broad brush. Statements like “The more murderous Muslims become” clearly shows an ignorance that the author (as well as fundamentalist Christians) think all Muslims act and think as a group, and that all of them approve of terrorism. A more correct statement would be “The more murderous fundamentalist Muslim terrorists become”.
So, I think liberals are disgusted by both groups and their ilk.
Everybody complains about everybody and everybody sucks.
There. I’m being objective. Satisfied?
Have Muslims become more murderous in the last couple of months? If so, I hadn’t noticed. Are liberals more prone to complaining now than they were when Bush first got us into this damn-fool war? What time frame is the OP speaking about?
Hampshire**, thanks for your post.
Muslims are not becoming more murderous. Violence in regions that have Muslim populations is being reported more often, as Westerners are more deeply invloved and are more often targeted. Violence conducted by some Muslims is becoming more spectacular (beheading, suicide bombings, terrorist attacks against transport hubs). Those Muslims are labelled *takfiris *by other Muslims (which translates as ‘those who believe that others are kafirs’ with an implicit ‘and should be killed’, although *kafir *refers to ‘anyone who does not believe in any Abrahamic religion’, and does not necessarily carry the ‘and should be killed’ suffix) is becoming ever more violent. People labelled takfiris generally believe that most other Muslims are kafirs, mostly due to corrupting Western influences and lack of regligious education. Hence, if you look closely, most of the people murdered by takfiris are Muslims. Let’s look at Iraq. Compare the number of Americans that die in daily suicide bombings to that of Iraqis. Do not include the suicide bomber. See? So, some Muslims are becoming more murderous, especially against other Muslims. But when they kill Westerners they try to make a bigger show of it. Or, more Muslims are being murdered by the truly murderous Muslims and more Westerns are dying too. It’s a bit complicated.
How the hell this relates to Christians and liberals I have no clue. But I suspect the Jews.
I notice that you haven’t been around here all that long. My perspective on the liberals of this board since 9-11 is somewhat opposite.
After the fall of the towers it was quite clear to me that a poster would have to be quite careful about limiting his criticism to Islamist terrorists rather than Islam. It wa a sure way to get invited to the pit. We were often reminded that Islam is a religion of peace. Putting it that way, it is easy to draw comparisons to Christianity and justify a tolerance for a religion based on the western experience with Christianity.
Most posters here are humanists (IMHO), Christian or otherwise and have a morality of tolerance for other people, visible minorities and people of exotic cultures. In order to reinforce that view, comparing Islam to Christianity leads to comparing bin Laden to Jerry Falwell in order to provide the perspective that there are extremists in both religions, that don’t represent the religion as a whole.
Well more recently, I’ve noticed that criticising Islam on the SDMB is getting more acceptable. Events in Europe are beginning to show that “liberal” fundamentals such as the right to free speech are under threat by Islam as a whole. Liberals are no longer quick to defend Islam.
For now it appears to me that the Baptist political power is a more immediate threat to the American way of life. The Islamic threat which on the whole is even more serious is starting to become more obvious even though it isn’t immediate.
Is this some new fad spelling?
Evolution and natural selection is taught at virtually all Catholic high schools and colleges in the U.S.
Amen, brother!
BBC News, 26 Jan. 2006:
Idiocy is clearly contagious.
Nah. You just demonstrated the librul pessemisim that we always get to hear about.
-Joe
Hay dere I spel reel gud. Itz a gifft 
Libruls love to complain about murderous people, whether they be Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, or “any other flavor you can think of” extremists.
They don’t even like non-extremist murderous people either.
So, to summarise:
- ISLAM as practiced varies widely in its approval of activities deemed to be “crimes” in many Western countries
- ISLAM has no central authority to interpret its rules/regualtions. So no general statements can be made about any given muslim’s acceptance of activities which may be deemed as crimes
- So, no one in the West has any right to criticize islam , its adherents, or its practices. To do so shows racism and intolerance
- ISLAM has its own laws (Sharia) which infidels must accept. To deny sharia is evidence of racism and intolerance
Lessee…what have i missed?
Well, I admit its a bit of a pickle for us. As a general rule, we burn with rage and contempt for any religious concept, as it tends to interfere with our agenda of free love, gay marriage and recreational drugs. As a rough guideline, this is serviceable so long as no religious group leaps into the forefront of America’s enemies. The destruction of all that is good and just is our overarching concern, and as America is the embodiment thereof,any group that expresses enmity towards the US is pretty much hunky-dory by us.
Oddly, that approval doesn’t extend to the Bushivik wing of the Republican Party, which is vigorously pursuing a policy certain to doom the nation to isolation, enmity, and near universal loathing. (They haven’t pissed off the Amish yet, but I understand there are plans in the works to provide nuclear arms to the Mennonites in a bid to provoke sectarian strife…)
We’ve done just about all we could to destroy America, save for voting Republican. Go figure.
We have a thread of at least 36 posts in response to a textbook example of a straw man. Requests for examples of the straw man got no response. Some of you, to be sure, are dropping in to mock the OP. Others, though, took the bait. It’s all catch and release, so I suppose there’s no harm in it.
We are encouraged to not use the t-word, and I’ll respect that. I am sometimes guilty of rising to a clever lure, but I try not to.
But do you think that some of our fundamental liberal values are really under attack by Islam as a whole? Do you think that, for example, our Muslim posters here, let’s say Angua, are a threat to our way of life?
I can’t speak for every “liberal” around here, but the reason why I tend to defend Islam, even though I am an atheist and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, is that some of the things I hear about this religion sound quite wrong with me, and I think that believing them will eventually create more problems. I know that we have problems with Muslim terrorists, and I know that several countries in the world are theocracies or dictatorships with their laws based on some interpretation of Muslim religious law, and that these countries are not places I would like to live in. But some people have gone from this to believing, as The Flying Dutchman seems to be doing here, that Islam itself, as a religion, as a whole, is incompatible with modern, liberal values. And that therefore we have seen the start of a war between the Western world and the Muslim world that will end by, presumably, the destruction of one of these “worlds”. The reason why I’ve mentioned Angua earlier is that I’ve seen an argument between her and gum in this thread, which was supposed to be her answering questions about the particular liberal branch of Shi’a Islam that she belongs to, that amounted to gum claiming that as a Muslim, she just couldn’t believe that it was okay to be gay, while Angua and several other people tried to patiently explain that her sect just doesn’t condemn homosexuality, and no amount of Qur’anic verses that anyone could dig up would change this.
This is why I will tend to defend the religion of Islam when someone claims that it is fundamentally incompatible with Western life, or women’s rights, or whatever. Not everyone is a Qur’anic literalist, just like not everyone is a Biblical literalist. The Western world and the Muslim world are not two opposed forces; many people hold liberal, western, modern values while also practicing the religion of Islam. And even those Muslims who don’t hold modern liberal values, who still hold on to ancient values, don’t usually pose a threat to Western society. Because this is where I think that the belief that Islam itself is incompatible with modern life is dangerous: it leads to reaching conclusions about the causes of terrorism that are, I think, incorrect.
Almost everything I’ve heard about the people in Muslim countries who decide to turn to terrorism has told me that these weren’t usually devout fundamentalist Muslims. The groups they joined might have held to some fundamentalist ideology or another, but the people themselves seem to have been mostly “normal” people, rather secularized, but with a hatred of something. It might have been a hatred for the state of Israel, which has been created in what they believe to be their land, and is now supported by Western countries, it might have been a hatred for Western countries’ implication in the Middle East, or whatever, but in any case, they usually weren’t turning to terrorism because they thought that they would die as martyrs and get 72 virgins in Paradise, or something of the sort. This obscures the fact that the problem is really political. Yes, it allows us to feel superior to the terrorists (it’s laughable that anyone would blow themselves up to get 72 virgins), but it causes people to feel fear and anger at the whole religion of Islam, fear about the fact that not knowing the causes of the problem, they just don’t know what’s next, and it prevents them from really thinking about possible solutions to this problem which is really real, I’m not claiming otherwise.
This is why I will usually defend Islam and its practitioners when people attack it in a way that I feel is unfair. There’s also the fact that I’m usually against collective responsibility. Just because someone who is part of your group has done something wrong, doesn’t mean that you are responsible just by virtue of being part of this group, and usually you shouldn’t even have to dissociate yourself from them. This is also why, unlike what the OP says, I don’t “attack” Christians for any reason. I may express anger at actions of a particular person who happens to be Christian, and they might even claim that their being Christian is the reason why they are acting this way, but I know that they are responsible for their actions, their religion isn’t. I also don’t hold any animosity towards Americans even though I disagree with their government’s policies, towards Serbs for the policies of Slobodan Milosevic and their other leaders during the war, and (especially given that I am a man) I will protest if anyone tries to blame “men” for the patriarcal society we’ve lived in for long and which still exists in many ways. I just don’t like to hold people responsible for what they haven’t done, and I don’t understand why many people think it is sensible policy.