Clearly the best approach is assimilation and corruption. Send them more porn.
How are you defining “Muslim”?
There’s a difference between “there’s a piece of paper somewhere that says X is Muslim” and “X believes there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
Clearly there is -
I was using a little of both,
From my personal experience (yeah, the plural of anecdote is not data) I have seen that for Islam, the divide between “piece of paper” and “self identification” is not as wide as might be thought.
I have had muslims explain to me that Islam is a little more than a religion - at least in the way that you might define Christianity. It is a way of living life, that even if you don’t necessarily actively participate, your are still said to be muslim.
Perhaps a good example would be my half brother’s wife - although she didn’t self identify as muslim, she still abstained from pork - why exactly? It was because of the Hudud laws.
In a way, although I was raised by nominally Christian parents, there is nothing at all Christian about my upbringing, however if you are raised by Islamic parents, parts of your day to day life will be Islamic.
I am not knowledgeable enough to make a detailed argument of this - it just seems to me that in Islam, there is a much closer correlation to daily life than there is in some other religions.
Damn you had a personal guard?
Well, I paid a young man to watch my house while I was at work, after a couple incidents with the neighborhood kids breaking in.
Most Cameroonians of any means hire a guard and most nice houses had a guard house-- in part for protection, and in part because they are expected to keep a portion of the community employed. Break-ins were inevitable, and violent home invasions were unfortunately common.
Often the guards were armed with bows and arrows, which always felt pretty retro.
Fairly official site, dances around the question and never answers it directly - http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0111.html
But yes, back when I learned, in the 60’s, impressionable children were told they would burn in hellfire if they missed a mass, unless they played the “Confess out of Hell Free” card (but you had to be sincerely contrite). Heck, it’s one of the three most important commandments, even if Catholics, and also the protestants across the world, ignore the bible in favour of what the 2nd century pope declared - and worship on Sundays not on Sabbath, the Lord’s day.
But that’s the whole point on the apostasy law - a less religious, less observant, more worldly and richer society tends to ignore the law, although there is still the problem of vigilante action in the more backward areas of even a relatively open country like Egypt. In Turkey, Ataturk basically forbade the interaction of state and mosque, although the current government is happily backsliding.
So to get back to the point of the argument - if Moslem countries become rich and advanced, then likely - based on western and Asian experience - fewer will be devout, fewer will be observant, birth rates will drop significantly, women will ignore the pretend-moslem dress codes, and the Moslem proportion of the world population will likely be not much larger than today.
Look at the Arab Spring - before it was hijacked by the more organized Moslem Brotherhood types, it was a movement of the students and the general public in the big cities; the most liberal, most westernized, least strict of the Arab world and the harbinger of heir future society.
Pretty much the exact same fears and the same arguments were used in the fifties over the “explosive growth” of the catholics in the USA. Did that problem ever materialize to the extent it was feared? And people back then had far better reason to fear a catholic take-over. The catholics really did have an agressive probirth and pro-large family policy in place. And boy did priests and the pope try to enforce it.
Look up the wiki article for demographic threat for an overview.
It’s okay if we’re overun with Muslims, the killer bees will wipe them out.
I would suggest that one make a visit to Indonesia, and see how socially liberal and economically progressive a nation can be with a large Muslim majority. Visit the Philippines, too, and make an informed judgment about the comparative quality of life in a Muslim country and a Christian country.
“Can be” is different from 'is".
Not the same period exactly, but
Regards,
Shodan
And which expression would refer to the whole world in 2064? “Can be”, or “is”?
What is your point, citing a couple of anecdotal incidents analogous what could be found, with a careful search, in almost every country in the world, regardless of predominant religion. For example, what was all that hooferaw about the building of an Islamc center in lower Manhattan a few years ago?
As a non-Muslim, I’d rather live in Indonesia than most other countries in the world, especially those nominally Christian.
“Is” wouldn’t be referring to the future - it is present tense. Were you referring to 2064 with your post? That was also present tense.
Human Rights Watch reports and State Department reports are not anecdotes.
Regards,
Shodan
anecdote: a narrative of a particular incident
Human Rights Watch and the State Dept are describing particular incidents. How are those NOT anecdotes?
It may be those incidents are typical of what happens in Indonesia, but the parts you excerpt don’t say so. Does every Christian congregation in that country have trouble getting building permits? Almost every? the majority? some? a few? dozens out of how many?
The paragraph immediately after the one you quote says that there were 244 religious attacks in 2011. The FBI says there were 1318 religiously-motivated hate crimes in the U.S. that year. Are those comparable statistics? Why or why not?
Did your half-brother’s wife abstain from pork because she believed in the Hudud laws, or because she’d been raised to abstain from pork and she continued to cook and eat in familiar patterns?
I cook and eat in fashions very similar to my mother and my grandmother before her–it’s not “explicitly Christian” (more like “middle-class mid-Atlantic suburban German-American”), but traditions and habits don’t require belief to sustain them. If she doesn’t self-identify as Muslim, why do you need to identify her as such?
If you’d been raised by nominally Islamic but non-practicing parents, would your day-to-day life still be Islamic? What if you’d been raised by staunch believing Christian parents – would there be anything Christian about your upbringing? It sounds like you are comparing apples and oranges here.