You want a divorce? I'll behead you.

The BBQ Pit
201

I am well aware of the literary allusion. It is part and parcel of the lie you have repeated about my position from the first couple of posts you submitted to this thread. You have consistently pretended that I have excused brutality and violence in direct contradiction to my clear statements to the opposite, yet you want to have a hissy fit that I make a fairly clean deduction that when you ascribe a constellation of bad traits to Islam, all of them negative, your are effectively declaring it to be evil. In other words, my deductions of your position based on your words is supposed to be a bad thing while your blatant misrepresentation of my position is OK.

Whatever.

202

Good comeback, tomndebb! You go, girl!

203

Tom, that’s twice you’ve called me a liar. That’s way out of line, and it is clear evidence of how you act when you can’t win by logic and discussion. You call people ugly names with absolutely no evidence.

You claim you knew what I wrote was a literary allusion … riiiiight, Tomndebb, that’s the ticket, that’s why you called it a lie, because you knew it was a literary allusion? I don’t think so.

I know that you don’t believe that you are ignoring evidence that things like stoning and amputation are central parts of Islam from day one. Despite the clear evidence, you think they are some kind of leftover practices from previous times which are somehow not a central part of Islam. This is despite them having, not just a place, but a special place in the Koran/Hadith/Sharia trinity that forms the core of Islamic law. That’s why those crimes are in all versions of Sharia law. That’s why those punishments are not found anywhere but Sharia Law. Which is why I brought in the allusion to say you are ignoring evidence. And, no surprise, you don’t think you are doing that.

Which is fine, that’s why people have discussions.

But now, in place of trying to stuff words in my mouth, and in lieu of saying that you were wrong to do so twice (doing it once is unpleasant but excusable, but doing it again after someone politely asks you not to is just plain creepy), and instead of dealing with the issues, your brilliant solution is to repeatedly call me a liar. Why? Because you think my literary allusion doesn’t fit you? OK, we can discuss that … but calling a man a liar because you don’t think his literary allusion fits the situation is just another one of your many ways of avoiding a serious discussion.

Like I said, your revealing of your true methods, of tap-dancing around the issues and of putting words in people’s mouths and of calling them liars when you don’t like their literary allegories, goes a long way towards explaining why you see absolutely no connection between the public stoning of women that occurs only in Islamic countries, and Islam itself. You’d make a great Muslim fundamentalist, Tomndebb, you’ve got the fundamentals down pat already. You can ignore, explain, and deny the violent aspects of Islam, and put words in people’s mouths, and call people nasty names, along with the best of them. You’re more than halfway there already. All that’s left is for you to assault a few cartoonists for their cartoons of Big Mo, and the job is done. And hey, guess what, I’m a cartoonist who has drawn cartoons of Big Mo … see your chance and take it, I guess.

I find your childish outbursts both funny and sad. You are obviously a bright guy, which is why it is sad … but it’s still funny to watch your liar, liar, pants on fire style of interaction. However, as a safety note, I’d advise you not to make any sudden moves. You’ve had your cranial switchboard inserted in your fundamental orifice for so long to avoid looking at the world and its ugly facts that you might immediately go snow-blind if it accidentally came out too fast … keep a pair of dark glasses on hand at all times would be my advice, in case of a sudden attack of reality they could both save your vision and preserve your anonymity.

PS - Once again you are trying to defend your fatuous claim that I think Islam is “evil” … give it up, doc, you lost long ago on that point. I have stated my position repeatedly that Islam is not “evil”. I don’t care if you add up three words I used and it spells “EVIL” in glowing letters in your world. I said it was violent and cruel and barbaric. I explained, complete with examples, why those words do not add up to evil. I gave an example of what I would call evil, which was neither violent, cruel, nor barbaric. And still you persist with your sniveling about how if you hold them the right way and look at them in a certain light, the words really, really, really do add up to “evil” …

But the definition of evil not the point. Your unpleasant behaviour is the point.

Suppose I characterized your position as saying Islam was, I don’t know, say “pathological” just to pick a word. Suppose you came back and politely said “I have a very different definition of pathological, which is why I never use the word. Please don’t put words in my mouth.”

At that point, the polite thing to do would be for me to pick another word, regardless of whether I believed that your position added up to what I might call “pathological”. The impolite thing to do would be for me to continue insist that you think Islam is pathological, to repeat my statement that you find so unpleasant.

At that point I’m already out of line. And if you asked me once again to not put words in your mouth, particularly a word you never use, the polite thing to do would be to apologize for doing it the second time, and for me stop putting words in your mouth.

The asshole thing to do at that point would be to try to defend your particular definition, as though the issue were the definition of the word. It is not.

The issue is you repeatedly putting words in my mouth, words I never use, doing it again after being asked to desist, and then trying to justify your putting words in my mouth. There is no justification for that kind of asshole behavior. A polite apology is all that works at that point.

But I suppose, as a trainee Islamic fundamentalist, being polite might no longer an option for you …

204

I have called you a liar. Don’t make me call you an idiot.

You have repeatedly posted the lie that I have either excused or defended violence by various groups. That is a lie. Posting that I see Islam only in the most favorable light is a lie.

I have consistently made one point: that the various elements of behavior attributed to “Islam” are actually disparate elements of different cultures that are not inherently associated with Islam. You obviously disagree with my position, but you lied when you posted such tripe as

When I never made any claim for anything being “justified.”

So you lied again in saying that I claimed that no one was to blame–at which point I called out your dishonesty in the next post.
then

Since I have done no such thing (outside your entirely paint-it-all-one-color view of the world), we have one more lie lodged against me.

This was not so much an attack on me as a deliberate ignoring of reality. I had already pointed out the Midddle East connection to Nigeria, (and Sudan and Somalia), and you simply continued to post, pretending that they were not part of the exact cultural situation that I had already described. All of those locations carry exactly the nomadic traditions imported by Arabs in the seventh century and later. Denying it is simply pretending that history never happened.

However, I am only doing that in your twisted corruption of what I have posted. If those barbaric acts are such fundamental aspects of Islam, they should have been carried with Islam all across Northern India, into Malaysia and Indonesia, and on to the Philipines. Somehow, you are willing to ignore the fact that they were not, in fact, carried along with that expansion, and that they were suppressed for many years in Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and other Muslim lands. You simply ignore that historical fact. I acknowledge that they have made a comeback, (or been newly introduced), in too many of those places in the last ten or fifteen years. However, that has been due to the expansion of one or two sects who have siezed on the suppression of Islam as an excuse to promote their own extreme, (and culturally based), separate version of Islam to promote their own ends.

If it was “Islam” that was responsible for those barbaric acts, then it should have held true for all Muslim countries throughout the last 1300 years. The fact that it was not true of all Muslim lands for all those years is a clear indicator that that barbarism does not arise from Islam, but from one or two corrupt sects within it.

I do not condone any of the horrific violence; I simply refrain from making up an imaginary Islam that does not actually occur across the entire world. As I have previously noted, we just got done inflicting horrible violence acoss the entire world for over forty years by pretending that anyone associated with the word “communism” was part of a vast conspiracy to conquer the world when we were actually involved in a quite different battle with the Soviet Union. I see us making the same sort of stupidly blanket association regarding Islam and I see the same sort of multi-decade era of violence arising from such tunnel vision and refusal to recognize distinctions of philosophy and motive within the Muslim world.

205

Tomndebb, the basic flaw in your theory is perfectly expressed here:

To see why it is a flaw, let me recast it in a different sphere:

I’m sure you can see the problem with your ridiculous theory. The fact that the violence is inherent in Islam does not mean that every Islamic society gets that particular cancer … but the fact that every society with that particular cancer (stonings and amputations) is Islamic should give you a clue. Well, no, it probably won’t, but it will give everyone but you a clue.

You don’t even see this cancer where it is happening. For example, you say:

So are you saying that the reason that half of Indonesian Muslims would like to see stoning introduced into Indonesia has nothing to do with Islam? C’mon, Tom, get real … the push for stoning in Indonesia shows that the barbaric traits of Islam were carried that far. In parts of Indonesia where Sharia Law has been introduced, we see these same barbaric acts returning. Coincidence? Or is it your claim that there were previous barbaric practices in Indonesia that were carried over into innocent Indonesian Islam? Or are the Indonesians being swayed by the “corrupt sects” you mention above?

You also say:

If you are talking about the connection through Islam, it makes my point exactly. There is no connection between Nigeria and the Middle East except Islam. So what came to Nigeria came from Islam, including amputation and stoning.

The problem is that what you politely call “nomadic traditions” (stoning and amputation) were swept up into Islam and made part of the Koran/Hadith/Sharia trilogy that is at the heart of Islam. At that point, they were no longer just “nomadic traditions”. They became Islamic traditions at that point, and were taken into Nigeria not as nomadic traditions, but as INSTRUCTIONS FROM GOD. I put that into capitals because you seem to miss the point. You seem to think that these are somehow outside of Islam, that they are cultural debris from another time. Yes, they were that before Islam came along … but post-Mohammed, they became instructions from God, instructions that were written down in the Islamic holy books and transmuted into the Islamic legal codes that would last for centuries, right up to the present.

Next, I am still amazed that you consider the Saudi Arabian and Iranian versions of Islam to be “corrupt sects” … what makes them “sects”? What makes them “corrupt”? Both of them claim to be major mainstream parts of Islam, and they are clearly two of the most important parts of Islam. One is the “Guardian of the Faith”, the keeper of the holy sites of Mecca, warden of the Ka’aba, and the holder of the divine “Peninsula” that Bin Laden doesn’t want defiled by the boots of “Jews and Crusaders”. The other is an ancient civilization which today is the spiritual head of the Shi’ites, the second of the two major divisions of Islam. How are either of those huge groups of people “sects”? They are two of the leading lights in Islam today.

So perhaps you could favor us with your reasons for calling Shi’ism a “corrupt sect”. Because by your definition, it would seem that Protestants could say that Catholicism is just a “corrupt sect” of Christianity. (Me, I hold that religion is just a corrupt sect of stupidity … but I digress.)

Finally, the normal font of useless information (Wiki) says this:

That, to me, is as violent and cruel and barbaric as stonings and amputations. Killing someone who leaves the religion, or has a different view of the religion, is a shameful, cowardly act. Clearly, since it is leveled at those who leave Islam, it cannot be a part of any pre-Islamic barbaric tradition like stoning people. It is a part of the religion itself … but Tomndebb, I’m sure that you will have some hilarious explanation of how this barbaric, vile practice is not really part of Islam either. Keep’m coming, it’s Easter Friday so no comics in the newspaper, and we’re short of things to laugh about around here …

206

However, if such behavior only exists within certain limited groups, there is only your need to overextend the definition that encompasses the larger group. Based on your train of thought, I am sure that you will agree that democracy (used in the loose meaning of participatory government) is a terrible blight on the earth, given that democratic governments have a long and inglorious tradition of starting wars to further their own ends based on specious rationalizations. It has been going on for nearly 2500 years.

I am saying that the reason that a large number of Muslims in Indonesia have very recently begun to favor barbaric acts that are not part of their history is that Wahabbist and related Fundamentalist Islamists have used the Suharto suppression of Islam as a way to rile them up and change their beliefs from that of Islam as it was practiced in that land for hundreds of years to something much more like the Arabian Wahabbist movement that is only a couple of hundred years old and only broke out of the Middle East in the last few years.
And I have never said that this stuff “has no connection with Islam.” That is you throwing up more straw men to attack. I would no more deny a connection than I would deny a connection between Christianity and Fred Phelps or Ian Paisley or the Christian Identity movement. I simply recognize that Phelps and Paisley and the Aryan Nation bunches are not the whole of Christianity and that Wahabbism and its related sects are not the whole of Islam…

This is factually wrong. The dominant Mulsim ethnic group in Nigeria are the Hausa who have very ancient cultural ties to the Arab world. When they became the dominant political group following independence, later joining OPEC, they reinforced their ties with the Wahabbist elements of Saudi Arabia rather than with more moderate elements of Islam in other parts of the world. Wahabbist Islam is (now) a major part of that connection, but pretending that the fact of the cultural tradition is not relevant is rather like pretending that there is no cultural difference between the North and South of Ireland which are, after all, both Christian in origin.

And they were set aside by the overwhelming majority of Muslims for years until the Wahabbists and Islamists fired them up, again, as a way to defy the Christian West.

Actually, Wahabbism only dates to 1782. The Iranian version is even younger than that, dating back about 60 years at the very most and only actually taking root among the power clique that took over Iran 30 years ago. You are falling into the same error as those who get swept up, (either in belief or rejection), by the biblical literalist movement in Christianity, believing that a trend that is fewer than 220 years old, (or 180 for the Christian movement) is actually the way that people have believed and acted upon their religion for hundreds of years.

I have never said that the Shi’a branch of islam is corrupt. Claiming that the religion practiced by the theocracy of Iran “is” Shi’a indicates a failure to understand the stuation. Khameini and his boys, (and Khomeini before him), follow the Shi’a tradition. However, the Shi’a/Sunni split is more comparable to the Catholic/Orthodox split, which still allows for numerous differing interpretations, (as, for example, between Catholics and Protestants, with the Protestants having an additional dozen major splits and hundreds of minor dissensions). Criticizing Khameini’s brand of religion is no more a condemnation of Shi’a than criticism of Ian Paisley, (or Fred Phelps), is a criticism of Calvinism, much less Protestantism, and far less Western Christianity.

If you are more interested in inventing my opinions that coming to the discussion honestly, that is your problem. I think that imposing death for apostasy is evil. I again note that however this might be addressed in the Qur’an, it is only carried out by those extreme Fundamentalists whom you insist on pretending are the mainstream of the religion, worldwide.

207

Tomndebb, I’ll answer your interesting points piece by piece, as there are many disparate issues there. The first one is this:

Well, first a minor technical note, if they’ve been doing something for 220 years, that is they way they have believed and acted for “hundreds of years” … Wahabbism is about as old as the USA, so it is hardly a new idea.

But we were talking about stonings and amputations, IIRC. So are stonings and amputations are “fewer than 220 years old”? I don’t think so. Were there no stonings and amputations before Wahabbism? Cite? Did stonings and amputations in Iran really only start sixty years ago? Cite?

You keep wanting to claim that this is a recent phenomenon. As near as I can tell, there have been stonings and amputations done under the name of Islam for as long as Islam has existed. Am I wrong?

Because if stonings and amputations have only been around a couple hundred years, then you are 100% correct that it is just “corrupt sects”, and I’ll leave you as undisputed winner in the fighting ignorance sweepstakes.

On the other hand, if they have been around for 1400 years or so, your claim that it is a modern idea, something new to Islam, just the product of a “corrupt sect”, seems kinda dubious …

208

Invent your opinions? I’m trying to discern your opinions, which is difficult with all the bobbing and weaving.

You think all of those things are “evi”, death for apostasy (called for in the Koran/Hadith/Sharia), stoning (called for in the Koran/Hadith/Sharia), and amputation (called for in the Koran/Hadith/Sharia). One assumes that you think the people who practice them are “evil” as well.

But the Koran and the Hadiths and the Sharia Law, the core of the religion that told them to do those “evil” things?

Oh, those are innocent. No evil there. Those are part of the Religion of Peace™, how could they possibly be “evil”?

No, it is just the “corrupt sects” that are “evil”, the ones that actually do what the Koran and the Hadiths and the Sharia Law specifically require the believers to do.

In fact, those sects are not “corrupt”, they do exactly the things that Mohammed and his Companions told them to do … how could doing exactly what Mohammed said to do be “corrupt”? From their perspective, the Tomndebb peace and flowers Islam is the “corrupt” version … and under any reasonable meaning of “corrupt”, they are right.

So, lets see if we can come to some kind of clarity on your position here:

  1. Killing people for leaving the religion, and amputating hands and feet, and publicly stoning women to death are “evil”. True/False?

  2. The Koran/Hadiths/Shariah Law, that clearly and in great detail instruct and insist and require every true Muslim to do those “evil” things, are not “evil”. True/False?

Is that your position?

Please answer without reference to Christianity, Buddhism, or any other religion. Answer the questions about Islam. They are simple questions, true/false questions. You are welcome to expand your true/false answer. You are not welcome to do your usual handwaving …

209

I am also not going to answer whether I have stopped beating my wife.

Your “questions” only continue to present your odd beliefs, (unsupported by reality), about Islam in ways that provide false dilemmas.

= = =

When you talk about Wahabbism being so old that that is clearly how “they” behave, you deliberately omit the fact that it was confined to the Arabian peninsula for its first 150 years and only began to creep out into a few nearby regions in the last few decades. To read your posts, is to get the impression that all Muslims have behaved according to Wahabbist dictates ever since it first originated.
However, that is not how life went on in Muslim countries. Wahabbism was seen in most of the Islamic world as a backward movement. Wahabbism began to poke its nose out of the Arab peninsula during the twentieth century as it inserted itself into various anti-colonial movements, offering its odd brand of Islam as an alternative to the “Western corruption” associated with Europan and American interference with local political efforts.
As recently as 1970, (actually later, but that will serve as a decent benchmark), Afghanistan and Iran, along with several other Muslim states of the MENA region, were havens for American and European hippies to hang out. At that time, they were all fully Muslim countries. Their citizens worshipped in mosques. Prayer was publicly called in the streets five times each day. Most of the people followed halal dietary laws, observed Ramadan, followed the marriage and burial customs of Islam, and behaved in the manner of Muslims for hundreds of years. Stonings and severing limbs were events that occurred rarely or never and then only in the distant regions of any country far from the “civilized” regions. Those situations changed over the next decades.

In Iran, the Shah’s suppression of some Muslim rules, (such as his prohibiting women from wearing the hibab), led many Iranians to rally to the Islamist movement of the exiled Khomeini, while many others, including Muslim clerics, supported socialist or constitutionalist opposition groups. However, when the Shah’s goons murdered a man in the home of one of the leading Imam’s, a lot of emotional support swung to the Islamists as the most visible opponents of the Shah’s corruption. So when the Shah stepped out of the country for surgery and Khomeini stepped back in, his party was able to pull off a coup that imposed a new variety of Islam that was very different from that practiced by most Iranians for the last few hundred years.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets managed to stage a couple of coups that eventually got them their own puppet government. When it could not hold its own, the Soviets swarmed in to “support” it. Many different groups, (often just local warlords), took up the fight, but the Reagan administration chose to funnel most of the weapons to the religious fanatics of what would later become the Taliban on the grounds that they were better organized than some other groups. Following the expulsion of the Soviets, the Taliban, (with the most weapons), gained power and instituted a form of Islam that had never been seen in Afghanistan except in scattered remote villages. Up until the early 1990s, Afghan women went to universities, served in the government, and participated fully in the nation’s life. Theft was punished by imprisonment, divorces were handled in courts, and stonings were not part of the culture.

Indonesia is slowly following the Iranian pattern. Suharto gave credence to the Islamist movement by using it to play off other groups in various power struggles so that when he was finally forced from office, they had a greater voice in the nation relative to their numbers. They have used the ensuing decade to promote their position even more, following the standard tactic of opposing “the West.” As the Indonesian economy has struggled over the last few years, more disaffected people have rallied to that proselytization, (much as many people rallied to socialist movements during economic upheavals from the late 19th through the 20th centuries).

You earlier claimed that Judaism had moved beyond its violent beginnings and Islam had not. The reality is that both had moved beyond their savage roots. There are sects within Islam that would like to take Islam backwards–and they have done a good job of exploiting the colonial actions of Europeans, (“Christians”), and the corruption of Western-supported regimes to make their case, but they are still not the controlling forces within Islam. I can say that they are corrupt in exactly the same way that I say that various Christian groups that spend inordinate amounts of effort blasting the “Whore of Rome” or calling for a “Christian America” to be enshrined in law or displaying any number of other attitudes are, in my opinion, corrupt versions of Christianity–even when they quote the bible to make their claims.

210

I really admire your patience, tomndebb.

211

Well yeah, but it is certainly more common among muslims.

212

Not among real Muslims: real devotees of Islam don’t abuse women, ergo anyone who beheads a women cannot be a real Muslim, so Islam is ipso facto not a religion of violence towards women. Res ipsa loquitur, bibo ergo sum, dominoes ad nauseam.

213

That’s silly–as you know.

Khameini and bin Laden are just as much Muslims as Phelps and Paisley and Robinson are Christians. The point is not that the extremists are not Muslims or Christians. The point is that they are extremists within larger groups who do not share their views.

= = =

I doubt it and I doubt that you could provide any realistic numbers to prove it.

214

I have a standing agreement with myself to largely avoid debating in these types of threads these days. But this sort of caught my eye.

Well, yes. Some I’ve met personally, do :).

I’m not going to address the “corrupt” portion of this discussion directly, as it just doesn’t interest me much. Arguing which is a corruption depends an awful lot on just who is breaking from who over what and it becomes very hard to trace. Like the original intentions of the Founders, arguments quickly become circular and mired in speculation. Both represent splits from what could be categorized ( in certain aspects ) as more moderate traditions that pre-date them, but don’t necessarily reach back to the earliest days of Islam itself. But the the picture of early Islam is still hazy and it’s a relation to one modern POV or another is endlessly debateable without resolution.

But what I don’t really get is your objection to the word sect. While it often implies in Christianity a “heretical” split from a larger body of orthodoxy ( so Protestantism as a sect of Catholicism or vice versa to listen to some Protestants ), is more usually these days just used to describe a subset of a religious group, while still being part of the same overarching grouping. This group can be huge or it can be tiny. At an extreme one could label Christianity and Islam as sects of Judaism all under a common Abrahamic umbrella. Though most probably wouldn’t, as there really isn’t an “Abrahamism” as an ongoing religion, but rather three seperate faiths descended from common roots.

So, Shi’ism is a sect of Islam and Ithna’ashari Shi’ism ( the predominant type in in most regions, including Iran ) is a sect of Shi’ism. Meanwhile the Baha’i faith, a direct offshoot of Ithna’ashari Shi’ism, is essentially considered a sect by Iranian authorities, who oppress them as de facto apostates accordingly. But most scholars ( and as far as I know all Baha’i ) consider them(selves ) a seperate religion entirely at this point. i.e. Baha’i is to Islam as Islam is to Judaism/Christianity.

Now Tom seems to be taking that a step further and referring to Khomeinism as a sect of Ithan’ashari Shi’ism. This is a contentious argument to make, but not wholely without merit. It’s a fact that Khomeini introduced a novel innovation in Shi’ism with the concept of supreme rule by jurists and that his theological position, once a tiny minority has spread to become ( apparently ) dominant in the old Iranian theological center of Qom, opposed ( very loosely ) by the more ‘Quietist’ theological center at Najaf in Iraq. But personally I’d label these more as “schools of thought” within Ithna’ashari Shi’ism, rather than direct splits off of it. It would be a bit like saying Pope Jon Paul’s brand of ultraconservatism, which has become dominant in the Catholic halls of power due to his entirely unexpected longevity, is a distinct sect. The Khomeinism-Quietist split is more reminiscent of the Akhbari-Usuli divide in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Usuli argument largely won and both Khomeinism and Najaf-brand Quietism are Usuli.

Similarily Wahhabism is a sect of Sunnism, a larger grouping that has historically been less prone to as sharp of schisms as Shi’ism. Wahhabism is in fact quite theologically distinct from the larger body of Sunnism ( with the partial exception of Deobandism, another sect of similar age and antecedents ). Whether they are “corrupt” or not ( they’d certainly argue they are more pure ), they are certainly self-consciously retrograde and ( probably unself-consciously ) puritannical relative to really just about any other other sect of Islam on the planet.

Well, see herein we run into definitional difficulties. If “each has millions of dedicated adherents” counts as huge, they’re huge. But Ithna’ashari Shi’a probably account for less than 10% of the world population of Muslims and the actual number of committed Khomeinists is a much smaller subset of that ( outside Iran and Lebanon you still won’t meet many, inside Iran you may not meet many either ). Wahhabis are far less numerous even than that - their possesion of Mecca and Medina is a historical accident, not deriving from the blessings and beneficence of their fellow Muslims.

Leading lights is another tough one. Influence in certain circles due to oil wealth and loudly screeched political radicalism? Yeah. Theologically dominant and well-regarded by other Muslim nations? Not really.

Anyway a long hijack because your seeming treatment of “sect” as a dismissive perjorative on the level of “cult” kinda mystified me. Feel free to ignore this digression, I sometimes just feel the need to blather on about minutia nobody cares about.

215

You keep saying this, but intention posted a link in post #132 of a survey of Indonesians that pretty much confirmed that almost half of them supported stoning for adultery and 34% of them supported amputation for theft.

What cultural link is there between the middle east and Indonesia that makes all these people believe similar things? I don’t know why you refuse to acknowledge what is obvious and that the common link between them is the religion of Islam.

Islam permits (if not demands) people to think and do these things that otherwise they most likely wouldn’t, or if they did they wouldn’t have the unifying force of Islam to back up their savagery. It unites people into large enough numbers where such actions can occur where otherwise they would not and it dissuades dissent of such actions because dissenters have to overcome the word of god to do so.

216

The link to Indonesia is very recent and I have made no claim that they are following cultural ties. I have explicitly noted that they are not following cultural ties. What I have also pointed out is that the Islamist Fundanmentalists have a political viewpoint that is anti-Western and that they have recently used social upheavals in Indonesia to push their dual programs of Fundamentalist Islam riding piggy-back on anti-Western economic rhetoric. Indonesia did not have a history of that behavior between the original missionaries and the very late 20th century. (I would not be at all surprised to find that the attitudes reflected in that poll are no older than the U.S. invasion of Iraq, although I would not make any claim for that case.)

What is “obvious” is that there is a particular strain of Islam that has made a lot of headway in recruiting adherents and affecting attitudes in the last 30 years. It is not at all “obvious” that the issue is “Islam” any more than that the “Moral Majority” or the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, (or the Westboro Baptist Church), is “Christianity.”

And yet these acts are not occurring in Turkey, (or Dearborn), or Algeria, (where devout Muslims are actually opposing the proponents of such acts), or Egypt, (where the Fundamentalists have a history of attacking other Muslims who are declining to go along with their odd brand of Islam), or any number of other places. If the issue is “Islam,” why is it not universal where Islam is found?

217

I think you’ve made my point for me. Where Islam exists it can be used by those who wish to pervert it (If you wish to say that stonings and beheadings are a perversion, rather than what it demands).

There is a difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it. Which is all the difference in the world for those who have avoided those penalties. But, how many people in these countries would like to see sentences like stoning for adultery and amputation for theft? 58% of Egypt’s people would like to see Sharia as the only source of law for that country. Does that mean they support all aspects of Sharia? Probably a significant subset would, if I was to guess. It does leave them susceptible to a fundamentalist influence if the correct conditions arise as you allude to in your post.
A link to lots of stats

218

I always thought you were an intelligent poster and this confirms it. I wish I had the same restraint. But this sort of caught my eye.

Ouch! Please, I beg you for all that you love and hold dear, do not do this! It hurts my retinas and my brain automatically assigns demerits to whatever poster uses such a bastard spelling of “separate”.

Sorry, I was born with this affliction and I can’t help it. Feel free to ignore this digression, I sometimes just feel the need to blather on about minutia nobody cares about. Please carry on. :wink:

219

Which means that it is as easily used for violent and intolerant purposes as just about every other religion, philosophy, and culture in the world–Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, democracy, socialism, capitalism, and on and on.

Or, more likely, it has been the reaction against Western hegemony and the perception that the West supports the corrupt leadership of secular authority that has created the conditions that have encouraged the rise Fundamentalist attitudes.

220

Tomndebb, you say:

Again you miss the point. The problem is that if someone wants to live a life of non-resistance like Jesus, that’s not a problem. If someone wants to live a life of violence like Muhammed, that’s a problem. If someone wants to have their country follow Jesus’s instructions on stonings, that’s not a problem. If someone wants to follow Muhammed’s instructions on stonings, that’s a big problem.

So no, Islam is not “as easily used for violent and intolerant purposes as every other religion”. It is much easier to use Islam for violent purposes, because that violence is specifically called for in the Koran/Hadith/Sharia. That’s the part of Islam that you turn a blind eye to.

It’s the difference between WWJD* regarding stoning and a host of other questions, and WWMD regarding the same questions. There is a huge difference between them that all of your handwaving can’t erase. Yes, you can twist Christianity into violence if you ignore everything Jesus said. And you can twist Islam into the Religion of Peace™ if you ignore everything Muhammed said. But that common twistability doesn’t make them the same, as you imply.

*WWJD = “What Would Jesus Do?”