Jive has a desire to make religion black and white so that he can judge it and its people with one fell swoop. Any time he is forced to think outside of those black and white confides he turns to insults. I mean, hell, he makes my reputation look like the welcoming committee at a good manners convention.
Black and white? How many times did I ask you if you were willing to admit there were at least
elements of Islam that were violent and damaging? How many times did I ask if you to not judge is as 'religion' and instead look at its parts and confront the beliefs individually? And how many times did you completely dodge that question? That's where my problem with you lies. You have no interest in discussion. You only want to come in, say your piece, then disappear for a bit until you feel like chiming in again. It's fucking irritating. Any time I'm forced to think outside the box? What a joke. I turn to insults because your 'debate' is piss poor and deserves to be ridiculed. Have another read through the thread and see how I respond to other people that are actually taking part, yet disagree with me. I really not interested in offering you a warm welcoming committee.
To be fair, I don't think Jive is trying to paint all Muslims as fanatics. The point he's making, at least in my interpretation, is a pretty simple one: there are elements of Islamic creed and scripture that facilitate extremist behavior. Honestly I don't see what is so controversial about that. No one has said that Islam is evil across the board. But let's not treat it like it is the fount of goodness in the world right now, either.
You'd think after the 10th time I said it, bvs would have caught on, wouldn't you?
No I agree, just the ones that worship in the purest form.
The ones that are following the "literal word of god", yes. But what happened to being able to criticize the ideology while leaving the people out of it? I thought you were all over that?
Once again, I agree. But as some of us were trying to discuss earlier and got greeted with ridicule is why are some drawn to the the more extreme interpretations of this religion while others are not? He kept trying to steer it into the direction of, they are the ones worshiping in the right way, so that he could blanketly blame religion. Others of us were trying to show that there's much more nuance than that.
'Extreme' worship in the Muslim world is not the same as it is in the West. Most practicing Muslims believe the Quran is the unerring word of god. They believe that the fashion in which it's written is somehow beautiful, unlike any other Arabic writing, which is definitive proof that it is the literal word of god. You like to bring up the Westboro Baptist Church as if it's somehow analogous with Islamic fundamentalism. It's not. The Westboro Baptist Church is a
single family; Muslim fundamentalists number in the hundreds of thousands.
Is the Old Testament also a violent book? Undoubtedly so. But lucky for us, as a product of and in order to function in a secular society, the majority of religious people in the West either choose to ignore, or flat out don't even read those parts. Violence toward gays in North America
is a religious issue. It says right there in Leviticus that gays are to be "put to death". Violence of that kind is held to a minimum
in spite of the hateful text.
I honestly don't know how much more straightforward one can get. If you look at this survey and the areas that tend to gravitate more to the extreme, you'll see a correlation with lower wealth and limited education. Now Jive finally did concede that education had something to do with it, but turned it so that the more educated you are the more secular you are, the more secular you are the more you turn away from the purer form of religion. It's a false premise.
You've been anything
but straightforward. You don't have to be honest with me, but for fuck sake, be honest with yourself.
And I didn't concede shit. Nowhere on this site will you find me
not correlating education with religiosity. It's a point I always bring up. I don't need to 'turn' it any way. Like it or not, there is a direct link - a HUGE correlation - between level of education and a lack of belief in god. It's not a false premise. It's a concrete, undeniable fact. You can't argue with that no matter how convoluted you try to make it. The fact that you think this was a small victory for you is laughable.
The problem is that the issue at the core of religious "purity" is unmeasurable. Perhaps one can design a survey where one tries to correlate degree of religious devotion (maybe on a scale of 1-10) with socio-economic factors like median income and education level, but even that would leave too much room for interpretation in terms of genuine religious feeling.
My take on all this is people who interpret religion violently or espouse radical elements within a given religion do so because they are seeking a convenient outlet for feelings already engrained in their personalities, i.e. radical people seek out radical religion as a justification for their behavior rather than radical religion turning people radical. Obviously, though, I have no way to measure that.
The last bit as where you and I begin to diverge. If not for religion, how would you convince a father (many fathers. We aren't talking about an isolated case) to murder his daughter for talking to a man she wasn't related to? How would you convince a mob to hunt down, then hang
bloggers for atheistic beliefs? The latter one alone wouldn't even be a
thing if not for religion. The only way to rationally make your argument is to say there's a disproportionate amount of the population in these Middle Eastern countries predisposed to violence and radical behaviour. I'm not sure why that would be any more palatable (or maybe whether or not a fact is palatable is of little concern to you, in which case I tip my hat).
Definitely. I don't understand how some can say religion makes good people do bad things. It's already in their minds and personalities for them to either discriminate, proselytize, or even commit violence.
ETA - then again, there are plenty of cult members who become so brainwashed that they do all those things. But that comes from them being so malleable to manipulative, dangerous people, not just religion.
For the first bit, I refer you to my reply to iYup. I can definitely provide more examples, however.
How is religious belief any different than belonging to a cult, besides the size and cultural acceptance? Christianity
was a cult at one point. People like to point the finger at Scientology and Mormonism as obvious frauds, but how are their beliefs different than the ones you believe in? Honestly, what is the difference? There isn't one. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc have the benefit of the veil of time to hide how completely fraudulent their claims are; that's literally the only thing they have going for them that a cult doesn't.
"Them" being malleable to manipulative people or ideas is exactly what is going on with the people believing in the big religions right now. Don't get upset about that; I assume you're Christian? Then you believe that 1.6 billion other people have been manipulated into thinking Islam is the true religion. You believe 1.5 billion Hindus have been manipulated. You believe the same about 1 billion Buddhists. You might not word it like that, but how is what a different world religion believes compared to you any different than what a small cult believes compared to you? Either way, you think it's pure fantasy. Humans are eerily similar. If religion has taught us anything, it's how remarkably easy it is to convince people to believe extraordinary, evidence free ideas
What the government says about itself is pretty irrelevant.
