Bill Maher: Islam is inherently worse than other religions.

[Bereta_Eder]

Also that a "standard" excuse for majoirly conservative to plain dictatorial powers inside a country to get help from abroad was that the opposition was red. Some of it definitely was (since the left wing had a major position as the driving force for equality, progress etc) and the rest was genuinely liberal forces within or outside the red vehicle.
Nevertheless, that often dishonest amalgam provided the perfect "alobi" for external forces to "support" let's say severly unpleasant characters, that most of the time were so plainly stupid they could be manipulated without any difficulty (rarely to the genuine benefit of "their" people) and other times they were simply quislings.

[Kidlicious]

Luckily, after the oil shocks of the 70's, SA has no interest in price spikes. So that's really irrelevant.

[Sava]

I wonder if the shooter agrees or disagrees with Bill Maher:

http://gawker.com/california-mosque-hit-by-gunfire-will-be-investigated-1654580081

[Kidlicious]

I wonder if the shooter agrees or disagrees with Bill Maher:

http://gawker.com/california-mosque-...ted-1654580081

I wonder if you stick twinkees up your ass.

[Sava]

you have been a bit obsessive lately

but no, I don't

i have a very strong anus and twinkees lack the structural integrity needed to survive the ordeal

[Kidlicious]

Clueless, like a liberal.

[Sava]

I'm not into that scene. You'll have to teach me the lingo.

[Kidlicious]

Here's something I'll try to teach you. Sometimes people mean something else.

[Sava]

Are you trying to ask me out or something?

[Kidlicious]

You said "I wonder ..."
I said "I wonder ..."

Exactly how ****ing stoned are you? Now you think I'm asking you out?

[Sava]

You are just that terrible of a communicator. Don't worry, not all my jokes are funny either.

[molly bloom]

I wonder if you stick twinkees up your ass.

Only before you're due to eat them.

[Heresson]

double post

[Heresson]

OK.

Fist of all, I have browsed through half of this thread, but got tired, so will only adress the first issues.

General notes.

The issue of the name of ISIS / ISIS, brought up, by, among others, Wiglaf.

In Arabic, the term is Sham. Sham IS Syria, but it's Greater Syria; the modern Arabic word for the state of Syria, which encompasses only part of historical Syria, is Suriya.

Sham is also the name of Damascus.

Sham's borders are:
- Euphrates in the east. The region of Upper Mesopotamia is Gazira, but it got out of use and is sort of divided between Sham and Iraq in more modern terminology, as it seems
- the mountains, esp. Taurus / Antitaurus mountains in the north
- the Syrian Desert in the south/east
- Sinai penisula / Egypt in south-west
- the Mediterranean sea in the west (sometimes Cyprus is included)

So Sham means:
- Syria
- Lebanon
- Jordan
- Palestine
this is the core.
Additionally, there are parts of Egypt (Sinai) and Turkey (esp. Cilicia, today called Cukurova) that are ascribed to it.
Also, according to some, Cyprus, called "the star of Syria".

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Secondly,
I hate the knee-jerk reaction of people. When we are discussing the PRESENT, and MAJOR issues within islam, one starts to hear about PAST or FRINGE problems within Christianity.

Sorry, but if someone has bad teeth, pointing out to another person saying he used to have as ugly isn't going to do the trick. One should just go to the dentist.

I think people do it out of fear of racism. Chegitz was so kind in a discussion with me to say islam is "a religion of brown people". It's not. Its a universal religion of 1,2-1,5 bilion people, of all races.

But, above all, it's a religion, a branch of ideologies with associated traditions. Not a race. It's perfectly fair to say one religion is more this or that based on its scripture, or behaviour of its believers.
It's an approximation of course, because large religions are obviously varied. But claiming all religions are essentially the same is not true. It's an ideology.


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I absolutely despite the completely MORONIC, but strangely popular, bon-mot about islam being younger by 600 years. It's a good joke. But it's a joke, and people use it like a serious arguement in a discussion. I will not mention the names of the ones of you that have disgraced themselves by this sort of "argument"

The age of a religion has no importance. It's however important to know how the religions were conceived and grew.

Christianity was born in a relatively safe Roman protectorate, and spread peacefully for the first couple of centuries. THEN it got the power, got into symbiosis with

the state etc.
May I add: Diocletian etc were the ones trying to build a Roman state religion, to mobilise the society around the emperor. What Constantine did, in my opinion, was just adopting Christianity to a previously forged role. Then, of course, first slowly, and then faster and faster, Christianity degenerated into a medieval, often not very nice, religion.

And it was then that islam was born. In one of the most obscure and neglected regions of the ancient world. And indeed there's something miraculous about it. But anyway, the practices that Christians adopted hundreds of years after Christ, Muslims adopted together with their leader during his lifestyle.

The life of Muhammad is like a history of ancient Christianity in a rapid shortening, and more. First he was a minority, preaching tolerance even. Then he was persecuted, banned, and started ruing Medina. He got rid of the internal religious opposition - not in a nice way - and conquered Mecca. His successors spread from Arabia to the core of what is the Muslim World today.
And they DID take all the best of the territories they conquered, and built upon it, creating a marvelous civilisation. There was still a violent aspect to it, but mostly in the borderlands, and regulated. I will not discuss further events.

Today we are much more socially developed than in I or VII century...
and islam (which was created in VII century, and developed in VIII, IX and beyond, but not beyond XIII really), as well as Christianity, in all its developments, had to deal with these changes. And that's the problem.

Christians can peel off the medieval stuff, saying this is against Christianity etc. And to find some good arguments, because of the Old Testament-New Testament
distinction.

Muslims are not this lucky. For two reasons. One of them is that while Christians can argue "it was not part of the original Christianity", "it was against the teachings of Christ", "it was the Old Testament", "I condemn Urban II", "these were catholics / lutherans / orthodox, not our, say, New Church of the Apostles"...

Muslims can't.
What was happening in Islam was mostly happening in Christianity - holy wars, killing apostates, forcing religion...
but they can't say it was not the original islam - because Muhammad and his companions did it.
they can't say it was the Old testament, because there's just one Al-Qur'an, and in fact the traditional rules of abrogation make the earlier, peaceful remarks from

Meccan era invalid, not the later, hostile Medinean ones.
they can't say it was against the teachings of Muhammad, because these were his teachings.
they can't ascribe it to some later caliph, because it was the original founder of the faith
they can't say it was not their denomination, because it was the founder of their faith.

And the entire islamic religious law - a concept not existant in Christianity in fact, and you ignore that, which is that all the laws should be based on the words of God, and if not, then on the actions of the Prophet. If of course possible, and if not, by analogy, by consensus etc...

Sharia is NOT the law in the majority of the Muslim world; it influences it only, mostly, but there are calls for implementing it in many places.
And, what's more important, its ideological hold is undisputed. It's hard for someone to condemn sharia, or hadiths.
It's hard for people to stand up to the idea of ACTUAL religious liberty, when the people, books etc they were always told to admire were acting against it.

And I do agree most Muslims are wonderful people. But the interpretations of Al-Qur'an and sunna in a way that would be good for basic rights simply go against the literal sense of traditions and scripture, are a bit far-fetched. The fundie interpretations are literal and seem obvious. That's why I guess most Egyptians clearly wouldn't actually kill a man over his apostasy... but would at least in speach support such a law, because to claim otherwise would be revolt against their faith.

That's why its so very important to support liberal interpretations, and to educate people, who are confronted with the West if Evil and Hates You propaganda.
And its important to solve some medial and actually legitimate Muslim complains. Above all, to force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, together with its illegal settlers. And not react in a dumb Swiss "lets ban minarets" way. It's not minarets that are a problem. These are radical preachers founded by the Gulf that are, for
once.

The other (Sunni, but not only) Muslim problem is a lack of a caliph. Islam is headless. Even in the Middle Ages, a caliph lost much of his religious power to ulama.
But nowdays there's not even a caliph. There's no respected authority to bring some official or official interpretation or doctrine. There are some highly respected
religious centres, like Al-Azhar, but it's not the same.

Sure, Islam promotes violence in some ways, but Islam isn't going away and bashing Muslims isn't going to make them less likely to be violent.

Sure, Catholicism promotes violence in some ways, but Catholicism isn't going away and bashing Catholics isn't going to make them less likely to be violent.
etc.

It's not about bashing Muslims. But there is a serious problem. There are as many Catholics as Sunni Muslims... but you don't get one percent of the religiously-inspired problems... because there's a pope, moreover, almost universally accepted one, and because, as I've mentioned, there are ways of separating the bad part of the Christian tradition from the good one.

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The ones who think the verses from Al-Qur'an are cherrypicked... you are wrong. The ideas of military Jihad or of islam's political rule is not something that was incidental. It was a constant, many-century praxis. It was a highly developed ideology that needs a counter mostly on the ideological grounds.

If Islam is problematic how do you call a religion that invented the most brutal torture mechanisms that proceeded in vandalizing ancient

works of art just because they were "indecent" etc etc
Not only that but is probably responsible for the largest anihilation of peoples in the history of mankind.
Islam is not monolithic and some of the world's most amazing cultures AND people can be found in it.
It's just having a hard time right now.

It's not a religion that invented torture mechanisms, nor were they ever considered something intrinsic.
Ancient works of art were being destroyed once - but then they were adapted and taken example of.
Sorry, but Christianity is not responsible for ww1 nor ww2.

The major atrocities of the 20th century have been committed by Christians anyway.

America (or MURICA), a God-fearing (supposedly) Christian (supposedly) nation bombed German and Japanese cities. Germany killed millions. Russian

Orthodox killed millions.

Hitler was not fond of Christianity, and
Stalin was an atheist.
Pol Pot I think too.
Mao was an atheist I guess.
Ww1 leaders were Christians, but the worst crime of the ww1, which is the Armenian genocide, was actually commited by Muslims, although fired on the top level by a secular ideology, too.

You are the one claiming religion is the determinant. It is up to you to get the evidence for your theory. So you go find me statistics that show that for instance Nigerian Muslim are less liberal than Nigerian Christians.

uh... Nigerian Christians do not have religious laws in their states, for once? With all the consequences?

Hundreds of millions? Come on. The immense majority of Muslims are just people like you and me trying to earn a living. If hundreds of millions of Muslims were as militants as you claim, the whole world would turn Muslim.

You made a mistake. Your counterpart spoke of Muslims who uphold their religion above human rights. And indeed, these are hundreds of milions, you can easily count by people who think apostates can be killed. HOWEVER, not all would do it themselves. However, as they support it, and in many countries it is illegal, hence they transpher the ugly part of implementing these ideas to the state.

I have been asking people about it, although not often. Usually they try to make some excuse, like that it's to prohibit internal turmoil.

Can't we all just agree that humans are terrible and will use any excuse they can find to do terrible things?

Religion is not just an excuse.

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Btw, it's hard to say what actually constitutes islam.
The so-called 5 pillars are not wrong in themselves at all
- declaration of faith
- fast
- pilgrimage
- prayer
- almony
However, if someone accepts Muhammad as a prophet, it brings the problem of his attitude towards some of the actions of Muhammad.

If syria or iraq or albania or bosnia or turkey could maintain a secular country (despite severe for the time being human rights issues)
that means that other muslim countries can do it too.

It's not that easy. Syria didn't manage. Iraq is sadly doomed. Both were mantaining a secular country at the expense of democracy anyway.
Albania became secular after decades of atheisation, and Turkey after a shock therapy by Ataturk, who was truly a saviour of Turkey and could afford it.

But I would look to Morocco and Tunis for a better example, I guess. To Malaysia and Indonesia. Of course, they aren't perfect, but are not bad.
Someone of you said TUnisia is in the hands of islamists - actually, not anymore, they lost the recent elections.

during the middle ages western europe was considered something like a dark dirty backwater no man's land whereas arabia was shining.

Actually, Arabia was backwater, because Arabia is just a region, and it was still not very good. But lands conquered by Arabs were much better. They always were:

Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Africa were the centres of civilisation prior to that. In some lands, however, as in Morocco, Islam brought great progress, though, and Arabs managed to be open back then to the conquered nations, and valued science and art, and developed what they have discovered.

Religion is the determinant in so far as the Koran orders that both apostates and people who have sex outside of marriage must both be executed.

So, yes, it is true you can find muslims who ignore those particular religious commandments but that doesn't mean those commandments don't exist nor does it change the fact that polls show a majority of muslims in a number of countries all say they want people executed if they convert to a different religion. Would you not say that killing people is violent and that if a religion orders that people be killed then it is, therefor, inherently violent?

I don't remember about adulterers, but I think Al-Qur'an doesn't really mention death penalty for apostates. Hadiths do, however.

i find this debate a little strange. if we accept that both muslims and christians have justified violence based on their faith (and of course we might say that more muslims do so today, but we can still see examples of christians doing the same), then we can say both faiths can be used to justify violence. a debate about whether there is textual justification for such violence seems beside the point.

I don't really see examples of Christians "doing the same" today. There are no worldwide Christian parties, no worldwide Christian terrorist groups, no significant part of Christians calling for theocracy, no significant part of Christians supporting death penalty for biasphemers or apostates, no Christian states actually having apostasy laws, no Christian countries forbidding building non-Christian temples, I don't think there are Christian countries forbidding Muslim proselitation too, and I
could say dozens of other things.

"we are all the same" answer just ignores the problem.
Islamic terrorism is a temporary phenomenon that will pass. Sharia isn't.

or to put it another way, if violence is committed in the name of god/allah, does it matter what textual support there is for said violence?

OF COURSE it is. Because, to eliminate it, one should find some answer to this textual support.

We've established quite well that the Christian nations' body count is significantly worse than Muslim nations'.

But not in the name of religion...
USSR was still a sort of "Christian nation" and so was Nazi Germany, but their rulers and driving ideologies weren't.

Since you assume that in cases of violent political outcomes, textual ideological support has to be a cause, then there must be, somewhere, textual support leading

certain nations to adopt aggressive policies. This implies that there is an ideology running within Christian people, not necessarily religious, but still present within, that is even worse than Islam; and that the continued action of the Christian religion has not been able to suppress it.

Uh, Germany went to war in the name of Lebensraum for the German nation, a racist ideology that was condemned by papacy before the war.
USSR went to war in the name of spreading communism and freedom of the workers etc.
ISIS however, acts in the name of islam.

Except that post-WW2 Arabs (note: Arabs, not Muslims) developed secular, nationalist, and decolonialist regimes that were considered enemy

by Western powers.

Lebanon - ****ed over
Al Assad - ****ed over
Iraq - invaded
Egypt - invaded by the UK and France
The Shah - abandoned by its US allies (who had originally thought the islamists would be easy to buy off)
Gaddafi - enemy of the West, overthrown by NATO-backed islamists
Tunisian regime - abandoned, now ruled by islamists
Fatah - undermined until Hamas showed up
Saudi Arabia - fundie monarchy, close US ally

Now to Afghanistan (non-Arabs but Muslims): islamists were supported in their fight against the USSR
Turkey (non-Arabs): long history of secularism, threatened by the regime's inability to respond to popular needs

You're just the typical product of disinformation. Your country keeps overthrowing, harassing and isolating secular regimes in Muslim countries; when it meets success,

you blame Muslims for being illiberal.

While most of your posts here were quite misguided, here you are right in the general picture. The West (esp. USA) betrayed the democracy in the Middle East and in South America too.
And now they're ripping the bitter fruit.

As I've written, Tunisia has ousted the islamists.

You're blaming America for Lebanon? You don't know your history.

I do. Lebanon was a confessional democracy. Left-wingers, who happened to be mostly Druze or Muslim, wanted to end the confessional system, but also socialism, entanglement with Naser etc. I don't know how it would have worked out. the west intervened and made maronites rule for some more time still, which was great for the economy, but the internal pressures grew, esp. due to the presence of Palestinians cleansed of their land by Israelis, until a civil war erupted - and this time the West didn't intervene, because, I guess, there was no big Red Takeover scare.

If Saddam stayed in power without the sanctions there would likely have been more than 1M alive people over last decade in Iraq who have died from the "intervention" either directly or indirectly, not to mention millions of refugees that would not have happened, ancient communities which would still exist in there, and so on. There would be no ISIL, probably few hundred thousand less dead in Syria, few million of refugees less in there too. To think all this was done on the back of few thousand gassed Kurds. Propaganda at its finest. Saddam may have been an "evil dictator" perfect for media demonization, but what were last 10 years? Is there a mascot to wear the flag for million and more dead?

But that is not the point, is it - the point is that the region is destabilized - Israel and Saudis are happy as well as US defence industry..

Saddam should have poured the dollars into US congress while he still had them, and it is the best thing anyone else in US crosshairs can do. In case you have

"pariah" status, well #1 priority should be to find a way to deliver the millions to the congress and repair your media representation in the country of freedom fries.

Should be #1 priority for any despot.

That approach works wonders for Saudis.

This is true, too

"Vast numbers of Christians would not condone...{insert atrocity here}"

Nor would vast numbers of Muslims. Strawman.

They would... as we've mentioned, majorities or large minorities in many a Muslim country would support death penalty for apostates.


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Anyway,
the fact is that there IS a problem within islam with tolerance and violence in the modern sense.
I don't think this needs to be INTRINSIC. Because the very core of Islam, 5 pillars, are fine.
However, it will be - for the reasons I have given - very hard to outroot the fundie thoughts among Muslims.
And one needs to prepare an ideological offensive, apart from the obvious need to crush ISIS.
Had only GWB spent this enormous money on the war on fundamentalism, not on "war against terror", we would be in a better place now.
There ARE violent parts in Coran and hadith etc. But they are usually, I guess, sort of overlooked by Muslims. Because islam has some nice teachings too and I guess being good people, as probably most Muslims are, they prefer to think about the bright side of it. However, there should be some ideological responce ready for people that are confronted with these verses.
There should be a response ready for the ones who are told the West mistreats Muslims - this is much easier, as the West actually supported
Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example....
ah.
I am tired, will go now.

[ricketyclik]

Wow. Impressively well thought-out response.