So the Orlando shooter has burial rights? You're shiting me...

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Jennik wrote:

If you want to argue that the average Muslim thinks no worse than the average Christian, I'll agree with you.

Although I grew up in a mostly Islamic community and met lots of thoroughly respectable Muslims, there's quite a bit of sociological data - read: surveys - which show that the average Muslim holds opinions we'd generally consider as worse than the average Christian. I don't believe in giving up on Muslims, but there is a real problem with fundamentalist extremism in Islam, regrettably they DO think worse on average, and like all real problems it deserves real solutions, solutions which become more distant the longer we deny the problem. There is a minority of Muslims who are doing it right, where one can feel the phrases "friendly bearded Christian" and "friendly bearded Muslim" are equally interchangeable, where Islam has become a faith of charity and love; it's a matter of replicating that success.

I wish I could upvote you.

That being said, I wonder about how to interprete those surveys (and their methodology). I mean, yes, there is a shitload of fucked up beliefs, but I wonder how many of those are really structural to Islam and how many are just some kind of group think (the first ones are really problematic to solve, the second ones just require to pop a bubble and have a lot of patience...probably decades of patience). If you grow up with everyone believing something, there is a lot of pressure to conform to that even if you personally wouldn't give a fuck (and that applies to every belief). And no, it just doesn't ever reduce to what the book says. Things like honor killings seem to have no basis.

Muslims in the west are definitively more moderate for the reasons above.

It's like having a survey about how much people love communism in North Korea. A lot may hate it, but you won't see it expressed for obvious reasons.

PS: I may research it a little, it's a good question. I assume you refer to surveys like this one.

I should have said "real and pervasive problem." It's a problem in the ideological infrastructure, not merely a small handful of nutjobs who do extremely violent shit. It's this infrastructure which helps those nutjobs grow, like fertilizer helps crops; some of the nutjobs may have occurred anyway, but core beliefs help to shape significantly more than would have occurred naturally.

This may be an oversimplification, but where I draw the line is understanding of shari'a. I feel the key to tolerance and multiculturalism is the concept of separation of church and state. I wouldn't say shari'a is a concept which must be destroyed, but I feel it needs to be understood as a strictly Muslim doctrine, a set of laws which Muslims apply to themselves and do not thrust upon non-believers. The name Islam comes from the word for submission, and it's fine if shari'a is what Muslims voluntarily (and I really mean voluntarily) submit themselves to. However, the way I see it, as soon as shari'a is extended to the overall populace, as soon as it becomes a wish for a theocratic state, that is the moment it becomes toxic to Western civilization.

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Jennik wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Again, I know it sucks to think that we're not different. There is comfort in pretending 'they' are not a part of 'my' group. To call them bottom of the barrel scum though is to ignore the reality of what happened and why. These tragedies deserve more than a head in the sand knee jerk reaction, for all sides involved.

I'm not sure what group you're putting me into or why you're even talking about groups now in the first place. Your initial statements dealt with individuals, not groups. My response dealt with individuals, not groups. I am an individual, just as the the people who committed those atrocities were individuals. I, as an individual, am fundamentally different from those other individuals.

Exactly how am I ignoring the reality of what happened and why it happened when I call these individuals bottom of the barrel scum? What do you even mean by that?

You must have misunderstood my response to ray's post then. I was speaking specifically to him grouping those people as muslims. I was trying to point out that we are all in the same group, the people effected by the events in those people's lives that brought us to this conclusion.

To your second question, I'm trying to convey the idea that to blindly label or judge someone to be bottom of the barrel scum seems to me to be dismissing all the bad shit that happened in their lives that led them to those actions. People have choices sure but people also don't just find themselves shooting gays in a night club or with a bomb strapped to themselves in an airport. A really fucked up series of events had to occur in a person's life for them to think that's the path they are going to take.

I didn't mean there are not structural problems on Islam, but I'm sure the most horrid things like ISIS or killing/enslaving people from other abrahamic religions are heretical.

There is always to be religious groups that want to impose their laws on all the population. It's a question of marginalizing them in the political sphere if possible and neutering the worst ideas (if Leviticus was marginalized being not really that different, everything can be marginalized).

Everyone gets crazy about sharia, but essentially is the same annoyance that people that say x country should have law from y religion, just in their worst variant. Remove the violent parts and it's not that different of, let's say, mormonism. Also, does sharia mean the same for every muslim? What do they actually mean? Does that include the whole torture and kill thing for everyone? We need surveys to judge that too.

As I said before, in the long run I'd rather see religions dissapear, but for now efforts to moderate them is the best route.

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NeroNoah wrote:

As I said before, in the long run I'd rather see religions dissapear, but for now efforts to moderate them is the best route.

Same here. I'm not so unrealistic as to believe advocating for the renunciation of shari'a would be effective, at least not anytime soon. But if I had to pinpoint a portion of Islam to moderate, that would be it. Well, that, and jihad should be reinterpreted as proselytizing. Winning hearts and minds is how America sells its wars, and Islam should follow suit (except, you know, actually believe it).

By the way, almost all of the disturbing survey results support that shari'a is the issue. There's rampant belief that homosexuality should be punishable by law, etc.

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NeroNoah wrote:

As I said before, in the long run I'd rather see religions dissapear, but for now efforts to moderate them is the best route.

As a rule, I'm getting along really well with those muslims that do not shy away from a greasy pork chop and a drop of little something to bolster the appetite.

That being said, selling it as part of the process to make religions dissapear is poor marketing for almost any religion. Atheists and agnostics are not really well liked in a lot of the world, US included, :)

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NeroNoah wrote:

That being said, selling it as part of the process to make religions dissapear is poor marketing for almost any religion. Atheists and agnostics are not really well liked in a lot of the world, US included, :)

Well, yeah. We atheists can't do it; we're not credible. The voices for moderation must come from within Islam itself.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

By the way, almost all of the disturbing survey results support that shari'a is the issue. There's rampant belief that homosexuality should be punishable by law, etc.

Sodomy law style or kill the gay style? I'm pretty sure it's the second for a lot of places, but I wouldn't be suprised the first one is more common, because it's the most common at world level and very recently countries have started to move from that shit. Obviously it could be the reverse, but my instinct says there is more than one interpretation of sharia.

If you can link that info, the better. (although I'll search it...wikipedia to the rescue! Yep, my instinct was right).

http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I was speaking specifically to him grouping those people as muslims. I was trying to point out that we are all in the same group, the people effected by the events in those people's lives that brought us to this conclusion.

I would still disagree with you on this point. People's actions are heavily influenced by their beliefs. Today's Muslims are more likely to hold harmful beliefs than people in other major religions. Your average Muslims is fundamentally different from from an average person of another religion because their religion is fundamentally different than those other religions.

When a Muslim executes an ex-Muslim for the crime of apostasy, they are not simply killing someone and finding an excuse to justify their killing. They are explicitly killing this person because they are Muslim. This is a religion that very commonly comes with the most terrible kinds of baggage.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

To your second question, I'm trying to convey the idea that to blindly label or judge someone to be bottom of the barrel scum seems to me to be dismissing all the bad shit that happened in their lives that led them to those actions.

Labeling people specifically based on their actions is anything but blind. You actually have to perceive reality in order to do this. The fact that some factors in this person's life led them to committing an atrocity does nothing to change the fact that they are bottom of the barrel scum. The fact that some factors in a person's life can even allow them to do something like kill fifty people in a nightclub is what makes them bottom of the barrel scum.