Cenk Uyguy gets it

[CapnAwesome]

What you overlooked is that it goes the other way around as well. Such a relationship is not unidirectional. It is not that religion is strictly the reason for these cultural practices. It is more religion and culture mutually influencing each other so that it's hard to just blame it all on religion. I gave you the example of FGM to illustrate the point. But you can relate this to oppression of women as well. Religion, or rather how one interprets or employs religion, may enable the oppression of women but it doesn't necessarily cause the oppression, nor is it implausible that religion may just be a correlate of some other causal factor rooted within culture itself.

Yeah, ok, you're pretty familiar with the early history of Islam and how it spread. That's all good, but it doesn't necessarily mean you know as a result what is going on "behind the scenes". Perhaps you're looking at what you have from a wrong angle, and perhaps you're being overly selective in that you're focusing on Islam as the root cause of certain negative practices but you're not seriously considering other factors as well. You're forgetting, for example, that heaps of Muslims don't oppress women. I would say Muslim Kurds are a good example. But anecdotally, I also intimately know Muslims and have some relatives who happen to be Muslim. The ones I know don't oppress women, and where I'm from (around 50-60% Muslim population, such oppression (ala Saudi-style) is rare and any slight form of oppression that occurs equally occurs in both Muslim and Christian populations over there).

So my point overall? It's not simply religion. And it's simply unfair to end up condemning a whole population of people for the crimes of a few in the group.

I didn't ignore that. In fact I explicitly said it in my first reply.

the culture stems from Islam as much as Islam stems from the culture.

That some shitty things that happen in the Muslim world hardly excuses Islam from it's own shitty things. It's like excusing a serial killer from murder because there are also serial rapists in the same neighborhood. Both Islam sucks and the cultural elements that lead towards something like female genital mutilation suck. Nor does saying 'I know Muslims and they are good people' excuse the religion. John Rabe personally was responsible for saving hundreds of Chinese lives during World War II, and he was a member of the Nazi party. It doesn't mean that Nazism is a good idea. (Sorry Godwin!) There are good and bad people of every religion, that does not excuse the religion itself.

What is a religion but a set of ideas? You can critically examine any set of ideas and you can see how they actually work in the real world. Islam fails on both accounts. Sure, female genital mutilation would probably still be around without Islam, but what about the murder of apostates (or Atheists)? It's a pretty hard sell to say that would still be around without Islam. What about charging Zakat to Christians or Jews? I mean that's explicitly part of Islam. I don't think you could tell me that it would be around without Islam.

Even if all of Islam were cultural (it's not), it's still no excuse. In the modern world, we don't want our cultural values to come from the 6th century middle east, which is where Muhammad got his cultural values from and Muslims, across the board and across the world view him as a moral example. It's time for the world to move on from this shitty set of ideas. So I'm not condemning Muslims for the crimes of a few, I'm condemn Islam because it is a shitty set of ideas that apply poorly to the real world as well.