(August 15, 2016 at 12:33 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: I didn't ignore that. In fact I explicitly said it in my first reply.
I Wrote:the culture stems from Islam as much as Islam stems from the culture.
If you're going to agree that there is a mutual influence going on, then you can't pin it all on religion itself. Culture itself can influence the same barbaric practices without the need for religion, and the same religion can foster opposing set of attitudes for different groups of adherents depending on how one interprets the scriptures and doctrines of that religion.
Quote: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.
Naziism is clearly not a good idea because, as far as I know, it's pretty clear what it's supposed to stand for. With Islam, on the other hand, you got around 1.5 billion Muslims all over the world, with multiple subgroups within Islam, and even further subgroups within these subgroups, so that some groups espouse different ideals from others to the point that you may as well consider them different faiths or religions.
Quote: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.
People have been killing members who leave their tribes long before Islam came about. And if you rewatch the video in the OP, there was a chart that showed the percentage of Muslims who approved of the death penalty for leaving Islam in certain Muslim countries. In some countries, the percentage was disconcertingly high, but in other Muslim countries the percentage was way low. So if Islam itself clearly says to kill apostates, why do some Muslim countries in general seem to disapprove of this? If you want to go by what the Qur'an says, again that depends on one's interpretation and selective picking of verses. Some Muslims go with the "no compulsion in religion" verse and believe strongly in it. So if you want to criticize Islam, which by all means you have the right to do so, you have to keep in mind that religion is a set of ideas open to more than one interpretation.
