Cenk Uyguy gets it

[GrandizerII]

Don't fucking care.  "God" is a piss poor excuse for killing people.

[Angrboda]

Well, there goes the neighborhood....

[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.

[Simon Moon]

This video is from two years ago, but still relevant today.


Cenk Uygur (Young Turks) said it best: this is a cultural problem, not a strictly religious one. This is why even Christians in the same regions commit some of the extreme stuff that some Muslim factions commit. I know a lot of you are big fans of Sam Harris, and some may not be fond of Ben Affleck, but Sam Harris is just misguided on this topic. Listen to the video and see what Cenk has to say: he pretty much says what I've always wanted to point out to some members here.

I am unable to watch the vid right now. Being a fan of TYT, I've probably seen it before.

Could you summarize the cultural aspects that Cenk is pointing to?

I tend to side more with Harris on this. While I am sure the cultural aspects have a big influence, without having a religious text that specifically tells adherents to kill unbelievers, treat women horribly, cut thieves hand off, etc, etc, etc., what would the 'cultural aspects' have as an engine to motivate so many to act horribly?

As an example, China has a horrible human rights record toward Tibetans. So where are all the Tibetan terrorists? Might some of the differences be the religious text they adhere to?

[GrandizerII]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Arkilogue]

Don't fucking care.  "God" is a piss poor excuse for killing people.

Agreed. If the believer's only recourse is to kill the unbeliever, they have admitted and demonstrated complete spiritual poverty.

[GrandizerII]

This video is from two years ago, but still relevant today.


Cenk Uygur (Young Turks) said it best: this is a cultural problem, not a strictly religious one. This is why even Christians in the same regions commit some of the extreme stuff that some Muslim factions commit. I know a lot of you are big fans of Sam Harris, and some may not be fond of Ben Affleck, but Sam Harris is just misguided on this topic. Listen to the video and see what Cenk has to say: he pretty much says what I've always wanted to point out to some members here.

I am unable to watch the vid right now. Being a fan of TYT, I've probably seen it before.

Could you summarize the cultural aspects that Cenk is pointing to?

Well, aside from the chart I just referred to in previous post, he mentioned FGM as an example to illustrate the point that culture irrespective of religion can play a significant role in fostering barbaric "ideals" and made some other points that escape my mind at the moment. But the overall point is that you can't make generalizations about the Muslim population based on a bad handling of statistics or without consideration of the role of culture in triggering certain practices/attitudes or of the multiple different ways in which religious doctrines are interpreted (leading to different ways of applying beliefs).

As an example, China has a horrible human rights record toward Tibetans. So where are all the Tibetan terrorists? Might some of the differences be the religious text they adhere to?

Sure, that's possible. Or rather their interpretation of it. Physical environment may play a role as well, I don't know. At the end of the day, it's so many multiple factors that one can't just assert religion is a major contributor to all these barbarisms.

And terrorism itself has been committed by various nonMuslims anyway throughout history of mankind, even in modern days.

[Arkilogue]

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.

It's dangerous to be a Muslim. 82-95% of Islamic terrorism kills other Muslims.

[GrandizerII]

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.

It's dangerous to be a Muslim. 82-95% of Islamic terrorism kills other Muslims.

If true, then it's a percentage of Islamic terrorism. Not of Muslims overall.

So what point are you trying to make exactly?

[Arkilogue]

It's dangerous to be a Muslim. 82-95% of Islamic terrorism kills other Muslims.

If true, then it's a percentage of Islamic terrorism. Not of Muslims overall.

So what point are you trying to make exactly?

That Islam is inherently more dangerous to it's own adherents than any other religion.

It also has not gone through a reformation like the others.