(January 12, 2025 at 12:47 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I'm absolutely fine with people shitting on old gods and new gods, and if they decide to get all murdery about it that's just another thing to mock them for. The only privilege worth considering here is the privilege the religious appear to believe that they and they alone possess. Business as usual in our god-addled world.

Your self-congratulation is reaching escape velocity from what the rest of us call reality. Publishing bigoted cartoons to intimidate and demonize immigrants is a whole lot more morally problematic than "shitting on gods," and trying to characterize immigrant Muslim communities as some sort of privileged class in the West shows how little you know or care about power dynamics.

As before, it wouldn't make a difference to me what was (or was more) morally problematic. Notice that I'm not out there murdering people for moral failure as I see it. Which brings us right back round to terrorists and big mo.

(January 12, 2025 at 10:53 am)Istvan Wrote: Gee, you guys are so far up in your ivory towers that you don't think marginalization is as big an issue as it seems from the ground.

I suppose that, for those who come from a culture where brutal (and even fatal) violence is an acceptable form of complaint, a more nuanced approach is... elitist.

Then again, this is from the viewpoint of a culture that views brutal violence against women and gays as something that those oppressed groups should "get over." So perhaps it's just that the shoe is on the other foot? One might even think that they're being triggered, the poor souls.

(January 12, 2025 at 1:34 pm)Istvan Wrote:

(January 12, 2025 at 12:47 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I'm absolutely fine with people shitting on old gods and new gods, and if they decide to get all murdery about it that's just another thing to mock them for.  The only privilege worth considering here is the privilege the religious appear to believe that they and they alone possess.  Business as usual in our god-addled world.

Your self-congratulation is reaching escape velocity from what the rest of us call reality. Publishing bigoted cartoons to intimidate and demonize immigrants is a whole lot more morally problematic than "shitting on gods," and trying to characterize immigrant Muslim communities as some sort of privileged class in the West shows how little you know or care about power dynamics.

We must not forget that migrants chose to leave their countries and move to the West. There is a 5 million large Turkish community in Germany. Most of them are very well integrated and have no problem with the rest. But there is a group among them about which we like to say “They went with their wooden clogs (as in peasant image) and they came back with wooden clogs”.
 
   Don’t get me wrong. Life in a foreign country is always difficult. You are actually leaving one world to start again in another world. And I understand the issues of local people too. Poorer people will always antagonize new-comers because they want to maintain their salaries and jobs. On the other hand, higher classes (especially in place like Germany where the economy is doing well) are mostly happy to have (for instance) a million extra Syrians to recruit in the lower paying jobs and other area where there is a shortage of workforce.
 
   The third issue is: No one knows nothing about religion and spirituality. Most believers live in the illusion that their culture and their way of believing is simply the best and all others are s…ers.
 
   Again: We all need to work on these issues.  

Careful, tell the types of folks that murder cartoonists that they don't know shit, and big mo didn't know shit, and you're next. We don't all need to work on these issues. We're not all murdering people over cartoons.

(January 15, 2025 at 12:16 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Careful, tell the types of folks that murder cartoonists that they don't know shit, and big mo didn't know shit, and you're next.  We don't all need to work on these issues.  We're not all murdering people over cartoons.

All of these reminds me of the Byzantine İconoclast movement of the 8th century A.D.:



(Chludow Plaster / Moscow / 8th century: Christians are covering up the images of Christ in the 8th century AD)



(St Irene Church in Istanbul. The is a mosaic behing the Cross but it was painted over (by Christians) because they didn't want to have visual representations of even holy personalities in their churches)



Archangel in the Church of St-Sophia, Also dates to the 8th century, Also covered with plaster (by Christians) in the 8th century AD.

   This kind of iconoclast behavior emerged in many places all over the Christian World throughout the Middle-Ages.

   But Byzantine examples are better known. You may want to check examples in the Church of St-Demetrius in Thessaloniki / Greece with beautyfull 5th century mosaics being simply plastered over and then restored in later periods (mostly in the 19th or 20th century).

    So dogmatically religious people will portray all sorts of irrational behavior and hatred of images is among them. When you think in very simple terms: Why do these people feel so threatened by the female body for instance? / And don’t tell me it’s only Muslims, before the renaissance, the human body (male and female) was a problem in Europe as well. Shakespeare and Moliere used male actors to portray female characters. The church was even against Theater in general because all of it was a “lie”.
 
   No, the mechanics of ignorant people, especially when they have the numbers is so different. You may check out the book of Gustave Lebon “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895).

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:...pular_Mind
 
   To sum up: It’s not even that they know what they are doing. It’s the same mentality that caused them to Crucify Christ in the first place. These people are mostly reacting. Thinking that the more they make noise, the better it is for themselves.
 
   So “sinful it is”. That’s the only thing they know with their limited cognitive capacities (when they are enmeshed in their dogmatic beliefs that way).

   So the only solution is dialogue. The only problem is that religious leaders can be very limited in their perspective as well. But in Europe, we can still count on the education system. As I said, there are so many kids (male and female) coming from these Zorro-like families who end up serving society in very important ways. That’s what we need to remind ourselves when things go ugly like this.

"People do weird things" is not a very detailed hypothesis to explain the phenomena.

Leo, lol. You see any christians lopping off heads because somebody drew a picture of jesus? No, because they've been housebroken. Case in point, your examples. If you want to tell me that the problem is that too many muslims today are even more retrograde than medeival christians were then I'm not exactly going to disagree.

(January 16, 2025 at 1:30 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Leo, lol.  You see any christians lopping off heads because somebody drew a picture of jesus?  No, because they've been housebroken.  Case in point, your examples.  If you want to tell me that the problem is that too many muslims today are even more retrograde than medeival christians were then I'm not exactly going to disagree.

Well they weren’t acting like angels during the crusades. They even raided East-Roman cities including Constantinople. You can also check-out this movie if you want:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3465916/
 
Faith has always the potential to lead us into irrational thoughts and behavior. It doesn’t matter who you are harming while doing that. People are harming one another for ideologies (socialism, racism or even nationalist / republican ideas).
 
A truly spiritual person (at least in theory) has to be able to look beyond these things and see the universal phenomenon within each and every one of us.
 
The contradiction we have today is that most religious people are doing the exact opposite of this while people without any religious denomination are simply better in understanding and applying these universal principles.
 
So my answer is: - The era of tolerating extreme approaches within religious issues is over. Don’t you think we should try to evolve as a specie (instead of trying to resurrect some ancient ways of doing thing – That didn’t even exist to begin with if you know about these issues -).