RE: Why do atheists and liberals like Islam?
March 31, 2016 at 6:02 pm
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2016 at 6:06 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(March 31, 2016 at 5:28 pm)Amine Wrote:(March 31, 2016 at 2:22 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I lived in Iran for four years and Saudi Arabia for most of one. Pretty sure I've got the background to make informed comments on the matter. And I found the people there to be great, in both countries. SA's governance, of course, is shitty, but under the shah's regime in Iran, the law was secular and the people held many of our values.
How about you? What experiences in Muslim countries informs your opinion?
That's nice that you have that to wave around at people, I bet you're just beside yourself. I've never been to one and don't plan on going any time soon. While I'm sure there are plenty of nice, nonpsychopathic people there, the beliefs of individuals don't often show bad consequences until seen at the group level. You could go visit the Westboro Baptist Church like Louie Thoreaux and live with them for a couple of weeks and realize that they're actually a pretty friendly bunch. They just have some batshit insane ideas about reality. Luckily, they are tiny. If they weren't, they'd still be the same people, but the governance, of course, would be shitty. And by the way, how'd that whole thing with the Shah in Iran go again? Radical Islam ushered in under massive popular support, if I recall? We tried, though, huh?
Well, you insinuated that I was speaking out of a lack of experience. Why you're now dismissing my experience, especially when you have none to speak of yourself, escapes me, but it sure says a hell of a lot about you. So -- I wasn't "waving it around", but rather, rebutting an assumption on your part that was incorrect in my case. Funny how you're deprecating experience now that you see that some of us here have a little.
As for the fall of the Shah, I lived through that revolution, and while it was co-opted by the clerics in Janiary of 1979, it was driven by the people themselves and motivated by his cruelty, not his secularism. It started making headway in early 1978, but only after it was successful did the mullahs overthrow the Bakhtiar government.
I trust that next time you'll think before you post. That is, after all, the recommended order of operations.