Why do atheists and liberals like Islam?

[Amine]

Thumpalumpacus
So what you're telling us is that you start off by assuming that you're right, even though you admit you yourself cannot satisfy the conditions that you yourself laid down (live in the country, don't just visit) to have one's opinion valued?

I offered my opinion, you dismissed it because you assumed that my life-experiences have been just as limited as your own, and when you found otherwise you immediately abandoned your own standards.

As for proving you or anyone else wrong, I'm not interested in that. I already know that I won't change many minds, especially given the unpopularity of my views.  And I certainly don't care about changing your mind.  I don't know you from a can of paint and don't care if you come to agree with me or not.

I write what I write here and elsewhere for readers who want more than just a narrow-minded perspective offered by someone who has never actually lived in a Muslim country and is unqualified to opine by his own standards. Given the experiences I've had, I think it's a pretty unusual perspective that most Americans never get in the mass-media portrayal of Muslims. You don't have to agree with it, you don't have to read it, hell, if you put me on ignore I wouldn't care.  Because yours is a mind that has already decided on the "facts", and will not consider any alternative to its own narrative.

95% of what you've said is lazy insults and sarcasm. I actually don't mind that and won't whine about it, but it doesn't get you anywhere either.

When you merit better treatment, you'll get it.

"He called me an idiot, I must be wrong!". You said the outcome didn't represent the will of the people, as if it is just a coincidence that a Shiite government popped up where... the majority happen to be Shiites. So to be more clear, the ushering in of this radical Islamic government was backed by massive popular support.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is fallacious thinking. You'll need to examine the role of the Tudeh Party in organizing the strikes and demonstrations which eventually brought the Shah down ... and then look at what happened to all the other elements which had assisted in the Shah's overthrow.

The April 1st 1979 referendum asked "Islamic Republic, yes or no" and virtually everyone said yes. And they got the shitty government they asked for.

Yes, and with a referendum written that vaguely, can you honestly argue that they knew what they were in for? And according to Iranchamber.com --

Ayatollah Khomeini had charged the provisional government with the task of drawing up a draft constitution. A step in this direction was taken on March 30 and 31, 1979, when a national referendum was held to determine the kind of political system to be established. Ayatollah Khomeini rejected demands by various political groups and by Ayatollah Shariatmadari that voters be given a wide choice. The only form of government to appear on the ballot was an Islamic republic, and voting was not by secret ballot. The government reported an overwhelming majority of over 98 percent in favor of an Islamic republic. Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979.

Source: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/islam...1979_2.php

[Emphasis added -- Thump]

Is such a large plurality surprising?

Britannica goes into a bit more detail about the role of Islam in the reaction to the Shah's corruption:
"In January 1978, incensed by what they considered to be slanderous remarks made against Khomeini in Eṭṭelāʿāt, a Tehrān newspaper, thousands of young madrassa (religious school) students took to the streets. They were followed by thousands more Iranian youth—mostly unemployed recent immigrants from the countryside—who began protesting the regime’s excesses. The shah, weakened by cancer and stunned by the sudden outpouring of hostility against him, vacillated between concession and repression, assuming the protests to be part of an international conspiracy against him. Many people were killed by government forces in anti-regime protests, serving only to fuel the violence in a Shīʿite country where martyrdom played a fundamental role in religious expression. Fatalities were followed by demonstrations to commemorate the customary 40-day milestone of mourning in Shīʿite tradition, and further casualties occurred at those protests, mortality and protest propelling one another forward. Thus, in spite of all government efforts, a cycle of violence began in which each death fueled further protest, and all protest—from the secular left and religious right—was subsumed under the cloak of Shīʿite Islam and crowned by the revolutionary rallying cry Allāhu akbar (“God is great”), which could be heard at protests and which issued from the rooftops in the evenings."

There are some accurate points in that article, I think -- especially the part about cycling violence. You will have noticed that while some of the motivation was religious (which is not anything I've denied; I simply pointed out that the Revolution was not motivated by his secularism, which was your insinuation), the article pretty much supports  my point -- religious mourning practices do not equate to religious motivations behind a revolution.  Indeed, you have to get past these first two paragraphs to find your own quote:

Mounting social discontent in the 1970s in Iran, which culminated in revolution at the end of the decade, had several crucial dimensions. Although petroleum revenues continued to be a major source of income for Iran in the 1970s, world monetary instability and fluctuations in Western oil consumption seriously threatened the country’s economy, which had been rapidly expanding since the early 1950s and was still directed in large part toward high-cost projects and programs. A decade of extraordinary economic growth, heavy government spending, and a boom in oil prices led to high rates of inflation and the stagnation of Iranians’ buying power and standard of living.

In addition to mounting economic difficulties, sociopolitical repression by the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi likewise increased in the 1970s. Outlets for political participation were minimal, and opposition parties such as the National Front (a loose coalition of nationalists, clerics, and noncommunist left-wing parties) and the pro-Soviet Tūdeh (“Masses”) Party were marginalized or outlawed. Social and political protest was often met with censorship, surveillance, or harassment, and illegal detention and torture were common.

(Odd you should have decided to omit those two paragraphs ... pretty selective quoter you've got there.)

Revolutions get hijacked all the time, and you will find that throughout history. That was my point, and I stand by it. Just as the October 1917 Revolution was against a cruel despot, so was the January 1979 revolution.  Just as the Kerensky government tried to navigate a moderate path in a political milieu rife with extremist factions, so too did the Bakhtiar government; both failed not because the extremists represented the will of the public masses, but because those extremists had no scruples about how they seized the levers of power.

Fuckin quote thing fucked up. Oh well.

Such posturing! For someone who claims over and over not to care, you sure spend a lot of time whining before actually getting into anything of substance. You seem especially concerned with portraying me as someone who absolutely refuses to acknowledge facts. Spare me that bullshit, be an adult and just state your case if that's what you want to do, as you claim.

I actually did not insinuate that the revolution was motivated by his secularism, or at least only his secularism. I never would have agreed with that at all. I never said there was nothing more to it than religion. I'm on record as saying "As for the 1979 revolution, whatever it was motivated by, the result speaks loud and clear." What has always been important to me, particularly in the context of this thread, is the religious element of the motivation for revolution, which you don't even deny, and the outcome. I don't know what you think I'm trying to argue here. You accused me of basically not knowing any Muslims and then we got into this tangent about Iranian history. The fact that you don't deny there is an Islamic religious element to the revolution (an understatement IMO) is quite enough for me to say, "see, we agree" because that's what I've been saying.

It seems to me that all of this history is interesting and important in its own right but, in this discussion, is more a way to try to bury the harm of people believing in medieval shit. Why can't we just say Islam is bad without getting into a bunch of rationalizations about how everything that ever involved it actually had all sorts of other factors (which of course will always be the case)? Personally I doubt things would have turned out half as bad if people weren't under such religious fantasies which make them fanatical, confused, and easy to manipulate.