(August 14, 2016 at 11:59 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote:(August 14, 2016 at 11:32 pm)Irrational Wrote: Well, I'm not too keen with your usage of the word "all" because that's not exactly true. Would you like to be a little less misleading?
Furthermore, many cultural practices such as FGM preceded the advent of Islam, and in fact some Christian and Jewish groups also perform these barbaric rituals. It is not just Muslims who do it, and not all Muslims do so anyway.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...0413000258
I will agree with you that religion can have an impact on the culture itself, but it's not an absolute rule and it's not something you can determine confidently with just speculations and selective observations. Relationships between variables can go both ways, and don't have to be in one direction only. And it's more nuanced than that anyway. Relationships don't tend to be so simple.
Which Muslim dominated country doesn't have a problem with the treatment of women? There are some that are better then others, but yeah, they all have sexism problems. Don't know what that has to do with FGM, nor did I bring it up. I think the argument that 'Christians and Jews are bad too' doesn't have much bearing on Islam. So what? It's like someone saying that Jeffery Dahlmer was a bad person and someone else saying 'Ted Bundy was a bad person too' So what? Islam blows.
I'm not saying that Islam has an influence on the culture out of speculation. I'm pretty familiar with the early history of Islam and how it influenced the culture. Pretty familiar with the spread of Islam to southeast Asia and the cultural changes that took place there. Pretty familiar with the spread of Islam to west Africa and India. You don't have to speculate, you can read about it. You can also ask Muslims, most of whom will say their religion is the number one identifying factor about themselves, not their culture. Who will tell you that Islam is a cross cultural religion. So you don't have to speculate.
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.
