Why do I say that Islam is an evil religion?

[R00tKiT]

It's probably more than just your emotional investment ....... one can plausibly argue that tolerating cheating -as long as one can get away with it- threatens family stability, and hence society. Maybe an increased number of unfaithful husbands is correlated with, say, a higher divorce rate. This might be an argument to condemn cheating even under moral realism.

But let's say there really is no factual basis for condemning this act, it's still conceivable, as you said, to call it evil.

Yep, people get things wrong all the time...especially when we get around to calling things evil.  

I agree, but they wouldn't really be wrong if they called cheating evil. Again, even from a moral realist viewpoint, it's not hard to find objective facts supporting this assessment. 

And?  Let's assume a person had a genuine religious experience and it filled them with a mighty terror of god.  Okay.  So..what makes disobeying god evil though? 

A person who believes that god is their creator, that is the same entity that endowed them with everything they have, will naturally think disobeying this entity is ungrateful and evil.

Imagine you went away from home for a trip, in the meantime you lent your neighbor your car for a couple of weeks.. and when you come back, you find out that your car was stolen, and the ungrateful neighbor is nowhere to be found. I'm sure you'll be more upset than you would be if some anonymous person forced you out of your car and drove away. There is something particularly atrocious about ungratefulniess, your neighbor's betrayal is a different level of evil than that of stealing your goods by brute force.

 That's how a religious person sees the act of disobeying God. Being in good health, endowed with eyesight, hearing, being able to walk, and not being affected by the very long list of debilitating illnesses and disabilities, and yet, with all that, fail to perform simple religious deeds, or worse reject belief in God altogether... The religious person naturally sees that everything he has is a gift from God, and so, for them, returning the favor by not respecting a simple to-do (and not to do) list is a form of betrayal, of betraying their creator, and is indeed evil.

Um....no...it doesn't?  I guess "secularism" (I'm pretty sure you don't have the faintest clue what that word means) allows us more specificity to talk about things that are bad and things that are evil than your religion does...but you seem to be willing to insist that there's no objectivity in your religions moral pronouncements to begin with...so...?  This response does beg the question, though, why you tried the whole "what the wife don't know" bit.  You seem to realize, all of a sudden, that this doesn't matter.  I was beginning to wonder if you also thought that, should you be in some place god can't see, then disobeying gods would not be evil.  Probably not the case, eh?  Because you believe there's something bad about disobeying gods.  

I think we already reached a stalemate, it really comes down to your a prioris. In a naturalist worldview, no religious statement is objective in any way -some may argue that religious language becomes meaningless. In a theistic worldview, there obviously are objective moral evils other than the plain evils like physically harming someone. Secretly cheating on a spouse is a grave sin in abrahamic religions, it's "meh, who cares" outside of religion. That's it, these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed.

So how to break this stalemate ? In my example about unfaithfulness, I was attempting to poke holes in the realist viewpoint : there might very well be acts that are evil and yet can't be shown to be so by appeal to objective facts. Even if I weren't religious at all, I would find it really hard to consider cheating anything below evil.