A Simple Rule

[Mister Agenda]

If people still think I'm terrible for even having the opinion that all moderates are hypocrites and validate the fundamentalists, then that's up to them.

No worries. I think you're mistaken on this point, but far from terrible, especially given your body of work. You're all right by me.

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I hope you come back soon. This particular issue is a really sensitive one among liberals and needlessly so in my opinion.

If they'd all agree with you, all that wouldn't be necessary, eh?

A lot of emotion gets dumped into it, as evident from how you saw Affleck literally turn red in the face with rage before he tried to shout Harris down, proving Harris' point that liberals are unwilling to oppose or discuss Islamic theocracy.

Because a single case proves a point about an entire demographic? And it would be a lot easier to discuss Islamic theocracy with people who can comprehend that it isn't a synonym for 'Islam'. All the fuss you complain about? It's almost entirely due to people like you refusing to make simple and obvious distinctions when talking about more than a fifth of the world's population.

To some on the left, to criticize Islam is the same as saying we should round them all up and kill them.

I'd love to see a citation with a quote of that.

To suggest there might be a relationship between Islamic violence and Islamic theology, or to even want to discuss the issue, earns you the label of "racist".

When is it ever framed as just a suggestion? You keep skipping the discussion and going straight to your conclusions like they're a fact and whine that the mean old liberals don't want to have a discussion unless they accept your conclusions in the first place. And it's not just you. There's a whole demographic of Christian conservatives and WTF atheists who agree that people who say 'Islamic extremism' instead of 'Islam' are persecuting them. There's a reason you want to skip the part where we examine your assumptions.

By the way, if a Muslim loses his faith and becomes an atheist, has he changed his "race"?

Nope.

Does that mean that atheism is also a "race"?

Nope.

I'm still fuzzy on the whole Islam-is-a-race thing.

Care to cite a quote of this 'Islam is a race' thing? Just because many people hate Muslims because their racists doesn't make Islam a race. I bet if you were a little less defensive, you could grasp the difference.

I do agree that "race" is an arbitrary, poorly defined concept anyway but I was under the impression that a "racist" was someone who hated people for their genetic heritage rather than what nutty ideas they decided to adopt.

Or their national origin. Would it be beyond your understanding to see how someone who expresses contempt for Mexicans might be racist?

Is the hysteria among some liberals based on slippery-slope thinking, that today we are criticizing Islam and tomorrow we'll be sending them off to concentration camps?

The thinking is that since you refuse to distinguish between Muslims who are (for example) good American citizens and the Taliban, that your indiscriminate condemnations provide cover and justification for discriminating against innocent people here and abroad; and in some cases violence against them. It's not a slippery slope, it's current events.

Or is there some other reason why we're not allowed to have a discussion about Islamic teaching?

For starters, that's a lie. What you're not allowed to do is smear people without being called on it. The idea that Islamic teaching is at the root of the troubles endemic to undeveloped or single-resource countries and our problems with them rather than their political history and our heavy-handed interventions is motivated by a desire to make it about something that absolves the West of any responsibility for a situation which it has actively and purposely developed. If we make it about a book, if we make it about essence, the only way to address the problem is to make 1.6 billion people stop believing that book, and that's something we can't do. It's like using China as an excuse to not do anything about global warming, rather than correct our own policies that are contributing to the problem, we complain that it's really out of our hands until the 'other' changes their ways.

If it helps to reassure some liberals concerned about the prospect of violent persecution of Muslims, let me remind you that all religions die with the utterance of two magic words:

"PROVE IT!"

Can you give an example of a religion that died because of that? From what I've read of history, the most common cause of death for a religion has been a new religion taking its place.

Thomas Paine once wrote in his conclusion to The Age of Reason, that where ideas are expressed and exchanged freely, Truth will finally and powerfully prevail.

Apparently you're adding an addendum: if the mean old liberals will stop criticizing what we say and just agree that we're right!