(February 25, 2015 at 12:02 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: ... moderate Muslims do indeed exist, and they do indeed take actions to support their stances. You plugged your ears and shouted.Of course there are moderate Muslims, the prophet Mohammed even said so:
Quote:Quran (2:216) - "Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not."
The problem is that a moderate Islam is not a viable long-term movement because it has NO CREDIBLE INTELLECTUAL BASE.
As Sam Harris said: Osama bin Laden is giving a truly straightforward version of Islam, and you really have to be an acrobat to figure out how he is distorting the faith.
Harris is even writing a book with a moderate Muslim, yet he adds the caveat that he is highly skeptical of any lasting reform of Islam.
Just read the life of Mohammed and then ask yourself: how in the hell are moderate Muslims going to moderate 13 years of head-chopping and sex slavery?
Moderate Islam is not a viable movement.
Perhaps in less enlightened times, it might have been possible to reform Islam, when you could burn all the books you didn't like and create a new interpretation, a new Mohammed i.e. rewrite history. But today, we have all the gruesome details of Mohammed's life, so much that there can be no credible intellectual base for moderate Islam.
And that's why it's futile to support moderate Muslim movements. Only mass apostasy might have a hope.
