The Issue of Islamic Conservatism

[Leonardo17]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^You really need to let go of this Byzantine nonsense.

Boru

[Ivan Denisovich]

West being willing to cooperate have no bearing on condition of democracy in country x as west was willing to deal with Russia that was rogue state long before current war, or supplying weapons to genocidal regime.

[The Grand Nudger]

The issue of islamic conservatism is that islam is pig shit, and conserving pig shit leads to pig shit outcomes. The rule of law and freedom of expression, the rights of minorities, women, and lgbtq people are all sideways with the principles of islam. There's no better version of islam that includes these things which is also, accurately, still islam. We will never overcome islamic autocrats until we have overcome islam, end of. The US can be as problematic as we like, and islam is still islam.

[Leonardo17]

The issue of islamic conservatism is that islam is pig shit, and conserving pig shit leads to pig shit outcomes.   The rule of law and freedom of expression, the rights of minorities, women, and lgbtq people are all sideways with the principles of islam.  There's no better version of islam that includes these things which is also, accurately, still islam.  We will never overcome islamic autocrats until we have overcome islam, end of.  The US can be as problematic as we like, and islam is still islam.

Religions are like ideologies with some sort of “soft side” or positive aspect. I like to compare them to some political ideologies. You and I have been disagreeing about things like the Soviet Union for instance.
 
First of all, Karl Marx what a humanist type of philosopher and people who are knowledgeable in philosophy say that some of his ideas were of great value even today.
 
Second, at some point Karl Marx had to admit he was not a Marxist.
 
Third, Left-wing people like to say that Lenin was a man with real socialist vision but he sort of lost his place to a real dictator like Stalin. But still: To some baby boomer leftists even Stalin was “The man of Steel” who defeated Hitler and made the Soviet Union a strong superpower.
 
The reason why I am telling you all this is that, during most of the 20th century, there were strong socialist ideals and there was this “Socialist social contract”. Today that is simply gone. But it was still around at least during my teenage years.
 
The issue of religions is not that different. In the 1982 movie called Gandhi, you can hear Gandhi say “I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Sikh, I am a Christian”. What he means is that all these religions have this “basic message” I am talking about.
 
Still on a practical level and for most people, it’s this mixture of faith in completely unproven ideas married with some orders and instructions that are to be followed to the letter by commoners or ordinary people but simply don’t apply to the rich and powerful (including the spiritual cast).
 
Here is a nice video on how construction workers in Dubai are exploited like animals although the rich in Dubai have more than enough cash to treat them decently if only they wanted to:
 
 
 
I talked about this with many people. Nobody is interested in the burden of that kind of belief system anymore.
 
But what you are not seeing is that this is slowly shifting. It’s not going to happen in a decade or so, but gradually, the more insane aspects of religion are simply going to disappear.
 
Still: The Political Islamist government is also doing nothing about Gaza. Left wing parties here are mobilizing to support the Gaza humanitarian aid flotilla while the governing AK Party is looking for ways to normalize its relation with Israel.
 
The Abrahamic God says “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. So where is the solution when the conservative ones love dollar bills more than religious scriptures?

[Alan V]

The issue of religions is not that different. In the 1982 movie called Gandhi, you can hear Gandhi say “I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Sikh, I am a Christian”. What he means is that all these religions have this “basic message” I am talking about.

That's a nice hope, and it is similar to what the Sufis sometimes say.  But I don't think it is realistic.

I am not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or any other variety of religious person.  Those are all out-dated systems of thought in my opinion.
 

The Abrahamic God says “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. So where is the solution when the conservative ones love dollar bills more than religious scriptures?

Here's the way I see it.  We all share a common human nature, a psychology which was evolved over thousands of years so that we adapt to our immediate circumstances.

This means that people adopt one religion over another primarily to integrate socially, to gain the benefits of that social integration in terms of surviving and thriving.  In other words, in most cases we do not do it because we are convinced of the truth of our religious beliefs.  We are, in fact, behaving opportunistically just as we were evolved to do.

Only a certain number of people spend the time and efforts to really examine their belief systems critically.  Many of such people abandon them altogether.

So the opportunists are in the majority, by far.  Only a few are able to really cash in because of it, but they are supported by all of those who have been trained to think they are good people.

[Leonardo17]

[The Grand Nudger]

 You can be an atheist and still ask to the perpetrators of 9/11 “What part of the scripture saying ‘Thou Shalt not kill’ did you somehow manage to miss?

They didn't miss shit Leo.  For every fragment of a directive that you can dig out of magic books that you like, the people who you disagree with can do the same.   Islamists aren't doing islam wrong.  You are. It's their religion. It's always been their religion. How often, and for how long, must reformers fail before we can acknowledge it was a shitty enterprise from the word go?

Scripture™ is a uniquely bad reason to do or not do anything.

[Leonardo17]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

@Leonardo17

I agree with the final statement. There should be laws directing people only to believe in what they can directly observe or verify with experiments done to see if someone is completely right or not. Trying to do things by believing what somebody or some book said is full of risks from the very beginning.

I can’t imagine an idea more inimical to freedom that attempting to legislate belief. 

I also don’t understand how such laws could be enforced.

Boru