Being critical of radical Islam

[Puzzledtraveller]

Does not make you a republican, it does not undermine your core liberal beliefs, it does not legitimize bigotry, it does not make you an Islamaphobe, it does not mean you are playing in to the hands of the far right. It does not make you Donald Trump.

Perhaps criticism is what Islam needs to cut and cauterize the radical elements? Have you considered that?

It is not that the criticism is bad, it is what is criticized and the context and contrast applied to that criticism that makes the difference. It is intellectual dishonesty to retort "well all religions are bad". Christians for example represent such a wide and diverse span of beliefs that range from radical interpretations to open minded liberal interpretations of The Bible. It has went through it's reformation. Is it possible Islam must go through this change too? If so, behaving like the problems are not there will not help it.

Flame away, because I am walking away. I rarely visit DU anymore and it is in part due to the sometimes staggering obtuseness of some members that will not allow a discussion of the issue.

[NightWatcher]

1. I'm suspect of anything done in the name of an imaginary deity

I'm having a hard time determining where it is ok for one to reside on the religious spectrum. Sure, the radicals of all religions are often too extreme and violent, having warped the views of the mainstream of that religion. Then again I have a hard time legitimizing anyone's views who exist in the realm of invisible sky guys whatsoever.

Fundamentalists will reside as long as any religions exist. If religion were no more, we'd label people who act on the behalf or at the direction of invisible men who reside in the sky as nuts.

[tech3149]

2. I am critical of fundamentalism of all aspects of life

Whether it's politics, economics, religion or any other human endeavor. Fundamentalism is based on an absolutism that requires accepting every aspect of the belief is infallible.
I am fairly certain that my beliefs are founded on evidence that they are accurate and beneficial to all. I will always be open to information and ideas that will improve my views.

[Arugula Latte]

3. Criticism of irrational supernatural belief systems is not "bigotry" like so many here insist.

Many religious people, including DUers, want to put a protective anti-criticism bubble around their nonsensical mythologies. It ain't happening.

[hifiguy]

21. + a googolplex.

[840high]

4. ....x10+

[uppityperson]

5. Being critical of radicalism of any sort is fine. Claiming those who share something

but are not of the fundamentalist radical sort are the same is not ok.

[pampango]

6. Well said. Being critical of radical Islam is one thing. Assuming all Muslims are radical

is another. "All Muslims" are not any one thing. Stereotypes are rarely useful.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

14. Your protests would seem more sincere if you were to offer them when

other groups are being disparaged as a whole.

[LittleBlue]

9. Please explain this, then

Do you believe stoning women and killing converts constitutes radicalism? If so, then how do you reconcile your second sentence with these results?

[sibelian]

10. How many more times does that graphic have to be posted before people actually READ it?

It amazes me.

[hifiguy]

20. No kidding.

The facts are what the facts are, and they are unspeakably ugly.

[smirkymonkey]

24. I know, the denial on this site is unreal.

[cheapdate]

28. Amazing. Even if we look only at developing and non-Western countries

we still find populations where 90% of Musilms reject the idea of making Sharia the law of the land, and where clear majorities reject extreme fundamentalist garbage like stonings.

[Whiskeytide]

30. I'm curious...

... why are Iran, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia not on the lists? I'd especially be interested to know how SA stacks up.

[liberal_at_heart]

42. The West has no understanding of what Sharia Law even means. From what I've heard it means

following things like praying a certain number of times a day, fasting, and being charitable. Stoning women is generally done in outlying, small, tribes and there are are countries where the national government that will arrest tribal members for stoning women.

[treestar]

43. In THEIR country

And none of that proves they are terrorists or support terrorism.

There are minorities on many of those questions, in many of those countries, and therefore a majority who don't want those things.

[Matrosov]

7. Some progressives don't care about the truth

They only care about being the opposite of whatever conservatives say and do.

If a conservative says Hot, they say Cold.

If a conservative says Up, they say Down.

Conservatives like to make outlandish claims about Muslim, those progressives have to defend Muslims at all costs, to the point of claiming any criticism of the Islamic religion or Islamic culture is racist.

Some seem to have an 'oppression chart' where they rank various groups in order of importance. They'll tell the rest of us not to paint anyone with a broad brush, but they'll do it themselves in a heart beat.

Muslims apparently outrank members of the LGBT community and women, and consequently some of those progressives were far more worried that the rapes in Cologne could be ammunition for conservatives than they were disturbed by the rapes themselves.

I wonder what the excuses will be if some members of the LGBT community in Europe were attacked or killed in the name of Allah.

[LittleBlue]

8. Criticism of Christianity was critical to reform

Criticism of Islam is largely illegal in the Islamic world. Which is partly why they are so far behind.

It isn't "progressive" to support medieval attitudes toward women.

[FLPanhandle]

11. As an atheist, I'm critical of all religions

Islam doesn't get a free pass just to appear different than republicans.

[Herman4747]

12. If the Islamic State is doing something like taking sex slaves...

...they actually quote verses from the Quran (e.g., Quran 70:29-30). I have seen videos of them doing this!

[Odin2005]

13. Bashing Islamic militancy is fine, bashing Islam and Muslims in general is not OK.

Sadly there are plenty of Islamophobic bigots on thus site who think Islam and all Muslims are uncivilized savages, in spite of the fact that one of the most progressive people in Congress is a Muslim, in spite of the fact that the most famous civil rights leader after MLK was a Muslim.

[LeftishBrit]

16. +1

[Igel]

18. There's a problem here.

For quite a while, it was standard practice to ascribe all the bad things done by Xians in the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Inquisition, to Xianity.

In fact, it still is.

When Xians object, the attitude is that they need to face their past, atone for it, etc., etc. They're apparently deep in denial.

For Islam, we have the kind of two-faced bowdlerization that was common in pre-Enlightenment days. It's okay to speak of the religion's merits and glories, all the great things "it's" done, but only speak of excesses as necessary and worthy given the goals or achievements. And that last bit, only really in house, never with an eye to criticism. We stopped that with Xianity in the 1700s, to a large extent; in some retrograde circles it continues.

But for Islam it's still standard practice. We don't speak of the Islamic Conquest, of the devshirme, of the laws that oppressed Xians and Jews that were implemented at times from Andalusia through to Indonesia. Instead, we speak of the tolerance that existed for a while in Andalusia, in Egypt, in Iraq, the relatively mild way Islam was implemented at times in India, and force the generalization that Islam isn't like Xianity. It's enlightened and good, and we slovenly Westerners will eventually realize how wonderful it is.

Xianity had slavery; Islam apparently did not. Xianity had racism; Islam is enlightened. It's a thorough-going whitewashing of history and entirely self-serving on the part of Muslims, who defend their faith, and for many Westerners, who like to bludgeon domestic enemies and turn attention from extraneous problems. We confuse political expediency for historical accuracy. Historical revisionism is necessary for Islam just as it was for Xianity. But now that the older, expurgated history of Xianity has been revised, the gates of revisionism have been closed just in time to prevent any kind of revisionism from affecting our understanding of Islam's history and, necessarily, of the behavior and actions of many a Muslim in the past (since religions by themselves are abstractions that only really exist in the minds and actions of their adherents).

Both religions have tolerant, altruistic, helpful strains of thought and belief and decent adherents, and always have (for their times). Both have bigoted, intolerant, power-hungry a-holes.

[Arugula Latte]

22. I think bashing Islam itself is fine. And so is bashing Christianity. & other supernatural beliefs.

They are based on mythologies and have zero evidence to support them. I don't "respect" them, but I respect people's right to believe in nonsense. Let's face it, these skydaddy-based religions are fucking stupid. But I don't hate all Muslims, and I don't hate all Christians.

[Odin2005]

25. I used to be an edgy New Atheist, then I grew up.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

27. Yeah, from your post it's so obvious

[Arugula Latte]

29. Oops, wrong place.

[Arugula Latte]

32. Yeah, that's it, I'm trying to be "edgy." You got me... Eyeroll back at you.

You seem to think bashing a belief system is wrong, wrong, wrong, so I hope you never, ever bash Republicanism.

[Quantess]

23. Who at the DU says all muslims are bad people or "uncivilized savages"?

Yes, plenty of people out there belive that and say that, but are any of them DUers?

Strawman.

[Odin2005]

26. Look at all the threads about the Cologne attacks.

[Quantess]

36. I read a few of them, but I didn't see any comment

Last edited Wed Jan 20, 2016, 08:36 PM - Edit history (1)

implying that all muslims are uncivilized, all muslims bad, etc. Show me one, from a DUer. Back up what you are saying.

[Quantess]

39. Again, can you please be specific?

Point out one specific post, please.

Just one will do.

[LeftishBrit]

15. Of course not...

indeed, encouraging radical Islam was originally a Republican strategy, because it was opposed to the Soviet Union and Communism.

However, treating all Muslims as enemies or inferiors or terrorists is a prejudiced attitude. Just as with Christians, Jews, or any other group.

[Arugula Latte]

31. I agree with that, but you are not drawing a distinction between the people and the belief system.

I think all Muslims and all Christians and all humans should be treated fairly and well. That doesn't mean I can't say that Islam and Christianity are stupid belief systems without a shred of evidence to support their supernatural aspects.

[nomorenomore08]

35. +2

[snagglepuss]

17. No offense intended but people keep misunderstanding what the Reformation entailed.

The Reformation was a radical movement to make Christianity "purer" by getting rid of "indulgences" and "frippery". IT had nothing to do with making Christianity tolerant. What changed Christianity was the Enlightenment. It's philosophers were not Christian, they were mainly Deists who abhorred religious intolerance and religious superstion.

What Islam need is an Enlightenment but it is very doubtful that will ever happen because throughout their history Muslims have executed those who raise difficult questions about their prophet, about monotheism, about the Koran. Submission is the operative word in Islam not freethinking.

[nomorenomore08]

34. Or maybe they're simply a few centuries behind (mainstream) Christianity.

After all, we in the West were burning "witches" and "heretics" at the stake just ~300 years ago.

[Warren DeMontague]

37. I think there's something to that, actually.

If one takes the viewpoint that these sorts of large modern belief system structures go through a natural kind of aging process, so to speak-- you look at Judaism about 10-15 centures in and I suspect they were up to their ears in Maccabees, although timelines get questionable the further back you go. Christianity, of course, was in its inquisition phase at about 1400 years.

That's approx. how old Islam is, now. There may be a natural maturation process of the belief system. Of course, the older religons have their zealots, etc. too of course but usually after a period the larger body of belief comes to terms with a certain amount of plurality and mellows out a bit.

Of course, I happen to believe myself that all these sorts of archaic systems of thought are woefully outdated for the rapidly changing, interconnected technological uncharted territory we find ourselves in now. Almost no one would try to run windows 95 on a new computer, but people can't figure out why they put 2,000 year old software into their brains and it fails miserably to deal with the universe as we know it.

personally, I suspect modern humans are better served at this point by open-ended and flexible systems of inquiry and constantly updated, evidence-based maps, allegories and metaphors to model our reality and our relationship to it, but that's just me.

[snagglepuss]

38. An insightful book on this topic is "Aristotle's Children" which

puts to rest the idea that Islam will follow the same trajectory as the West.

[liberal_at_heart]

41. that is again a generalization. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of young Muslims

who don't believe in the strict orthodox rules that their parents and grandparents believed in.

[kwassa]

19. Thread # 73 on this topic is a self-declared drive-by.

Hit-and-run. Clean up on aisle 3.

[nomorenomore08]

33. "Being critical of radical Islam" is not the problem. It's identifying the entire faith with

the radical elements. Does Islam have a bigger problem with violent zealotry than other religions? It certainly seems to. But that doesn't mean we should blame random individual Muslims for it.

[liberal_at_heart]

40. There are over 1.5 billion Muslims in this world. Just how many of them are radical? 5 to 10% maybe?

That's a lot of non radicalized Muslims. You cannot judge an entire group based on a small minority.