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[Merged] General Criticism of Islam/Islamophobia Topics

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A'isha said:
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My culture condemns stoning people to death, yours condones it. My culture IS BETTER, and it is not anythingphobic of me to point that out.
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[qimg]http://i479.photobucket.com/albums/rr157/antpogo/1267577787390.jpg[/qimg]
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You don't see any problem with stoning people to death?
 
The only kind of "destruction" of "Islamic culture" (there is no uniform "Islamic culture") I advocate is this:

 
A'isha said:
Yes, that's totally what I was getting at with that post, that I don't see any problem with stoning people to death. :rolleyes:
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It seemed you were trying to make the point that one culture can't be considered better than another even if one culture condones stoning and the other doesn't.

Seems like a logical deduction that you think cultural values condoning stoning don't disqualify it as being considered OK.
 
tsig said:
It seemed you were trying to make the point that one culture can't be considered better than another even if one culture condones stoning and the other doesn't.

Seems like a logical deduction that you think cultural values condoning stoning don't disqualify it as being considered OK.
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Neither Belz... nor Chaos seems to have had any trouble understanding what I meant. I can only wonder why you are apparently having so much difficulty doing the same.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
Fine, believe what you want. Keep beating on those strawmen. I'm obviously not going to change your mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...gay-friendly-women-led-mosques_n_1368460.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/01/religion.uk1
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I have never denied that there are liberal muslims, especially in the West, unfortunately many are unaware of the intricacies of Islamic theology; thus their approach that islam is peace, secularism, democracy and so on by definition changes little, they do not really confront the problematic parts of islam which are still there behind a thin veil.

At least a partial return toward the discriminatory past is always a very serious possibility (for it was always the strong pressure applied by the West which obliged the Islamic world to reform, even its liberals are a legacy of this). Finally the mainstream clerics are still in command of the future of this religion, aspiring clerics still hear in major Islamic religious universities about how islam will dominate the world and how Jews are 'pigs and monkeys', the eternal enemies of muslims not about making concessions.

The same old religious education is there, self criticism almost inexistent, unaided Human reason downplayed (still no Higher Criticism of islam), and the legacy of this, cumulated with other causes, is the return toward the past so widespread in the last 40 years (what you point are the few exceptions, actually the Islamic world was much more prone to firmly adopt modernity immediately after the colonial era than now)

I can even concede that that Turkish initiative is the best attempt so far to modernize islam (the way is a transformation of islam indeed starting in the ulama circles). But will it materialize? Will it be widely accepted in the muslim world? And finally will it be enough to assure us that islam will pass a certain threshold when a return toward the past becomes improbable?

Let me doubt that this can be done without also accepting openly that islam, sharia and Muhammad's deeds have important problematic parts (instead we hear about a return to a 'real' perfect Muhammad, I don't think this can work to solve the problem in the sense I talked about for such a perfect Muhammad never existed, as the jihadis in the Arabian peninsula can always reply with full justification, at least regarding Muhammad 'I challenge these [reformist] scholars to point out to me one - just one - Prophet of Allah who lived in peaceful coexistence with the disbelievers? From Adam (peace be upon him) all the way to Muhammad not one of them, not a single one, lived with the disbelievers without challenging them, opposing them and exposing their falsehood and resisting their ways. Not one of them lived without a conflict with the disbelievers that ended up with a total and final separation between the two camps: a camp of belief and a camp of kufr. The disbelievers were then destroyed either through a calamity or by the hands of the believers', see Inspire Magazine Fall 2010).

Ideally renouncing at the doctrine of the inerrancy of the holy book + accepting important change is the best approach (for the problem starts at the most basic level) but I can make exceptions if I see that people accept at least 'between the lines' that there are also those dark parts of islam. Sadly even this latter approach is almost inexistent in the Islamic world (the West included).

Finally I would like to keep the dialogue on this theme at the level of having a civilized exchange of ideas (be them contradictory) but alas this is not possible because some people seem to believe that they reached the 'nexus' of truth which makes alternative ideas necessarily irrational. The problem is of course that being 'progressive' in this sense does not make one be necessarily closer to the truth and the future will prove plenty that the directions of research they try to block with such fervour are fully legitimate (also because their postmodernist-multiculturalist history is 'built on sand', the history of islam has been embellished via ideological factors). Now of course such an approach can be easily hijacked by real extremists (they do) but this is part of another problem which do not invalidate its legitimacy.
 
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I just finished reading a book on Babylonia and Assyrian culture and it seems that current attitudes to women are very deeply rooted in the history of the region.
 
Arguing that Muslims and non-Muslims can never peacefully coexist by quoting a magazine published by Al-Qaeda is like arguing that blacks and whites can never live together peacefully by quoting William Pierce.
 
metacristi said:
Let me doubt that this can be done without also accepting openly that islam, sharia and Muhammad's deeds have important problematic parts (instead we hear about a return to a 'real' perfect Muhammad, I don't think this can work to solve the problem in the sense I talked about for such a perfect Muhammad never existed, as the jihadis in the Arabian peninsula can always reply with full justification, at least regarding Muhammad 'I challenge these [reformist] scholars to point out to me one - just one - Prophet of Allah who lived in peaceful coexistence with the disbelievers? From Adam (peace be upon him) all the way to Muhammad not one of them, not a single one, lived with the disbelievers without challenging them, opposing them and exposing their falsehood and resisting their ways. Not one of them lived without a conflict with the disbelievers that ended up with a total and final separation between the two camps: a camp of belief and a camp of kufr. The disbelievers were then destroyed either through a calamity or by the hands of the believers', see Inspire Magazine Fall 2010).
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You mean this thing? Did you think Osama bin Laden was the voice of the Muslim world when he was still alive?
 
tsig said:
It seemed you were trying to make the point that one culture can't be considered better than another even if one culture condones stoning and the other doesn't.

Seems like a logical deduction that you think cultural values condoning stoning don't disqualify it as being considered OK.
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You're missing the point. Nobody is saying stoning is okay. The objection to the tweet from Dawkins is that he's equating Islam with the worst practices of any group considering themselves Muslims. In other words, Dawkins is implying that all Muslims condone stoning, which is a false generalization.
 
A'isha said:
Neither Belz... nor Chaos seems to have had any trouble understanding what I meant. I can only wonder why you are apparently having so much difficulty doing the same.
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Not being Belz or Chaos I can only use my own mind to understand what you meant.

I can only wonder why you refuse to explain it.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
You're missing the point. Nobody is saying stoning is okay. The objection to the tweet from Dawkins is that he's equating Islam with the worst practices of any group considering themselves Muslims. In other words, Dawkins is implying that all Muslims condone stoning, which is a false generalization.
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Ah, the No True Muslim fallacy.
 
tsig said:
Ah, the No True Muslim fallacy.
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Errrr....no.

Perhaps you should consider that the objections is that people self-identifying as Muslims–y'know the people who consider themselves Muslim–believe many different things and that what some people who consider themselves Muslim believe things that contradict what other people who self-identify as Muslim belief. Thus, not only is trying to find a single thing that every Muslim believes a calling it [font="Courier New]Islam[/font] (i.e., Islam that independent of the minds of every and all Muslims*) is incredibly difficult to do, but attributing a belief that only held by a particular group of Muslims, [highlight]no matter how large[/highlight], and then claiming that it is representative of [font="Courier New]Islam[/font] and therefore makes [font="Courier New]Islam[/font] fundamentally incompatible with Western society is what gets you and Humes fork labeled Islamophobes.

*which is a strange concept to see apparently my ardent materialists like Humes fork
 
tsig said:
I can only wonder why you refuse to explain it.
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Because either you already damn well know my position on the horrific practice of stoning and are merely trying to score some rhetorical points while dodging the substance of Chaos' criticism, in which case I'm not going to dignify that insulting loaded question with an answer, or despite everything I've posted here during my entire time at the JREF forums, you somehow actually honestly believe I support stoning, in which case there's no point in me answering your question since if you can misunderstand me that badly then the semantic gap between us is apparently so insurmountable as to render any kind of coherent conversation impossible.
 
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