Activist Atheist divided regarding criticism of Islam


I did not bother reading this tirade in detail, but I have two things to say:

1. Sam Harris is a twit who will not get a second of my time.

2. I haven't said that Islam was "not warlike". The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest military powers in history, for one. Warfare and conquest was a reality of the past, regardless of culture and religion.

What you're misinterpreting is my insistence that social and material issues are the at the root of things such as ISIS, the Iranian Revolution, and many other things. This, frankly, isn't controversial. Colonialism and Imperialism happened. The Suez Canal crisis happened. The 1953 Coup d'Etat in Iran happened. Sykes-Picot... you get the idea.

The thing is, I don't need to provide you with detailed evidence of this, because I'm not arguing there's anything special about Islam or Christianity. If you want to show that the political instability etc of the Middle East is due to special features of Islam, that's on you, because that thesis has tremendous implications for our understanding of the Muslim world historically. I'm satisfied with perfectly ordinary political causes as the main explanation.
 
I did not bother reading this tirade in detail, but I have two things to say:

1. Sam Harris is a twit who will not get a second of my time.

2. I haven't said that Islam was "not warlike". The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest military powers in history, for one. Warfare and conquest was a reality of the past, regardless of culture and religion.


Good. The above is exactly what I expected you to say.

And its a very clear demonstration of why you cannot understand, or admit to yourself, the problems within Islam.
 
Good. The above is exactly what I expected you to say.

And its a very clear demonstration of why you cannot understand, or admit to yourself, the problems within Islam.

My response to a tirade of yours based on a false premise and centering around a video with a reactionary numbskull proves something?

Keep patting yourself on the back.

Caroline Finkel has a great quote in Osman's Dream (a book everyone imterested in Islam ought to read, rather than listening to pseudointellectuals like Harris):

The 'black hole' that is Ottoman history is a cause for regret in and of itself, but more regrettable still is the present palpable 'iron curtain' of misunderstanding between the West and Muslims. This stems to a large degree from the West's 'Old Narrative' of the Ottoman Empire, which by extension is the narrative of many centuries of Islamic past. To understand those who are culturally and historically different from us -- rather than resorting to such labels as 'evil empire', 'fundamentalist' and 'terrorist' to mask our ignorance -- is a matter of urgency. The greatest hubris is to ask why 'they' are not like 'us', to accept our cultural biases lazily and without question, and to frame the problem in terms of 'what
went wrong'.
 
I did not bother reading this tirade in detail, but I have two things to say:

1. Sam Harris is a twit who will not get a second of my time.

.


By the way it was not a “tirade” either. What it was, was a detailed explanation of why your beliefs are wrong about this subject, and an explanation of how and why authors like Sam Harris have dealt exhaustively with all of the claims that you have been making in defence of Islam.

What Harris is explaining to you, is exactly what I have explained to you. And I did not get my understanding of any of this from anything that Harris has said or written. But the reason for directing your attention to what Harris has said in all of his filmed debates and discussions on YouTube, and in his books, is that he is giving you a detailed, carefully explained, and pretty well researched explanation of all the numerous points that I have put to you, and for which you have no genuine rebuttal at all …

… nor will you ever be able to produce any rebuttal, except for a disingenuous or dangerously misguided one. Because all the known evidence and “facts” are against you … such as the facts about what the fundamentalist terrorists themselves repeatedly say about their aims and their entire and complete motivation for those aims.

You are simply one of a large number of apologists for Islam (and Christianity?), who seem to think the appalling situation of their continuous tens of thousands of deliberate planned mass murders, will be helped if you refuse to criticise the religion which they themselves say is the fundamental motivation for their murderous actions. They are, as they themselves repeatedly stress, waging a worldwide Jihad.

There are many people who do not want to face up to the truth about the role religion in the issue of Islamist fundamentalism. And like you they are actually acting as apologists for the most appalling religious atrocities being committed right before everyones eyes. But the problem with that apologist approach is that apart from being deliberately and dangerously dishonest, it's impossible to ever solve the problem of Islamic terrorism by deliberately lying to yourself and to everyone else about the central role of Islamic religion in all of this.
 
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Yes, yes, the Islamic world is a blobby, jihad-waging "they". Your line of thinking is worth no more effort to adress intellectually than that of a rabid antisemite.
 
Mohamed was a kiddie diddler.

Lot wanted to give his virgin daughters to the angry crowd to protect the strangers in his home.

Kids made fun of Moses bald head, so the lord sent bears after the kids to tear them apart to teach the world a lesson.

Let's all agree that religious faith includes ugly business.
 
Mohamed was a kiddie diddler.
For political reasons. While hardly the norm (the sheer volumes of early Islamic apologetia concerning A'isha proves that) it was not unheard of either.

Kids made fun of Moses bald head, so the lord sent bears after the kids to tear them apart to teach the world a lesson.

That was Elisha. But yes, that's my favourite hilariously absurd bible passage.

23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number. 25 And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

I love the matter-of-fact way it's interspersed between the tedious details of his journey.
 
For political reasons. While hardly the norm (the sheer volumes of early Islamic apologetia concerning A'isha proves that) it was not unheard of either.



That was Elisha. But yes, that's my favourite hilariously absurd bible passage.



I love the matter-of-fact way it's interspersed between the tedious details of his journey.

I stand corrected.

For all the corrections I received from the nuns, one would assume I'd correctly remember every player in the story. Thank the FSM they're not still around to correct me over mistaking Elisha for Moses.
 
I think that's addressing the idea specifically, but I can understand why the individual would take it personally. However, you do not seem to be open to this distinction. Let's try one really mild example to see where we're at. Take the following sentence:

I'm pretty sure Mohammad never received any divine revelation.

Do you take that as an attack against the believer?
It may be for many people. But the question is not whether this is an attack or not but if this possible attack is moderate and justified and what kind of answer is possible in a democratic society under the principles of freedom of expression and tolerance. My opinion is that this criticism is correct in any sense and that the answer cannot be violent or against the basic principle of freedom for criticism.

What is aberrant is not the feeling of offense when Muhammad is criticised, but the reaction that this feeling provokes in radical Islamists.
 
That is techincally impossible, since the last few posts i asked questions DIFFERENT from those asked early in our discussion.

If you think they are all more or less the same question, then our discussion is bound to fail anyway due to some sort of communication problem.
That was not the issue of my last questions, especially regarding those about how the police might act.(...)

And what you claim what my view is, is not my view; again, communication failure.
Especially:
"and therefore every Muslim"
I would disagree with that "therefore", even if i assumed that "Islamic terrorism depend only —or mainly— of the Koran" was true.(...)

I do not consider you to be capable of that. Thats because you answered my very general question about what police might do, if some murder-inciting teachings exist in some religion, with presuming that this is somehow similar to a "the end justifies the means"-approach.
Which the question was not.

Then we mostly disagree about "tactics".

Either you explain yourself very bad or my English is horrible. Both things are possible.
Along your comments you have defended some criticism (“Muhammad was a pedophile...”; “The Koran incites terrorism...”) and political measures (“To take an eye on mosques...”) that include all Muslims in a unique block without distinction. The individuals that you have defended here (Wilders, Hirsi Ali...) claim for a “war ” or coercive laws against Islam as a whole. But you say now that you are not attacking every Muslim or that you don’t think that the Koran is a main source of terrorism. I am very surprised. Please, answer this question: What we have been discussing during these days?

I said:"I can only say when some particular police action is not according to civil rights or it is discriminative."
Your answer: "I do not consider you to be capable of that."

I don’t know why do you think that I am not able to know when a particular activity of the police may be an attack against civil rights. I have been working fifteen years for an International NGO that works for Human Rights and I can consider myself a —humble— expert in the issue. I have read a lot of documents on this issue, at least.

“Tactics”? If you like to call it so...
Whther you
 
Caroline Finkel has a great quote in Osman's Dream (a book everyone imterested in Islam ought to read, rather than listening to pseudointellectuals like Harris):

You continue to wrongly presume what the position of those arguing against you actualle is.

As indication, let me quote from Osman's Dream, page 5, last paragraph:

"Was the Ottoman Empire motivated above all by commitement to 'holy war' (jihad) - the struggle against non-Muslims that was a canonical obligation upon all believers?"

source is the free avaible amazon version:
https://www.amazon.com/Osmans-Dream-History-Ottoman-Empire/dp/0465023975#reader_0465023975


So the book that you think would somehow cause other people to correct their seemingly erronerous notion, that there IS some sort of canonical obligation in Islam for some sort of mayhem vs e.g. non-Muslims, treats it without explanation as a given that there at least WAS some canonical obligation of that sort.

How can you ever think someone convinced that there IS some sort of problematic duty within Islamic thought and convinced that this might be a problem by constantly berating them and referring them to a book that says there at least WAS such a thing?

And yes, i noticed in Osman's Dream it is discussed whether that "Jihad obligation" played a role in the formation of the Ottoman Empire. Fine, discuss it all you like, maybe it didn't play a role.

But how could any of such arguments counter the argument that the old - and maybe in the Ottomanic Empire forgotten/irrelevant - obligation is alive today and some people are simply trying to fulfill this obligation?


Realy, i do not even get how that argument is supposed to work.
 
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... Your line of thinking is worth no more effort to adress intellectually than that of a rabid antisemite.

Here is a man recognizing the existence of "lines of thinking" and rejecting one he has identified. Fine, it's a start. Perhaps the gentleman would now like to define "line of thinking," and further explain why rejecting any one "line" makes sense. Why bother, unless thoughts do indeed have a relation to real outcomes?

Ideology -- political, religious, or supposedly scientific -- has consequences. For example, it forms the basis for political parties in democracy, whose elected politicians often act, and are tasked with, implementing those ideas with norms that affect public behaviors.

Ideas affect behavior, the general case. The relation is complex, but has some identifiable correlations. This is what might be explored using calm reasoning.

***
As for the post, it comes as part of a long string of ad-homs and one-liners with no arguments attached. Reported.
 
What we have been discussing during these days?

In the last post, i have tried to get an answer from you, how a police force might react to the general scenario that certain teachings sometimes spread within a certain religious community work as incitement to murder. That does not even require the religion to be Islam.

Along your comments you have defended some criticism (“Muhammad was a pedophile...”; “The Koran incites terrorism...”) ... that include all Muslims in a unique block without distinction.

As i explained several times, when i say something about Muhammad or the Koran i do not say anything about any Muslims much less about Muslims as a whole block.

To explain with another example, i might say that Karl Marx was incapable of both observing reality at least with only minor errors and of at least somewhat correct deduction from observation and furthermore Karl Marx lacked a sound ethical base; or in other words Karl Marx was an immoral idiot. For me that doesn't say anything about Socialists, except that it implies an encouragement to either abondon or at least emancipate Socialism beyond the stupidity of Karl Marx.

But in your ears it would be an indictment and attack upon all Socialists.

and political measures (“To take an eye on mosques...”) that include all Muslims in a unique block without distinction.

Whatever observation of Mosques would take place, that does not include all Muslims, as not all Muslims do attend a mosque.

That is simply a logical error on your side; observation of some places a part of the Muslims visite is never an observation of all Muslims.

If one observes christiant churches, it is also not an observation of all christians as only some 20% regularly attend churches.

The individuals that you have defended here (Wilders, Hirsi Ali...) claim for a “war ” or coercive laws against Islam as a whole.

You are aware that defending someone does not mean agreement with everything the person says?

But you say now that you are not attacking every Muslim or that you don’t think that the Koran is a main source of terrorism.

Again the same problem; you think the second half implies the first half.

I do not.

Koran is at least a very relevant factor for islamistic terrorism. If someone thinks this statement is intended as an attack on every Muslim, then that person is simply wrong; it is intended as an attack against a book.

I said:"I can only say when some particular police action is not according to civil rights or it is discriminative."
Your answer: "I do not consider you to be capable of that."

I don’t know why do you think that I am not able to know when a particular activity of the police may be an attack against civil rights. I have been working fifteen years for an International NGO that works for Human Rights and I can consider myself a —humble— expert in the issue. I have read a lot of documents on this issue, at least.

Then how can you miss that a question what a police force might do in a certain scenario is not equivalent with promotion of Duterte policies?


Think of the "classic" silend kidnapper issue:

Police has kidnapper and he even admits kidnapping. But the victim's whereabouts are unknown and as it has to be presumed that the victim is somewhere hidden and locked away with no means of escape and limited water or air supply. And the kidnapper is unwillingly to say where the victim is hidden even after being informed that the result in the long run (when the victim's body will be found) will be life long imprisonement for murder instead of just 10-20 years for kidnapping.

If one asks, what the police is allowed to do then, that question is not a statement that torture would then be ok; it is at most a question whether torture would be ok.

And it could simly be answered with:

The police cannot do anything beyond what they already do to save the life of the victim and if a relative of the victim tries out of fear for the life of the victim assaults the kidnapper to make him talk, the police is required to stop him with force and at worst shoot at him (which the police of course can and should avoid by never letting the relative near the kidnapper). Even if it were certain that the police could save the victim's life by torturing the kidnapper, the police must not do that.

And just the same with the obsrvation of religious centers, e.g.:
No, the police cannot do anything in regard to the religious centers; even if it were the only way to prevent a thousand murders, the police is not allowed to observe what is taught in the religious centers.


And by the way, long work in human rights group actually might hinder in fully contemplating such questions.

Because for a human rights group it is always also an issue of policy and how the public perceives some issue.

And while the answers that police must let the victim die because kidnapper's rights are so important or that maybe the police has to scrap some more bodies of the street because scrutinity into murder-inciting religious teachings is an absolute no-go might be the legally correct one, they are hard to sell.

Hence, such groups have a tendency not to give the actual correct answer but to instead make statements that are not actually answers to the questions (with the kidnapping case it is often "torture does not work"; which is not an answer, cause the question wasn't whether torture "works") but are helpful to politically promote what the human rights group think is the legally correct answer.
 
Mohamed was a kiddie diddler.

For political reasons. While hardly the norm (the sheer volumes of early Islamic apologetia concerning A'isha proves that) it was not unheard of either.

I don't understand this reply. Is this supposed to excuse paedophilia, or was there another point you were trying to make here?
 
You continue to wrongly presume what the position of those arguing against you actualle is.

As indication, let me quote from Osman's Dream, page 5, last paragraph:

"Was the Ottoman Empire motivated above all by commitement to 'holy war' (jihad) - the struggle against non-Muslims that was a canonical obligation upon all believers?"

source is the free avaible amazon version:
https://www.amazon.com/Osmans-Dream-History-Ottoman-Empire/dp/0465023975#reader_0465023975


So the book that you think would somehow cause other people to correct their seemingly erronerous notion, that there IS some sort of canonical obligation in Islam for some sort of mayhem vs e.g. non-Muslims, treats it without explanation as a given that there at least WAS some canonical obligation of that sort.

How can you ever think someone convinced that there IS some sort of problematic duty within Islamic thought and convinced that this might be a problem by constantly berating them and referring them to a book that says there at least WAS such a thing?

And yes, i noticed in Osman's Dream it is discussed whether that "Jihad obligation" played a role in the formation of the Ottoman Empire. Fine, discuss it all you like, maybe it didn't play a role.

But how could any of such arguments counter the argument that the old - and maybe in the Ottomanic Empire forgotten/irrelevant - obligation is alive today and some people are simply trying to fulfill this obligation?


Realy, i do not even get how that argument is supposed to work.

I have at no point suggested jihad is not a thing, nor that this idea plays no role today. I suggest reading the book, instead of quote mining it.

Are you suggesting that you have done some kind of scholarly analysis and reached the conclusion that the idea of "jihad" is crucial in the general political situation of the middle East?

You need to step back and forget what ISIS or Al-Qaeda say, and instead think about what allowed such groups to get power and soft support in the first place.
 
I don't understand this reply. Is this supposed to excuse paedophilia, or was there another point you were trying to make here?
Don't you think understanding the motivations of historical people in the context of their own times is important in and of itself?
 
My response to a tirade of yours based on a false premise and centering around a video with a reactionary numbskull proves something?

Keep patting yourself on the back.

Caroline Finkel has a great quote in Osman's Dream (a book everyone imterested in Islam ought to read, rather than listening to pseudointellectuals like Harris):


You just make yourself look like a fool when you describe Sam Harris as a "reactionary numbskull". Whatever anyone thinks of Harris (or any of the other prominent atheist activists of recent years ... Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Coyne, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, etc.), he is certainly not a "numbskull". It just shows how weak and disingenuous your arguments are when you try to belittle people in that way.

Look, what I have carefully explained to you at some length, is that all the evidence is actually against what you have been claiming. And in film clips like the one that I linked, Harris explains why that is the case and shows the unarguable evidence for that on every single point.

The fact that you want to ignore it and claim the opposite as an apologist for Islam and islamic terrorist mass murder, is both "your problem", but also its' a serious problem for all of humanity when apologists like you appear to be actually lending vocal support to Islamic fundamentalism and groups like IS, Al-Q, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram etc., ... because what is happening is that the sort of impressionable young Muslims in the west who are joining groups like IS and carrying out mass murder attacks in London, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt etc., are not only being persuaded by the religious message from IS, but also finding what they regard as vocal support from western apologists like you! … in that sense, and to that extent, apologists like you are actually part of the problem.

What you should be doing in any situation like this (or almost in any part of your life), is investigating the issue as objectively and honestly as you reasonably can, to determine what the true evidence really is for such things as the terrorist murders from IS and their Muslim devotees in the west. And to repeat – all the honest genuine evidence shows, as Harris clearly explains (and as I have explained here), that the central motivation for groups like IS and their naïve western followers, is most definitely religious fundamentalism taken directly from the Koran, and every mission statement ever released by groups like IS has repeated exactly that as the cause, with no other cause or aim ever stated at all … and if you had watched that YouTube clip from Harris, you would have heard there where he is responding to various articles in one of the IS on-line magazines (they produce their own recruiting promotional magazine) where the IS writers set out in detail exactly that claim and motivation based entirely upon their religious beliefs in a literal direct reading of what they regard as the words of Allah himself in the Koran … they themselves have been telling you and everyone else for decades that their aim is an entirely religious one … the entire objective is to impose by force of religious war fundamentalist religious rule from the Koran in all the lands where IS is active.

They believe that Allah himself has commanded them in their holy books which cannot be challenged, to create by force of physical Jihad, i.e. mass murder and war, Islamic religious states ruled according to a literal direct reading of the Koran.

We will never be able to solve this problem (Islamic fundamentalist terrorism), until the western apologists (like you) start to admit the truth that is staring them in the face. It's not even a huge elephant in a tiny room, it's a 100ft elephant trying to be squeezed into a 1cm space … the problem is absolutely obvious to everyone, except that many western apologists, especially those with any remanents of religious belief still hanging around in their ideas, mistakenly think they will appear more politically correct and “tolerant” if they make all sorts of apologetic statements trying to place a shady veil over what is staring everyone in the face with groups like IS … and it's really not arguable, because IS themselves insist that it is not arguable!
 
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I have at no point suggested jihad is not a thing, nor that this idea plays no role today.

Ok, maybe you did not suggest it.

But others seem to do:
https://www.nieuwwij.nl/english/karen-armstrong-nothing-islam-violent-christianity/
"Terrorism has nothing to do with Muhammad, any more than the Crusades had anything to do with Jesus."

and that complicates the discussion.

At least i think that the statement, that terrorism has nothing to with Muhammad, implies that the jihad Muhammed talked about does not play a role today.

Are you suggesting that you have done some kind of scholarly analysis and reached the conclusion that the idea of "jihad" is crucial in the general political situation of the middle East?

I would consider it at least so relevant that the above cited statement by Karen Armstrong has to be considered to be false.

As Karen Armstrong is supposedly an expert of that matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong#Reception

and yet seems to make statements that are simply false, in my eyes all arguments from authority regarding Islam and violence are a lot weaker than such arguments are anyway.

So while i have not conducted such study, the argument that some supposed expert conducted a study and arrived at a certain result counts little, if experts seem to say untrue statements about the issue.

Do you think that both Armstrong's statement:
"Terrorism has nothing to do with Muhammad"

and the position, that Jihad "is a thing" and "plays a role today",

could be true?


You need to step back and forget what ISIS or Al-Qaeda say, and instead think about what allowed such groups to get power and soft support in the first place.

With any event there are a multitude of factors. If the absence of one factor would have the result that the event would not have happened and the factor is due to itself not usually irrelevant for such events, i call it a cause.

Often there are several such factors and therefore causes.

For example with an overspeeding car hitting a drunk pedestrian in the middle of the road, both the too high speed of the driver and the drukenness of the pedestrian might be a cause in the sense, that if one had been absent (so car not driving too fast or pedestrian not that drunk) the accident would not have happened.

And similas for some terror attacks there might be several causes. E.g. if one of:
- US mistakes in the middle east
- founding of Israel
- big oil reserves in the middle east

would not have happened/be the case, 9/11 might not have happened.

And in such list of causes, i think something like the following might also have been included:
- the islamic scripture is as it is

I do not see how you could counter the last being a cause in the described sense by arguing that there are other such causes in the described sense.
 
If the Islamic scriptures had "not existed as they are", to paraphrase you, then the world would have been a massively different place. Counterfactual reasoning in itself is epistemologically sketchy (such that historians are usually extremely careful to at all engage in it), let alone when extrapolated over 1400 years.
 
But even taking your assertions at face value, look at the "jihad" waged by terrorist groups today. To whatever degree one can speak of an Islamic tradition of waging holy war, they don't really seem to be a continuous part of it, because they certainly don't care about the traditional rules:

- They are not lead by a widely recognized caliph.
- They engage in takfir (accusing Muslims of not being true Muslims).
- They frivolously harm civilians.
- They kill fellow Muslims en masse.
- They needlessly put their own lives at risk (suicide bombing).

... and so forth. I believe Bonner's Jihad in Islamic History is one of the briefer texts that cover this well, though honestly I haven't read it myself.
 

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