Merged Terror attack on German Christmas market

[McHrozni]

I see you don't actually quote the post that I take the quote in my sig from, but an entirely different post (one made a day and a half later than the one I quote).

It's rather difficult to claim that I'm taking your post "out of context" when the "context" apparently didn't show up until 32 hours later. But okay, let's look at your "context" for asking me if I wanted to be put in a gas chamber because I disagreed with you that "Islam" is the problem.

You are very keen to keep making excuses for yourself. Do keep up, this is hilarious: misquoting me three months after the post because the context was extra explained only 32 hours after it is a totally great excuse

Just so you know, the context was explained to you earlier on.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11504473&postcount=244

You even quoted that post. It would be polite to try to read what you quote before you start replying to what you think was said.

The rather hollow nature of your disclaimer here is shown by your requirement that Muslims meet impossible demands in order to avoid this fate.

Please explain to me how an effort 1/10th of what Muslims already do on a regular basis is impossible. Do go into details please.

"What Rohingya are doing?"

Sorry - I meant "what is being done to Rohingya", obviously

You either think the Muslim Rohingya are the ones rounding 130,000 people up into camps, razing villages, hacking children to death in pre-dawn raids, burning religious buildings, raping hundreds of women, and massacreing people and dumping them into mass graves (rather than, you know, being the victims of those genocidal crimes at the hands of Buddhists), or you're confusing the victims of genocide with the perpetrators.

No, I'm saying this is way, way below the likes of ISIS. It has certain similarities, true, but again, it's a difference of scale. What you describe is bad, but certainly no worse than what happened to non-Muslim Algerians after Algeria obtained independence - except that the number of victims there was six times larger. ISIS is in a whole another category.

Religious violence is not a binary thing, it doesn't either exist or it doesn't exist, and any religious violence isn't identically bad to any other religious violence. Religious violence exists in a minuscule amount in some contituents (abortion clinic bombings), it exists in mediocre amounts in others (Rohingya), it exists in severe amounts in certain cases (Pakistan) and it exists in obscene extremes in two current active cases (ISIS, Boko Haram).

You're supposed to provide examples of these latest excesses (example of Rohingya is much too mild) in all religions if you want to prove your claim all religions are equally bad.

Good luck.

Yeah, no. Not when you say nonsense like "If they claim they don't think their religion actually tells them to be terrorists, they already deny the validity of their religion as a whole."

If you disagree with this you're actually arguing against something that should be much more acceptable. The reason I constantly stress this amounts to denying the validity of their religion is to stress how difficult it is. I don't want to pretend it is easy, it isn't. Correcting a religion whose very foundations are supremacism, bigotry and hate into something acceptable to the humanist civilization can't be easy.

If you think Islam is built on something else than fine, think that, but if you're right the task is downright trivial and you're arguing against something that should come naturally to any Muslim.

...says the guy who accuses me of defending ISIS merely because I point out that all major religions, not just Islam, have problems with religiously-motivated violence and disagree that "If [Muslims] claim they don't think their religion actually tells them to be terrorists, they already deny the validity of their religion as a whole."

Yes, this is defending ISIS. If we were talking about Nazis (who were mild compared to ISIS), claiming other nations have had their demons too and start talking how bad Belgian rule over Congo was, without explaining why it would be relevant, would amount to defending Nazis, because it would distract attention away from Nazi crimes to something that bore no relevance to those crimes.

By the same measure when we talk about ISIS and Islam, changing the topic to irrelevant violence in other religions, is defending ISIS.

Changing the topic to violence perpetrated by other religions is only relevant if Islamic violence is a result of non-Islamic violence against Muslims who then engage in revanchism - like with Turks and Kurds for instance. No, violence against Rohyinga does not explain, excuse or justify ISIS or any other Islamic violence that doesn't explicitly target the perpetrators.

No, they're both similarly bad (or similarly benign), not that one is bad and the other is benign.

Only if you consider religious violence to be a binary phenomenon, where any amount of religious violence is equal in importance to any other amount of religious violence. For you to be right one would have to consider that slapping a person on the cheek because they insulted your religion is exactly as bad as brutally murdering tens of thousands, because they didn't want to believe in the same god as you do. There is no way to adequately describe how twisted this ethical standard is, and there is no way to overstate how horribly bad it is.

McHrozni

 

[McHrozni]

My "criticism of Islam", if you want to call it that, has involved condemnation of ISIS' theology and a rather burning hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood and its creed, but is mainly focused on feminist issues within Islam and Muslim countries.

No, I wouldn't call it criticism of Islam. You criticize specific Islamic groups, not the overreaching ideology behind them that is responsible for the existence of those very groups. Criticism of actions of Donald Trump does not amount to criticizing the US Constitution either, although I doubt you'll understand because you seem to be rather bad at analogies.

McHrozni

 

[McHrozni]

Unless more Jews demonstrate against Zionist settlements in occupied Palestine than participate in religious observances, I will accuse them of having the wrong priorities, and I will call for their religion to go extinct in its present form. Until that happens I will pay no attention to those Jews who say they oppose the settlements, because their holy books in fact extol the most murderous usurpation of exactly these areas.

You are free to do so in a thread dedicated to that conflict:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=306886

Have fun. Now can you please either explain how is this relevant to the topic?

McHrozni

 

[McHrozni]

Over in the General Israel/Palestine discussion thread, there actually was a guy who "warned" the Jews supporting Israel to change their ways or they'd end up victims of a new Holocaust (he even claimed he was only telling them that for their own good and he didn't WANT it to happen, it was just inevitable if they stayed on their current path).

The other posters there (including myself) didn't buy his excuses either.

His statement is factually true - there are many people in the world who would simply love to kill any Jew who supports the existence of Israel, and alarmingly many wouldn't hesitate to do so if they were given a chance.

The thing is, most of them are of Muslim faith, and you're using them as an argument of how benign Islam is and how unproblematic Muslims are. You furthermore use this as an example to prove Muslims run no risks with their perceived silence and indifference on Islamic extremism and terrorism.

You might have discovered a whole new level of fail here. Congratulations!

McHrozni

 

[McHrozni]

What I don't understand is why all good people born in Lockport, New York aren't condemning the actions of Oklahoma City Bomber Tim McVeigh.

Probably because there is nothing with being born in Lockport, New York that would intrinsically incite people to carry out large scale terrorist bombings.

Islam on the other hand does have just that, and plenty of it.

This would suggest you can't compare the two. You're free to list your reasons for disagreement. Make sure they're logically sound.

McHrozni

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Probably because there is nothing with being born in Lockport, New York that would intrinsically incite people to carry out large scale terrorist bombings.

Just as there is nothing about being a Muslim that would intrinsically incite people to carry out large scale terrorist bombings. Evidence for this is the 99.99% of Muslims who don't carry out bombings.

 

[McHrozni]

Just as there is nothing about being a Muslim that would intrinsically incite people to carry out large scale terrorist bombings.

You're absolutely correct, there is nothing about being a Muslim that would incite people. There is much in it in Islam, as I wrote however.

The two are not identical. Learn that already please.

McHrozni

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

You're absolutely correct, there is nothing about being a Muslim that would incite people. There is much in it in Islam, as I wrote however.

The two are not identical. Learn that already please.

And I was very specific in the language I used for a reason. If there is nothing intrinsic in being a Muslim that incites people then we can agree on that and agree that therefore Muslims should not be punished or targeted or have any culpability assigned to them for terrorism. Therefore trying to stop Muslims coming to your country, or registering Muslims, or harassing Muslims or anything else of that ilk is stupid. Do we agree?

Where we disagree then is in the second part. Given that a Muslim is a follower of Islam it would seem to follow to me that if there is nothing intrinsic to being a follower of Islam that incites people then it would be a difficult stretch of logic to insist that there is something intrinsic to Islam that incites people.

Because if almost every follower of Islam isn't incited then if it's trying to incite them it isn't doing a very good job and/or the vast majority of Muslims are not really followers of Islam.

Your suggestion seems to be that ISIS is true Islam and everyone else is doing it wrong. Which seems to be a dreadfully pro-terrorism message to send to almost all of 1.6bn people who claim to follow Islam and yet feel no need to engage in terrorism.

It also seems to suggest that you know more about Islam than the vast majority of Muslims, which at least seems somewhat presumptuous.

It also highlights your own double standards because you do not apply the same logic to Christians or Jews and assume that believing the Earth is flat/ stationary/6000 years old is intrinsic to their religions. And just to save you a paragraph of wrongness that is not equating the two outcomes but merely demonstrating the faulty logic.

 

[McHrozni]

And I was very specific in the language I used for a reason. If there is nothing intrinsic in being a Muslim that incites people then we can agree on that and agree that therefore Muslims should not be punished or targeted or have any culpability assigned to them for terrorism. Therefore trying to stop Muslims coming to your country, or registering Muslims, or harassing Muslims or anything else of that ilk is stupid. Do we agree?

Why stop there? I'm sure we can agree on many things, such as whether Beethoven was a really good composer or that the Avatar: The last bender movie was attrocious.

These are just as relevant to the debate as agreeing on punishment on Muslims for being Muslim.

Where we disagree then is in the second part. Given that a Muslim is a follower of Islam it would seem to follow to me that if there is nothing intrinsic to being a follower of Islam that incites people then it would be a difficult stretch of logic to insist that there is something intrinsic to Islam that incites people.

It is impossible to follow all of Islam. It is far too contradictory for that. Being Muslim therefore doesn't mean one necessarily follows the evil 'version' of Islam.

That said, if you were to honestly examine the Islamic teachings and the contexts in which they were said, you would discover that the most straightforward reading, the one which requires the least number of mental hoops, the one that passes Occhams' razor, gives you ISIS. That doesn't mean every Muslim will do so, in fact most will opt to jump through many mental hoops in order to live peaceful lives worth living. While this is commendable, it doesn't paint an accurate picture of Islam.

Because if almost every follower of Islam isn't incited then if it's trying to incite them it isn't doing a very good job and/or the vast majority of Muslims are not really followers of Islam.

That's what I'm saying. Most Muslims wouldn't even qualify for Muslims if you judged them by strict Islamic teachings, a vast majority would be classified as hypocrites if not apostates. That's why the problem is Islam and not all Muslims.

Your suggestion seems to be that ISIS is true Islam and everyone else is doing it wrong. Which seems to be a dreadfully pro-terrorism message to send to almost all of 1.6bn people who claim to follow Islam and yet feel no need to engage in terrorism.

As I said I have no problem with them if they claim to follow Islam and they don't. I just want them to do what they can to prevent from their young to discovering their religion says something other than their parents have told them, and turning into mass murderers as a result.

Is that really so much to ask?

It also seems to suggest that you know more about Islam than the vast majority of Muslims, which at least seems somewhat presumptuous.

A vast majority of Muslims don't read their holy books but just follow whatever their cleric claims to be true. The ones who wish to learn more are quite commonly found in the news like the one in the OP.

It also highlights your own double standards because you do not apply the same logic to Christians or Jews and assume that believing the Earth is flat/ stationary/6000 years old is intrinsic to their religions. And just to save you a paragraph of wrongness that is not equating the two outcomes but merely demonstrating the faulty logic.

Excuse me? Of course it is intrinsic to Christian and Jewish religion that Earth is stationary (flat is harder to support). But since that claim doesn't result in people being killed (any more anyway), I am content with their texts containing that. All religions have nonsense in them, but nonsense that kills people - as it does copiously in Islam - should be treated differently than nonsense that is just sitting there, creating cognitive dissonance for the believers, but not much else.

Why is that so hard to grasp, I wonder? I care more about people getting killed because a passage in the Koran says the faithful should kill unbelievers than by people getting mildly confused by a passage in the Bible stating Earth is stationary, when we know it goes around the Sun (among others). You're free to disagree with my logic, but I do expect you to justify why these two instances merit equal treatment.

McHrozni

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Why stop there? I'm sure we can agree on many things, such as whether Beethoven was a really good composer or that the Avatar: The last bender movie was attrocious.

These are just as relevant to the debate as agreeing on punishment on Muslims for being Muslim.

Not when you keep switching between saying Islam is X and Muslims must therefore do Y and not when the deplorables you are so quick to understand and justify are attempting to do or doing the very things I mention because of the very reasons we both agree are wrong.

It is impossible to follow all of Islam. It is far too contradictory for that. Being Muslim therefore doesn't mean one necessarily follows the evil 'version' of Islam.

That said, if you were to honestly examine the Islamic teachings and the contexts in which they were said, you would discover that the most straightforward reading, the one which requires the least number of mental hoops, the one that passes Occhams' razor, gives you ISIS. That doesn't mean every Muslim will do so, in fact most will opt to jump through many mental hoops in order to live peaceful lives worth living. While this is commendable, it doesn't paint an accurate picture of Islam.

Your two paragraphs here seem to be at odds. If Islam is too contradictory to follow in its entirety then again you are making a stretch in claiming that the right interpretation is yours and that the vast majority of Muslims are doing it wrong.

That's what I'm saying. Most Muslims wouldn't even qualify for Muslims if you judged them by strict Islamic teachings, a vast majority would be classified as hypocrites if not apostates. That's why the problem is Islam and not all Muslims.

Qualify according to whose judgement? Classified according to whose rules?
It seems the problem is with one very narrow interpretation of Islam - the one favoured by ISIS and yourself as correct.

As I said I have no problem with them if they claim to follow Islam and they don't. I just want them to do what they can to prevent from their young to discovering their religion says something other than their parents have told them, and turning into mass murderers as a result.

Is that really so much to ask?

I'm sure pretty much every Muslim parent is doing everything they can to stop their kids turning into mass murderers. Sadly sometimes everything you can do is sometimes not enough. Not even for white blue-eyed Christian parents with white blue-eyed Christian kids.

A vast majority of Muslims don't read their holy books but just follow whatever their cleric claims to be true. The ones who wish to learn more are quite commonly found in the news like the one in the OP.

Again if the claim is that the right interpretation of Islam is one which leads to murder and terrorism then I disagree and think that's a pretty stupid message to send to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Excuse me? Of course it is intrinsic to Christian and Jewish religion that Earth is stationary (flat is harder to support). But since that claim doesn't result in people being killed (any more anyway), I am content with their texts containing that. All religions have nonsense in them, but nonsense that kills people - as it does copiously in Islam - should be treated differently than nonsense that is just sitting there, creating cognitive dissonance for the believers, but not much else.

OK fine. I think that's the first time you have explicitly stated that Christianity and Judaism intrinsically incite people to stupidity. I think again most Christians and Jews would disagree with your claim that the correct interpretation of their religion is to deny physical reality and science.

Why is that so hard to grasp, I wonder? I care more about people getting killed because a passage in the Koran says the faithful should kill unbelievers than by people getting mildly confused by a passage in the Bible stating Earth is stationary, when we know it goes around the Sun (among others). You're free to disagree with my logic, but I do expect you to justify why these two instances merit equal treatment.

McHrozni

I did say you didn't need to write that paragraph but you went ahead and did it anyway. You may note yet again I never made the claim you ask me to justify - that the two instances merit equal treatment.

 

[A'isha]

You are very keen to keep making excuses for yourself. Do keep up, this is hilarious: misquoting me three months after the post because the context was extra explained only 32 hours after it is a totally great excuse

The "context" wasn't "extra explained" in that post, it merely involved you denying that you said I was going to be put in a gas chamber because of my opinions, then reiterating that I was going to be put in a gas chamber because of my opinions (that opinion being specifically that "Islam" is not the problem you constantly assert it is, and that refusing to agree with you that "Islam" is the problem will lead to my death when the inevitable genocide comes).

As I already pointed out when I dissected that post in detail.

Just so you know, the context was explained to you earlier on.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11504473&postcount=244

All that did was set up your blaming of Muslims for their own coming genocide. It certainly doesn't explain why you felt the need to explicitly include me among the victims of that genocide.

That only came when I disagreed with your justification for genocide.

That's when you declared you think I want to be thrown into a gas chamber too for disagreeing with said justification (the context of which was you saying "A'isha, alongside many others, completely ignores the textual evidence that strongly supports the observational data and tries to use the cherry-picked observational data to conclude Islam is not a source of problems" right before.)

Please explain to me how an effort 1/10th of what Muslims already do on a regular basis is impossible. Do go into details please.

Several others in this thread have done a more than admirable job of that.

It has certain similarities, true, but again, it's a difference of scale.

Now that I've shown you a Buddhist state that does what ISIS does and uses Buddhist teachings to justify it, just like you demanded, you dismiss it because it's not currently happening at the same scale as what ISIS is doing (to you, anyway).

What you describe is bad, but certainly no worse than what happened to non-Muslim Algerians after Algeria obtained independence - except that the number of victims there was six times larger. ISIS is in a whole another category.

In Algeria post-1962, there were hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims rounded up into concentration camps and kept there to starve by armed guards without any food or medical aid, children hacked to death in government-approved attacks incited by religious leaders, mass graves of victims of massacres that have been occurring regularly since 2012 (with more mass graves of refugees attempting to flee the violence but being kidnapped and murdered by human traffickers from neighboring countries with the compliance of the governments of those countries), and a meticulous state-sponsored campaign to completely wipe out villages leaving entire zones of destruction visible from satellites, to the point where they were in the final stages of genocide?

Religious violence is not a binary thing, it doesn't either exist or it doesn't exist, and any religious violence isn't identically bad to any other religious violence. Religious violence exists in a minuscule amount in some contituents (abortion clinic bombings), it exists in mediocre amounts in others (Rohingya), it exists in severe amounts in certain cases (Pakistan) and it exists in obscene extremes in two current active cases (ISIS, Boko Haram).

You're supposed to provide examples of these latest excesses (example of Rohingya is much too mild) in all religions if you want to prove your claim all religions are equally bad.

Now you're really moving the goalposts. From wanting an example of a Buddhist state that does what ISIS does and uses Buddhist teachings to justify it, to wanting something that matches an arbitrary scale, to now wanting examples of all religions matching this scale.

If you disagree with this you're actually arguing against something that should be much more acceptable. The reason I constantly stress this amounts to denying the validity of their religion is to stress how difficult it is. I don't want to pretend it is easy, it isn't. Correcting a religion whose very foundations are supremacism, bigotry and hate into something acceptable to the humanist civilization can't be easy.

No, it's not to stress how "difficult" it is. It's to make it as difficult as you can try to make it. As Archie Gemmill Goal said above, you have a single preferred interpretation of Islam (the same one ISIS has), and you treat every Muslim as having to address that one single interpretation of Islam in everything they do, rather than whatever their actual interpretation of Islam is, because you declare a priori that every interpretation of Islam other than yours and ISIS' is illegitimate.

Yes, this is defending ISIS. If we were talking about Nazis (who were mild compared to ISIS), claiming other nations have had their demons too and start talking how bad Belgian rule over Congo was, without explaining why it would be relevant, would amount to defending Nazis, because it would distract attention away from Nazi crimes to something that bore no relevance to those crimes.

By the same measure when we talk about ISIS and Islam, changing the topic to irrelevant violence in other religions, is defending ISIS.

I apologize for mistakenly thinking you were accusing me of defending ISIS, and then here you go doubling down on that very accusation.

Okay. That'll teach me, I suppose.

Changing the topic to violence perpetrated by other religions is only relevant if Islamic violence is a result of non-Islamic violence against Muslims who then engage in revanchism - like with Turks and Kurds for instance. No, violence against Rohyinga does not explain, excuse or justify ISIS or any other Islamic violence that doesn't explicitly target the perpetrators.

It does, however, show that the foundations of your argument is flawed. You aren't merely pointing out how bad ISIS is (or even how bad Islamically-motivated violence in general is). As both Darat and I have said in this very thread, no one contests that at all.

But what you're doing is taking that and springboarding to the accusation that Islam is unique (and uniquely evil) in its religiously-motivated violence. And as the example of what's happening in places like CAR and Burma/Sudan shows, it absolutely is not. You can try to handwave and minimize and pretend that the extent of non-Muslim religious violence goes no farther than bombing a few American abortion clinics, but reality simply does not agree with you.

No, I wouldn't call it criticism of Islam. You criticize specific Islamic groups, not the overreaching ideology behind them that is responsible for the existence of those very groups.

Now how about addressing all the things you snipped out of my post so you could pretend I was only criticizing specific groups. For instance, my statement that "I have spoken about things like the patriarchal nature of divorce in most forms of shari'ah (especially those permitting the so-called "triple talaq")".

His statement is factually true - there are many people in the world who would simply love to kill any Jew who supports the existence of Israel, and alarmingly many wouldn't hesitate to do so if they were given a chance.

Just as there are many people in the world who would simply love to kill any Muslim period and alarmingly many wouldn't hesitate to do so if they were given a chance.

It's a disingenuous, victim-blaming, genocide-apologist argument no matter who the proposed victims are.

The thing is, most of them are of Muslim faith, and you're using them as an argument of how benign Islam is and how unproblematic Muslims are.

Really? Can you quote where I said anything even remotely like that ridiculous strawman? That Muslims who call for the death of Jews who support Israel are an example of "how benign Islam is and how unproblematic Muslims are"?

Because it seems to me that my argument is really about all those Muslims who don't do things like call for the death of Jews who support Israel and wouldn't kill a Jew if given the chance, despite your lumping of all Muslims together under the umbrella of the worst ones you can find.

And I’m not so sure about that being a mostly-Muslim sentiment, considering the poster in question was hardly a Muslim, and my country just elected a president strongly supported by actual Jew-hating Neo-Nazis.

You furthermore use this as an example to prove Muslims run no risks with their perceived silence and indifference on Islamic extremism and terrorism.

If they run risks, it's from genocidal ******** looking for an excuse to justify (and then unleash) their hatred, not because the genocidal hatred directed at Muslims is their own fault.

 

[Craig B]

His statement is factually true - there are many people in the world who would simply love to kill any Jew who supports the existence of Israel, and alarmingly many wouldn't hesitate to do so if they were given a chance.

The thing is, most of them are of Muslim faith, and you're using them as an argument of how benign Islam is and how unproblematic Muslims are. You furthermore use this as an example to prove Muslims run no risks with their perceived silence and indifference on Islamic extremism and terrorism.

You might have discovered a whole new level of fail here. Congratulations!

McHrozni

Well, at least you're stating that my post is relevant to the topic. To stop these miscreants from having any excuse to kill Jews who support the existence of Israel, do you think that my suggestion about repudiation by Jews of Jewish holy books is correct, or do you agree with me that it is absurd?

 

[A'isha]

CAR and Burma/Sudan

This should read "CAR and Burma/Myanmar", sorry.

 

[Belgian thought]

Remind us, if you will, of the terms of your question by a link to it; and please recall that a courteous question is more likely to elicit a constructive response.

The question was not rude and at the moment Ii do not have time to find the link - I think it was a couple of years back relating to blasphemy and countries which apply Islamic jurisprudence

I will respond in due course.

 

[McHrozni]

Well, at least you're stating that my post is relevant to the topic. To stop these miscreants from having any excuse to kill Jews who support the existence of Israel, do you think that my suggestion about repudiation by Jews of Jewish holy books is correct, or do you agree with me that it is absurd?

If it can help it is correct, if it can't it is absurd.

As far as I know no one has yet made a case as to how it could help, so I consider it absurd.

McHrozni

 

[McHrozni]

The "context" wasn't "extra explained" in that post, it merely involved you denying that you said I was going to be put in a gas chamber because of my opinions, then reiterating that I was going to be put in a gas chamber because of my opinions (that opinion being specifically that "Islam" is not the problem you constantly assert it is, and that refusing to agree with you that "Islam" is the problem will lead to my death when the inevitable genocide comes).

As I already pointed out when I dissected that post in detail.

Yes, yes, I see where you're coming from. As predicted you will keep claiming nonsense because it is urgently necessary to smear and silence any and all critics of Islam.

All that did was set up your blaming of Muslims for their own coming genocide.

It has nothing to do with blame but only in what can be done to prevent it. If there were easier or better ways I would support those. Convincing Islamic extremists to stop killing an average of 60 people a day looks a tad more difficult to me (correct me if I'm wrong and don't spare the technical details), and nothing else would be effective, certainly not in the long term.

Therefore I support the task that is difficult, but one that at least could work.

Now that I've shown you a Buddhist state that does what ISIS does and uses Buddhist teachings to justify it, just like you demanded, you dismiss it because it's not currently happening at the same scale as what ISIS is doing (to you, anyway).

Oh please, this is ridiculous. Please list the international terrorist attacks in the name of Buddhist state of Myanmar. If the frequency is less than 10 a year and if they kill fewer than 100 people a year outside of Myanmar, you can't possibly compare them to ISIS that kills ten times as many.

I can find a whole lot more similarities between a state of your choice and ISIS. Both Lichtenstein and ISIS collect taxes, both USA and ISIS carry out juridical executions. Does this make them both like ISIS too? After all, they do have a point of similarity with ISIS, and it seems that by your standard sharing a feature of ISIS makes a country like ISIS. If your standard is different then please explain what is your standard for a country being like ISIS.

As I said, your comparison is ridiculous.

In Algeria post-1962, there were hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims rounded up into concentration camps and kept there to starve by armed guards without any food or medical aid, children hacked to death in government-approved attacks incited by religious leaders, mass graves of victims of massacres that have been occurring regularly since 2012 (with more mass graves of refugees attempting to flee the violence but being kidnapped and murdered by human traffickers from neighboring countries with the compliance of the governments of those countries), and a meticulous state-sponsored campaign to completely wipe out villages leaving entire zones of destruction visible from satellites, to the point where they were in the final stages of genocide?

Events in 1962 in Algeria are very similar to events in Myanmar today. If you're going to claim the events in Myanmar make Myanmar an ISIS-like entity, you must necessarily claim Algeria in 1962 was also an ISIS-like entity. Of course if you do so, defending Islam will be that much harder, because Algeria was far from being the only such instance in modern history in modern world.

Now you're really moving the goalposts. From wanting an example of a Buddhist state that does what ISIS does and uses Buddhist teachings to justify it, to wanting something that matches an arbitrary scale, to now wanting examples of all religions matching this scale.

You did claim it was an intrinsic feature of all religions, then focused on one example of Buddhists to prove it. You'll now argue to the death that events in Myanmar are equal to ISIS, which is ridiculous.

I'm just pointing out that regardless of the merits of your argument of Myanmar (of which there are none but I'm sure we'll never agree on that), the events there do not prove your claim to any meaningful extent. If you're going to claim all religions are like that you will need to find at least one such example in each and every religion we have sufficient documentation for, and then go on from there and prove there is no statistically significant difference between at least a majority of religions and Islam.

You need to prove that because that's the true extent of your claim. Prove it or shove it.

No, it's not to stress how "difficult" it is. It's to make it as difficult as you can try to make it.

Don't be absurd, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible.

As Archie Gemmill Goal said above, you have a single preferred interpretation of Islam (the same one ISIS has), and you treat every Muslim as having to address that one single interpretation of Islam in everything they do, rather than whatever their actual interpretation of Islam is, because you declare a priori that every interpretation of Islam other than yours and ISIS' is illegitimate.

What you call 'interpretation' is called "hypocrisy" or "apostasy" in Islamic holy texts, and a sin greater than polytheism. Just saying.

It does, however, show that the foundations of your argument is flawed. You aren't merely pointing out how bad ISIS is (or even how bad Islamically-motivated violence in general is). As both Darat and I have said in this very thread, no one contests that at all.

But what you're doing is taking that and springboarding to the accusation that Islam is unique (and uniquely evil) in its religiously-motivated violence. And as the example of what's happening in places like CAR and Burma/Sudan shows, it absolutely is not. You can try to handwave and minimize and pretend that the extent of non-Muslim religious violence goes no farther than bombing a few American abortion clinics, but reality simply does not agree with you.

I never said Islam is unique, where did you get that idea from? Not only it isn't unique, it isn't even the worst of all time, and I have previously mentioned even worse religions - Mesoamerican beliefs of human sacrifice were actually much worse, but they're extinct. Shinto used to be (used for) worse, but it has since been improved (radioactively so). I'm sure there are still suicide cults active somewhere, and those are worse than Islam, but they're truly tiny (dozens of members at worst).

What Islam is is the worst currently existing religion of any significance. There is no controversy in focusing in the worst currently existing religion and ignoring others who commit the same crimes on a scale of much less than 1% of Islam.

What you never did is explain is why should we give equal weight to religions that are manifestly doing much better and committing several orders of magnitude less evil. Please try to do so someday. You will fail, but it might inspire you to think my argument over for a change.

Now how about addressing all the things you snipped out of my post so you could pretend I was only criticizing specific groups. For instance, my statement that "I have spoken about things like the patriarchal nature of divorce in most forms of shari'ah (especially those permitting the so-called "triple talaq")".

It's debatable if this amounts to criticism of Islam, but if it does I apologize and wish to modify my claim:
You will not accept any meaningful criticism of Islam.

You see, quite a few forms of Sharia don't accept what we would call due process and they do accept and utilize what we would call cruel and unusual (if not barbaric) punishment - yet you're only interested in the way divorces are handled, and nothing else.
Whether you accept criticism of Islam or not is debatable, and I think we'll never agree on that. But that's besides the point, because you claim to criticize only one very tiny issue with Islam, and ignore much larger and worse aspects of that same topic within Islam.

Let's do a test, shall we?

A legal system that is not supposed to adopt to change as time goes by is unacceptable. Therefore Sharia is unacceptable. True or false?

All you need to do is agree and you will prove me wrong. Good luck!

Just as there are many people in the world who would simply love to kill any Muslim period and alarmingly many wouldn't hesitate to do so if they were given a chance.

Yes, there are. And Muslims who refuse to adequately condemn Islamic terrorism (which is a vast and overwhelming majority by the way) are their second finest recruiters.
Their very best - creme de la creme - recruiters are people like you, who actively defend Islam by defaming other religions.

Really? Can you quote where I said anything even remotely like that ridiculous strawman? That Muslims who call for the death of Jews who support Israel are an example of "how benign Islam is and how unproblematic Muslims are"?

Well, you do claim a large majority of Muslims don't engage in stuff that would show Islam is problematic, I believe? This vast majority includes those people.

If they run risks, it's from genocidal ******** looking for an excuse to justify (and then unleash) their hatred, not because the genocidal hatred directed at Muslims is their own fault.

Incidentally, why do you think Muslims are the scapegoats of our time?

McHrozni

 

[Craig B]

If it can help it is correct, if it can't it is absurd.

As far as I know no one has yet made a case as to how it could help, so I consider it absurd.

McHrozni

I deny that your ideas would help. So I consider them absurd. And if I consider something absurd, then absurd it must be, eh?

 

[McHrozni]

I deny that your ideas would help.

You do that. While you're at it you might as well deny any hypocrisy on my part for offering different solutions for two superficially similar yet fundamentally different problems.

McHrozni

 

[Craig B]

You do that. While you're at it you might as well deny any hypocrisy on my part for offering different solutions for two superficially similar yet fundamentally different problems.

McHrozni

I've no idea what your motive is for treating these similar problems so differently.

 

[McHrozni]

I've no idea what your motive is for treating these similar problems so differently.

Islamic hatred of Jews is based in Islamic supremacist ideology that labels them worse than animals. No amount of Jewish denouncement of aspects of Jewish religion will ever change that, because Islamic antisemitism is not due to any unreasonable belief the Jews have or any unreasonable teaching of the Jews nor any Jewish text that would incite it.

Fear of Muslims is based in a combination of Islamic terrorism and Islamic scriptures that justify and call for said actions and furthermore call for Islamic subjugation of the entire world. A sufficiently large body of Muslims denouncing those parts of scriptures (either directly or by claiming they don't say what they do say, the latter would require much larger and louder actions) would work to soothe those fears and prove critics of Muslims who claim they secretly wish for the extremists to succeed wrong. Many critics would still say it, but a vast majority of people wouldn't listen because they would have ample amounts of objective evidence they critics are wrong. A tiny minority of people glaring at Muslims but taking no action to speak of is an acceptable compromise, and in time even those would slowly disappear.

The two problems appear superficially similar, but it would be difficult for them to be more different when you examine them in detail.

McHrozni