Chuck Jones wrote:No no, doing bad things is bad. Reading a book which happens to have instructions (or, what could be construed by bad people as instructions) to do bad things, as well as contining good things which you agree with, is not bad. Being a part or a member of something in which some people have malevolent views isn't a bad thing. Tarring everyone with the same brush and using the baddies as an excuse to do so is bad. The baddies within islam not only give the good people a bad name, but they also have very easily managed to manipulate other people (ie some atheists, and christians, and others) to form a negative view of all muslims. You've simply fallen for the propaganda. In fact anybody at all who already has it in for religious people will quite happily allow themselves to be manipulated that way.
It is not just reading a book, it is praising as the word of God and distributing it. I know there are parts of the Koran that forbid the killing of non-combatants and I know the majority of Muslims do not condone terrorism, which is why I posted "Of course some will do things even more horrible than what their book instructs, which is worse."
But for what
is in the Koran or whatever scripture any religion has, the followers bear some moral responsibility for the contents of it.
What I really hate about Islam in particular is that what I gather was a progressive book in 500 CE is frozen for all time as the final and perfect message from God. Women's rights, LGBT rights, apostate's rights, are all shit when it comes to the Koran.
FBM wrote:Chuck Jones wrote:They aren't the same thing. A religion is effectively a culture, and nobody would say that a culture is the contents of a book. The book is part of the religion, it isn't the whole of it. What a religion is effectively is determined by what occurs within it, and as everyobody knows, the vast majority of people in religions are decent enough people. So to judge a religion by cherry picking when it's convenient rather than looking at the whole is ignorance. Sometimes, some atheists do this. In order to attack religion, they create a strawman and attack that, and then equate the strawman with the entirity of the religion and the entirity of the behaviour of all the hundreds of millions of people in that religion, when that is not the case.
There's a lot of truth in that, whether you're talking about religions, nationalities, football teams, politics, etc.
It's about as ignorant as me judging atheists and atheism by the works of Dawkins.
I agree that hasty generalizations are often distortions for convenience (and bias), and thus tend to exacerbate error and the original problem. Seems to me the more you specify particular individuals and particular behaviors, the more weight your argument carries. (Generic 'you' there.)
The Koran is only part of Islam and Islam is part of what a person who is also a Muslim is. I would judge a person's religion, but I wouldn't judge a whole person based on their religion alone.
What I've found with a few discussions I've had lately is this self-satisfaction that people express with their proffessed open mindedness. In realty it ammounts to wilful ignorance and intellectual cowardice as they are choosing to not form any sort of opinion on a particular topic. Basically "I don't know and I'm not going to look at any evidence because I'm quite happy on this fence."
-Mr P
The Net is best considered analogous to communication with disincarnate intelligences. As any neophyte would tell you. Do not invoke that which you have no facility to banish.
Audley Strange