Skeptic Project

Its a street pyjama party.

He didn't say Islam was inherently violent, he said it wasn't inherently peaceful.

This tendency to totalize systems of belief and cultural existence is rather troubling, and I think it rests on a rather false axiom of static existence for those systems

To Kepp's all-too-often quip about the role of muslim women, let us also look back in the mirror and examine the ways in which women have been treated in all faiths through time and historical particularities before we try and reduce their social position (which is drastically different in Istanbul than it is in Aleppo or Tehran). Its a faulty argument that doesn't stand up to rigorous considerations of time, place, and transformative elements within society. You're universe of data is not only too large to justify a claim, but its too varied for you to make a valid generalization. Everyone can come to "agree" that Islam has women in a subservient or submissive role, but that also ignores a great many things in the ways in which things change over time. Do you actually think that the faith is static? Because historians of religion would argue otherwise.

That's fine, but it still doesn't mean Harris said what you claim he did in the article I linked. Because he doesn't.

buddhism is inherently peaceful

@ Kepp, then its best to frame it in useful terms, not to insinuate that islam is an egregious committer of violence de facto. You conflated variables to come to the conclusion, and its best to use that mirror to provoke a much more useful discourse that isn't quite so devoid of a multi-faceted and complete approach.

wat?

@kepp, I hope I didn't come off as an ass. I just want to be very clear when we are trying to deal with something as complex as human behavior and culture. There are good and bad ways to enter the conversations.

I guess you kill Hindus.

please show me where in buddist teachings, it says "kill hindus/non-believers"...

Oh IRC, where were we before you?

It is from the 7th century and (in my belief; not divinely inspired) so its expected for it to contain questionable elements and things that aren't considered moral in this age, much like other religious texts written by man (or many different men). I believe that the Islam that most muslims follow is peaceful though.

You can plan the verse game, but it's stupid. You can find either written examples of violence in every major religion or examples of real world violence, no one is excluded.

When it comes to Buddhism, there's a monstrous amount of historical proof that horrible things have been done to non-believers and believers alike, even up until the 20th century.

You can find plenty of examples of Christian extremism, bombings, etc in the name of doing right by Jesus, and not only that in the Bible there are far more violent verses than in the Qu'ran.

When it comes to the Torah and the Old Testament, I have to leap to the conclusion that all Christians and Jews are inherently violent because the Bible tells them to:

• God tells Joshua to kill all the Amalekites - Exodus 17:13
• If a child curses or hits his/her parents, they should be killed - Exodus 21:15,17
• Eye for an eye - Exodus 21:24-25
• Witches should be killed - Exodus 22:18
• People who have sex with animals should be killed - Exodus 22:19
• Kill everyone who doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian God - Exodus 22:20
• God tells the Israelites to kill everyone in the promise land - Exodus 23:2
• If you don't bathe ritualitistically, you should be killed - Exodus 30:20-21
• If you break the Sabbath, you should be killed - Exodus 31:14
• God tells the sons of Levi to kill over 3,000 people - Exodus 32:27-28
• If someone sins and doesn't repent, they should be killed - Exodus 34:20
• If you work on the Sabbath, you should be killed - Exodus 35:2-3
• When adultry is committed, both parties should be killed - Leviticus 20:10
• If a man sleeps with his daughter in law, they both should be killed - Leviticus 20:12
• Homosexuals should be killed - Leviticus 20:13
• If you sleep with your wife and mother in law in a sexy threesome, you should be killed - Leviticus 20:14
• Anyone who sleeps with an animal should be killed, as well as the animal - Leviticus 20:15-16
• Witches, "psychics," etc should be killed - Leviticus 20:27
• If a priest's daughter sleeps around, she should be killed - Leviticus 21:9
• Anyone who says anything against god or doesn't believe should be killed (OMFG INFIDELS!) - Leviticus 24:16

And that's just the first two books, contrast that with on average the entire Qu'ran is believed to have between 35 - 50 suggestions of violence in general. Above is killing people only, and that's just two books.

Of course you could say that "well, the Bible says those things, but that doesn't mean people follow them." Actually there are hundreds of historical examples of tens of thousands of people being tortured, executed, burned alive, etc because of this. You can find some modern examples too, mostly with cults, of people doing the same thing.

Fundamentalist Islam only has about a 70 - 80 year history, it's a totally modern movement which peaked in the 70s, and the drop lead to certain groups believing they could achieve their goals through violence.

But one fact remains, if you add up the numbers, more Hindus commit terrorist attacks than Muslims does this mean Hinduism is inherently radical, violent, etc? No, but let's go ahead and claim all Muslims are if one nut does something crazy.

The truth is that people kill people, regardless of religion. Sometimes they use religion as a way to justify their murders, but the reality is that without religion they'd justify it by some other means. Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc didn't need religion to kill millions of people.

. Apologists for Islam insist that bin Laden was a terrible Muslim and represented no genuine strand of the faith. One wonders, therefore, who would have been offended if we had just kicked his corpse into the sea without a word. Indeed, one might wonder why our government wasn’t afraid to grant this ghoulish man full Muslim honors. Shouldn’t this have offended the true adherents of so peaceful and tolerant a faith?

Its hard not to read this and feel as though he casts a rather idiotic judgement about that which he has no idea about. While he does not come out and say Islam is violent, he certainly implies pretty heavily that it is inherently not peaceful nor tolerant. Now, this is where he runs into trouble because, as I brought up with Kepp, he does a shit job of gaining historical and sociological perspective. He makes this statement, leaves it be, and continues on his rambling way. One has to ask, which muslims is he talking about? All of them? Because then all it takes is, at minimum, a handful of exceptions to make his argument look like garbage (which it is). He totalizes, and thats a problem, and he conflates what happens in places like Afghanistan with Islam, which is just a remarkably stupid thing to do. There are so many other reasons for the hostile sentiments across the Middle East and Central Asia that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitical issues. Anyone who is unable to recognize the difference between religion as the cause, and religion being used as a recruiting tool clearly has a very limited scope of understanding.

Let's also ask why Harris choses to focus on Friedman's position but then fails to provide anything but bald assertions in return. He links Friedman's article but then only responds by asserting "Thomas Friedman has grown so manic as to imagine that bin Laden was never very popular among Muslims in the first place" as he goes on to quote Friedman as saying "Very few Arabs actively supported Bin Laden, but he initially drew significant passive support for his fist in the face of America, the Arab regimes and Israel. But as Al Qaeda was put on the run, and spent most of its energies killing other Muslims who didn’t toe its line, even its passive support melted away (except for the demented leadership of Hamas)." Well, these two statements, back to back, don't quite argue what Harris wants to argue. Friedman is actually right, there was not a large base of active support for al Qaeda and at best you could say that the Arab world, because of America's interventionist policies (notice, not their religion) had a high level of complacency with what al Qaeda- but that could be true of any movement that was anti-American or anti-Western. Lets also take a brief moment to consider the pew research center polls he cites as demonstration of appallingly high levels of support for bin Laden. If you scroll down you will see a chart detailing support for al Qaeda in a small sampling of countries, you will see that at most 28% of Palestinians in 2011 support al Qaeda. Now you have to really wonder, if Islam is a faith that lends itself to being non-peaceful and intolerant (like every other religion there is) why those figures aren't higher and similar across the sampling universe? Simply put, Harris wrote something out of his ass and doesn't really demonstrate an ability to think through this problem in any meaningful way.

In that case Matt, we can collapse any two given social phenomenon in all cases and totalize the first system in an effort to make an argument about political rationality. We wouldn't be right, but we could. In this country there are people who support interventionism because it secures material interests, and they happen to also be Christian. There are also people who believe that interventionism is in accordance with Christian doctrine. If we cannot distinguish the relationships here, we are utterly incapable of accessing the underlying logics that lay at the heart of political action. The people Harris is criticizing live in countries that have been perpetually interfered in, have lost tremendous amounts of sovereignty, and are continuously faced with the tug of war of larger political powers. They also happen to be predominantly muslim countries. So why is it that we rest on claiming Islam is the cause, when such a statement is completely without sound, logical support and not on the common economic and political thread of these nations?