Islam certainly gets a bad rap from the Western media, but is it deserved? Are Muslims taught to be evil? Or are we just shown the evil aspects of Islam?
This is a good question. And relevant. I don't really know the answer. In the middle ages, it was the only one that embraced education. Christians were banning books. For a great read, please consider a book called "Jerusalem Jerusalem". It was written by a ethologist turned secular. I loved every word in it.
... I'm still pissed about the Ottoman Empire... poor Constantinople... so young, so beautiful...
It's the 'In' religion to hate on but it's no worse or better than any other. ISIS and Al Quaeda have star power but as you read this there are roaming bands of machete armed Christians cannibalizing Muslims and Sikhs (not even a mild exaggeration it's what they are doing) in central Africa. There are militant Buddhists, Jainists, Toaists, even Norse Pagan Assholes committing violence to protect their religion from anything different.
Vilifying any group, whether "a religion" or "other" is the first step towards persecuting its members. Beware this slippery slope, or giving legitimacy to the fomenting haters who pose these divisive "questions"!
While on the surface they appear to be more violent or evil, I think it is much more complicated than that. Also, let's not forget that ISIS does what they do under the guise of Islam and in a very extremist way.
Some Christians shoot or blow up PP clinics. Some white Christians shoot up black churches. Most don't. To think that extremist groups like ISIS represent the majority of Islam is ignorant and dangerous.
To me all religions are "evil"...for lack of a better word...since I don't believe in evil.
My favourite Utube videos on this topic are those of Pat Condell. He tells it how it is. Sometimes he rants on a bit but he's also very entertaining and very 'cheeky' about it as well.
I love pat Cornell. I think he mentioned that Islam gets an extra star in the crazy m*** category. Lol!
Islam's bad rap has only recenltly come to the for. I grew up in the 60s and 70s in the UK and I don't recall anything said about Islamic terrorists.I grew up in an era of terrorism between Catholics and Protestants in N Ireland, so called Christians were the terrorists.
The Irish Republican Army and Ulster Defense Association were commiting atrocities every week.Muslims were a hardly heard about apart from the usual middle eastern clashes between the PLO and Israelis.
The real growth in Sunni Islamic terrorism started with Bin Laden, who was a fighter backed by the USA only because he was fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.The Iranian version was a direct rejection of the US organised coup against the elected leader of the country in the 1950s.So the US is responsible for the birth of extreme Shi'ite and Sunni versions of Islam.
Lesson being ...stop interfering as it always backfires and comes back with an even more fanatical response. Bombing terrorism never works. It going to take some big climb down by the USA to stop this continuing,but the regimes in the US have a fanatical devotion to the state of Israel as well as Saudi Arabia,until that stops we will just see this escalate. Which is not going to happen any time soon,
Islam is just another Abrahamic religion drawing on the same stories as those presented in the bible. I think the major difference is that Islam hasn't had quite as much time to mature, to alter their ideology as much as Judaism and Christianity. If one goes back in time to the early days of blood and burnt sacrifice, killing and pillaging, one finds today's extreme form of Islam under a different name.
So, Islam is worse in that it hasn't grown up yet in some circles. That said, all religions are regressive in nature, some more than others. None of them do us any favors as a species. Tribal thinking is outmoded. My god has a bigger thingy than your god does is exactly what it sounds like.
Yes, but I see all religions as evil! Christianity teaches that anyone who doesn’t follow Christianity will be tortured forever, while Islam teaches to kill people who doesn’t follow Islam. But I’m still doing my homework on a lot of regions, though to continue to educate my mind.
Has the various interpretations of Islamic text, in modern times, contributed to more uneccessary suffering and deaths than the interpretations of Christian or other texts? Arguably, yes.
Is the extreme outcomes of the interpretations because of the text itself, or is it just how that area of the world naturally evolved because of society or climate or whatever? I don’t know
We can at at least take the actual words of extremists when they say they have done the things they do best use of the inspiration from Islamic texts. We can also apply this to Christian extremists too.
At the end of the day, I’d have to say that, currently, Islam is causing more problems, in terms of religious text being the catalyst to how people act.
But there’s a lot of “evil” in the world. I think this overly long statement I wrote a while ago has some evil in it, in reference to American foreign policy:
What's the definition of terrorism? (the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror or fear, in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim) First, we must establish if innocent civilians were killed. We can point to dozens of times when innocent civilians were indeed killed in Syria and Iraq, for example. The next step is to ascertain the intentions of the bombings. Were they trying to kill potential jihadists or zero in on actual known terrorists and there happened to be some innocent people killed in the process? Alternatively, did they knowingly bomb an area with innocent civilians and disregarded this fact? Most wouldn't approve of the latter example except in very extreme circumstances. In any respect, the US doesn't have a good track record in killing actual jihadists. Well, our intentions were good, one might proclaim. Just because our intentions were good definitely doesn't justify killing innocent people and referring to them as collateral damage. After dozens and dozens of times killing innocent civilians, a moral person needs to acknowledge that our good intentions are just a proclamation used to convince and excuse ourselves of obvious pain and destruction imposed on others in order to perpetuate the empire of the western world. One would think that eventually we would realize that good intentions don't trump our horrible actions and we need to at least realize that our military intelligence isn't that great knowing that the contrast between our success rate and lack of success is so great. NOW I UNDERSTAND INTENT DOES MATTER, BUT WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE? WHEN WE KILL HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE OVER THE DECADES, IS IT OKAY BECAUSE AMERICAS SELF-PROCLAMED INTENTIONS WERE GOOD? Don't quote me on the exact percentages, but they are somewhere in the ball park of a 10 percent success rate, which means 10 percent of the time we kill our target and 90 percent we don't. Of that 90 percent, what kind of people do you think we killed? Innocent civilians of which we refer to as collateral damage. Estimates from high-ranking members of the actual military say there are more jihadists now than in the earliest parts of the conflicts. It's not that surprising, considering all of the innocent civilians we have killed. Is ISIS and other terrorists organizations a huge problem? Yes, of course, they have contributed to unnecessary deaths to other muslims in the area just because they don't subscribe to their particular brand of Islam. Could they potentially pose a huge global threat to the world if they had more resources such as "perfect weapons" and perfect organization, but attacks on the USA are virtually nonexistent, and deaths from terrorists from over-seas as a result of actual ideological positions are just simply not happening. Deaths attributed to right-wing ideology and deaths from firearms within our own country undeniably poses a much greater problem than anything else in terms of preventable death besides disease. Education is the key to understanding the problems of the world. Is it the interpretation of the religion of the jihadists that cause them to unnecessarily kill people for being gay, for apostasy,( opting out of islam) and others? Well, we should take them at their word when they say they kill for their strong beliefs. Any religion can be interpreted into a justification for killing so it begs the question, why isn't other areas which associate with other religions seeing as much devastation as the areas which associate with islam? Christianity went though a period of death and turmoil. Maybe islam is just trying to reach its time of enlightenment just as Christianity did, or is it even the religion itself, or the result of living in areas where poverty is high, resources are scarce and life is tough? These questions are hard to answer but asking the questions is the first step instead of just imposing our big dick of western regime all over the areas.
I mostly don't like the term evil. However it's mislead how radicals are a small portion of the faith. Polls done in western countries with Islamic citizens suggest between 50-60% of Islam view women as inferior and believe Sharia law should be imposed in countries they occupied. The religion itself isn't any worse than others. There just needs to be an internal reformation of islam. Christianity doesn't read the bible in the same absolute way otherwise Christians would quote exodus21 and head down to the slave market.
I combine it with all xstianity. No more, no less. Each has it's extremists, and yo are more likely to hear from/about the extremists then you are the run of the mill follower. Though, I just realized, I have never had anyone try to convert me to Islam, and have had many people be very pushy about the 'christ' orientated religions. Praise Bob.
my keyboard is getting destroyed by my cat...haha