In reply to Coel Hellier:
> This is one of the usual tactics used to disallow criticism of Islam: "It's so diverse that it is impossible to say anything about it". Well, yes, if it fairly diverse, but there are also lots of similarities across mainstream Islam. That's why it is sensible to use a term like "Islam" at all.
Well rather than accuse you of making a low quality straw man argument, which is obviously way beneath you, I shall clarify my position.
It's fine to criticise Islam. After all, it's a load of crap, much like Judaism and Christianity. It's generally illiberal, repressive nonsense. These broad criticisms are fair, but of course they also apply to the other religions, to different degrees depending on which sect of which religion you choose. One might argue that averaged across the whole, Islam is worse than either Judaism or Christianity on measures of repression and general retardedness, and this could be quite compelling. But it's a rather silly point, why 'average across the whole', when the 'whole' in question is so huge and diverse? And what purpose does a competition of retardedness between major religions achieve?
Presumably the problems we as western liberal people have with Islam are the areas where Islam cuts across human rights, and most specifically, our security, i.e. Islamist terrorism and extremism. Muslims in general do not believe in Islamist extremism (attempts, e.g. by Ben Shapiro to show that most Muslims are extremists unravel very quickly). So the ideology behind the terrorism is not Islam, the religion (which is diverse and not political), it is Islamism (which is much less diverse, and is political).
So which is the ideology we should attack? Is it Islam, the enormous religion of a billion-odd people (good luck with attacking that, a futile task if ever there was one)? Or is it Islamist extremism? If you think there is any practical purpose in attacking the whole religion of Islam, you're deluded. All this tactic will achieve is alienating the very people who are most able to make a difference: Muslims. Attacking Islam, rather than Islamism, panders to the ludicrous "war between Islam and the West" narrative of Osama Bin Laden - then played upon for the purposes of US foreign policy (give or take sucking the balls of the terrorist-funding epicentre of Islamist extremism, the Saudis whom the anti-Islamic, pro-US, pro-Israel right wingers remain markedly quiet about considering how they fund the whole kit and kaboodle of Islamist extremism in the West, but hey-ho you get used to the suffocating stench of hypocrisy after a while).
The question is this:
why attack Islam
rather than Islamism, if the problem is human rights and security? I've offered my explanation of why it's a popular approach (tribalism), what's your justification?
> Similarly, there really is a lot of commonality in mainstream "Islamic" ideas as manifest in many of the Muslim-majority nations across the world. We really can compare and contrast Islamic-majority countries with what we call "Western" countries.
Yes, you can. But it's an intellectually vapid exercise in motivated reasoning at best, and more realistically and worryingly it's a contribution to division and hatred in society.
If you start with the premise "Islam is bad" and then set out to find empirical justification by, say, comparing human rights records, measures of economic success etc, between majority Muslim and western nations, then hooray, you can show how true your wonderful, insightful proposition is! Well done! Islam is bad and here's the proof, just look at the numbers!
That's not a useful piece of analysis, it's fruitless nonsense born of deeply unattractive motivation. Firstly, it doesn't have any purpose - you can't persuade Muslims to give up their religion by showing them data on how badly Muslim nations do on international comparisons. And anyway, if you wanted to go down this path of seeing why bad outcomes happen to people globally, then you have to analyse on every measure you can think of and try to work out the causality. Is it the "deep religiosity effect" or the "corruption effect" or the "unhelpful military intervention effect" or the "high birth rate effect", etc, etc, etc that's the
cause of the bad outcomes? I'm sure you understand the difference between analysis that attempts to draw out probable causation, and coming up with a postulate "Islam is bad" and then setting out to find data to prove it? Your comment however, does not portray such understanding.
So my question is, given that there is no practical purpose in blathering on about how dreadful Islam is, and that many of the same criticisms of being plainly wrong and unhelpful in improving outcomes for people apply also to other religions,
why, when you know that you're backing-up division and hatred within society, do you think it's such a great idea?
Post edited at 21:46