Affleck is rightfully making sure that hate and retribution for murdering Islamic extremists is not confused with hate for anyone who claims to be muslim. Maher refuses to concede this point.
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My mistake, it wasnât my intention to defend it just that it could be applied to any religion.
Personally agree with Kristoff, I think the real problem are the fundamentalists of any stripe. The people who insist their interpretation is correct and everybody else is wrong.
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Likewise. Iâm way out of my depth but this book was pretty good.
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4m
âIslam is perfectly comfortable with the idea that religious leaders
should be in charge of the state, while Christianity,from the beginning,
has argued that it is separate from the state.â
Have you never heard of the âdivine right of kingsâ in
Christendom? The Queen of England is still head of the Anglican Church.
The British monarchy has no real power, now, but when it did, the church
and state were very intertwined in Britain and the rest of the European
monarchies.
" Christians hear regularly about how Christ overturned the tables at the
market and ended up dead at the hands of the state and the existing
religious authorities. I believe that creates a different dynamic."
The state in question was the Roman Empire. It adopted Christianity as the state religion and got around the knotty problem of the killing Jesus by blaming it on the Jews. Iâve never believed the story about Pilate washing his hands of the Jesus problem and letting the Jews decide his fate. That account always sounded like revisionist history to me, and in ancient times, history was revised as a matter of routine to fit in with the prevailing politics.
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Oh OK, I guess we are of the same mind on this after all. Never mind.
Iâm stunned by many of the comments here. I am a militant atheist, but I think Maher is flat out wrong. To me the essential point that Affleck & Kristoff were trying to make is that it is indeed âbigotedâ to extrapolate the traits of the extremist wings of a religion and apply it to ALL adherents of a faith. To me it would be identical to pointing to Westboro Baptist or the Uber-Christian homophomic rantings of the Ugandan government and thereby proclaiming that Christians hate gays! Indeed, a phrase like âviolent Muslimâ has an uncanny and discomfiting similarity to terms such as to âshifty JewââŚ
The most pressing issue which should be discussed - why do sovereign governments maintain the insane policy of supporting fundamentalist Jihadists? - is being undercut by the bigoted attitude they exhibit. I believe that you are getting off on the wrong emotional foot, when you approach 1.2 billion Muslims and begin your attempt to convince them about the benefits of liberal secularism with the opening phrase: 'NowâŚabout your murderous religionâŚ"
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Islamic extremists havenât exactly forgotten the past. They want to bring it back, but in a form that would be unrecognizable to the caliphs of the Middle Ages. Islamic justice was harsh by modern standards in Muslim states as it was in most others in ancient times, but it was nothing like the disgusting brutality of ISIS and other extremist groups. Jews and Christians lived relatively unmolested in Muslim-dominated countries. Jews in Islamic Spain did pretty well until the the Muslim rulers were expelled and their persecution by the Christian rulers that replaced the Muslims began. Iâm not a scholar on modern Islam and Muslims, but I think the vast majority of Muslims do remember the glorious past, and far more accurately than the extremists do, and I donât think most Muslims really want a caliph to tell them how to live, not even the civilized caliphs of the past.
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What Iâm trying to explain here is that religion-state fusion seems to be the norm. Deviations from that norm occur as the result of a limited number of socio-political situations: basically reaction against abuse, corruption and/or oppression or when a single national entity has multiple religions or sects and most of them see secularization of the state as the only way to prevent persecution.
If Christianity was somehow inherently amenable to state secularization because of its teachings, doctrine or mythology, it wouldnât have taken the better part of eighteen centuries and a couple or three bloody revolutions for such states to emerge in the Christian world.
It could certainly be argued that the emergence of secular states in the Christian world created a space where teachings and doctrines within the Christian tradition could emerge and refashion the faith in a manner that made it more compatible with modernism, political freedom and secularized states. However, for most of its history, those teachings were not so considered.
For most of Christianity, the idea of rendering unto Caesar was treated as an injunction to submit to royal/imperial authority, and the story of the money lenders in the temple was associated with the anti-Semitic hysteria local civil and religious officials would whip up as part of the Passion Week festivities.
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Algebra, the zero, algorithms, and coffee: the four cornerstones of computer science come to us from them.
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âAnd a religion whose founder created a state is very different than a
religion whose founder was in opposition to the state. Religious
conservatives will ALWAYS try to make the religion the center of the
state.â
Itâs probably true that Jesus viewed religion and the state as two separate things (ârender unto Caesar what is Caesarâs and render unto God what is Godâsâ), but he was not really the founder of Christianity. St. Paul was more like the founder. Although Paul also believed that the state and religions were two different things, separation of Church and state was not a main focus of his teaching. And Christianity might not have become the dominant religion that it is if the Emperor Constantine hadnât adopted it and given infidels and pagans the choice of âbaptism or the swordâ something like the choice to convert or die" given to nonbelievers who are unfortunate enough to come under the extremistsâ control. Whatever Jesus and Paul thought about the separation of church and state doesnât seem to have had much impact on how Christianity evolved.
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This was part of Benâs point.
Moderate Muslims are denouncing ISIL. And many Islamic nations are joining the fight against ISIL with boots on the ground. But that isnât exciting to the media. A head being chopped off is on continual rewind for weeks and a leader denouncing it gets crickets.
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The other problem is the vagueness of the questions, and frankly, the education of the person being asked the question.
Ask Americans if they think we should follow the Bible and itâs laws, or should the Ten Commandments be enshrined in law. Youâd get a solid chunk of âyesâ votes. Break it down, then, should someone go to jail for cursing? All of a sudden they arenât so sure. Should a parent selling their child into prostitution be able to have his child imprisoned because they donât respect the parent? UmâŚno. Itâs easy to answer âfollow the Koranâ or âfollow the Bibleâ and so most people do when asked. Just like most people just dismiss the parts of their religions that they donât believe.
I doubt even the most ultra Orthodox believer would settle for a goat as compensation for a rape of a family member.
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No one with the slightest knowledge of European history would make the absurd suggestion that Christianity has no history of religious leaders in charge of the state.
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Maher and Harris are conflating extremism with Islam. I am a secularist, with no love for religion,but Affleck is right - this is just bigotry. Unfortunately, Muslims donât have a corner on the market for dangerous fanatics. Why are Muslim fanatical extremists worse than Jewish or Christian fanatics - all of whom have done truly uncivilized and heinous things in the name of their religion. When my daughter rides her bike through ultra-Orthodox sections Brooklyn, male and female religious drivers try to deliberately run her over because of the clothes she wears. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the assassination of Rabin - fanaticism, not the principles of the religion. Iâm not familiar with Asian-originated religions, but Iâm sure we have examples there (Hindu mass murders of Muslims in India?). It appears the problem is humans, not any one religion, and religious extremism generally. Shame on Harris and Maher.
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Bill isnât limiting his criticism to religion, heâs criticizing ALL moderate Muslims as if theyâre little or no different than extremists. He bases this on the idea that all practicing Muslims read the same script. David Koresh read the King James Bible but Bill doesnât conflate Branch Davidians with Christians.
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The_Lone_Apple - I get what youâre trying to say here but I do not believe that is what Sam Harris was doing.
Some topics are so volatile that you need to speak fully and with context rather than with snappy catchphrases. This topic is definitely one of them. I personally enjoy Mr. Harrisâ work and think he has spent an enormous amount of time researching and thinking about this topic. I want to hear what he has to say about it. He wasnât being a bully, he was speaking intelligently on a very sensitive topic.
We use a Roman Alphabet and Arabic numerals.
It was the numerals I meant to refer toâbut I had a brain fart.
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Itâs hard for me to understand the value of the statement âMost Muslims believe death is an appropriate response to drawing a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed,â or whatever extremist point youâre trying to make.
Itâs hard to understand the motivation of making these types of blanket generalizations, even if they happen to be true (and Iâm not sure they are as Maher and Harris are claiming). What does a claim like that do for you? Itâs as if heâs trying to paint Islam as an existential threat to the rest of the world. And if thatâs what heâs doing, intentionally, then whatâs the appropriate response to an existential threat? Wiping them out? I mean, even if heâs backing up these claims with survey statistics, this is very dangerous territory.
The problems in most of these countries are rooted in abject poverty and lack of education. It just so happens that Islam is the religion in many of those place, but there are Christian nations with abject poverty and equally crazy, violent and evil people who are doing crazy, violent, evil things in the name of Christianity. Seems the common thread is the poverty, not the religion. Religion may exacerbate it, but thatâs not the real issue.
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I have a Muslim friend male 23 yrs old and single. Will not eat Pork or any products with Pork. He reads labels like crazy to make sure no pork is in packaged food. He brags about the women he beds. I asked him âIsnât Pre-Marital sex against your religion too?â⌠He said âEff my religion.â⌠You see all religions have rules and most people break them. I am Christian and nobody I know obeys all the rules of that religion either especially Catholics.
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