DB Roy wrote:

DWill wrote: I'm sure you could have picked out even more instances of religious violence in Indonesia, though the 1998 hysteria over sorcerers seems more linked to indigenous superstitions and politics than to Islam.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Islam is a superstition. Islam is deeply embedded in Indonesian politics. Looks like they're linked to me.

Try this as a comparison: if you call the U.S. a Christian country, then just about any craziness that happens could be attributed to Christianity, such as the existence of the KKK. But this would be a false attribution, simply a correlation, and a weak one at that. There are sociological distinctions that need to be preserved to avoid over-simplification of this topic, which can be summarized as "the bad things that religions do." You can call Islam or any other religion a superstition if you want, but there clearly are different sources of superstition, and some will be indigenous, as might be the case for the murderous hysteria 17 years ago in Indonesia.

Maybe that's why Indonesia is so moderate--Muslims aren't in total control...yet.

Who could say for sure--but for Indonesia to be a theocracy in the vein of Middle Eastern countries would take more than a slow encroachment; it would require a revolutionary takeover.

It's not the piousness that bothers me. It's the hypocrisy. I think there's a correlation--the more pious a people are, the bigger hypocrites they are.

Well, I guess, maybe. I don't know exactly what you're basing this statement on. Surely a lack of piety doesn't equate to less hypocrisy across the board, but rather only in a religious sense. There are other ways to be hypocritical besides religiously.

DWill wrote:Try this as a comparison: if you call the U.S. a Christian country, then just about any craziness that happens could be attributed to Christianity, such as the existence of the KKK. But this would be a false attribution, simply a correlation, and a weak one at that.

I don't usually post videos, and I forget where I first saw this interview with Reza Aslan (maybe it was posted on another thread here), but he really well articulates the idea that violence and oppression of women is not a Muslim problem, but a cultural problem. This video is fun to watch mostly for how Aslan completely dismantles these kinds of facile arguments by Bill Maher and the interviewers on CNN. Just watch the first four minutes is adequate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw

DWill wrote:

Gnostic Bishop wrote: Not the best debate but interesting.

I recognize that I am in the minority on this issue but when I think of Islam I think of all the various misogynistic rules of which the apparel in question is just a small part.

In my thinking I look at their rape law, their child bride law and their female genital mutilation laws, just to name a few.

For these reasons I am anti-Islam. The misogyny and denial of equality is also why I dislike Christianity.

In the link given, the example was given where if a woman was banned from wearing a veil in public, her husband would force her to stay in the home.

That is the type of misogynous and just wrong headed thinking that Islam spawns and to have Canadian women who are free by law to have their freedom denied them by men must never be allowed or encouraged by allowing women to be told what to wear by anyone but the law of the land.

We are nations of laws. Not nations where Muslim men can deny their wives and daughters the freedom that Canadian men and women have fought and died for. That should apply to all Western nations.

You may not think these good reasons for a ban but I do.

Regards
DL

When you say "their" rape law, "their" child bride law, "their" fgm laws, you seem to paint every person who identifies as Muslim as following extremist doctrine. How much experience do you have living in Muslim cultures? I ask not to imply that I have any, either, but unless we base our views on the real-world range of Muslim lives, we don't know what we're talking about. Islam in the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, is far different from Middle Eastern Islam, and illustrates the the complexity of that faith that many people want to ignore, in favor of a more convenient flattened view in which every Muslim lives by the word of the Koran or the hadiths and interprets them in the same ways.

Which specific article of clothing are you proposing banning, by the way? Or would it be any of the traditional female garments? Is it ridiculous to ask why a nun's habits should not also be banned? Contrary to what many might assume, Muslim women aren't generally itching to discard their hijabs and niqabs, which will make liberating them a problem.

You have generalized Muslim women just as I do.

I admit to speaking in the more general terms and ignoring the wide spread of actions that Muslims do while reading the same text.

That wide range I ignore because for most in the West, Muslims, thanks to the fundamental and jihadist types having taken over the media attention and being the focus of most non-Muslin people, are what most think of when they see the garb and at the same time, I believe that most who do wear the apparel in question are forced, if not by their men, then by culture and peer pressure.

If we pass a woman wearing such garb on the street, we have no idea as to whether she is forced or not but should ere on the side of freeing women from oppression in order to insure that all share our freedom in our free lands.

It is a shame that some who are not oppressed or forced have to comply to a law they do not like but to not have that law says to Muslim men who are oppressing their women that we free people do not care if they oppress and we definitely do as can be seen by the Canadian women who even assault women wearing such garb.

Most see those women as intolerant, and they are, as they are being intolerant of an intolerant and oppressive religion. I am in their camp on the issue of not tolerating oppressive and anti-freedom actions in our free nation.

Regards
DL

DWill wrote:
Something we have to accept is that to most Westerners, even moderate Muslims seem extremely pious and devout. That quality seem to be built in to that religion to a greater degree than is the case for Christianity.

Most Muslims show respect for Jesus as a man and prophet. Not as God's son or divine.

Jesus said to pray and show devotion in private so as not to seem to flaunt ones devoutness.

Those who say they show devoutness are not following Jesus' standards and the more right wing Muslim women are more likely forced to wear their apparel be Muslim men.

Regards
DL

geo wrote:

DWill wrote:Try this as a comparison: if you call the U.S. a Christian country, then just about any craziness that happens could be attributed to Christianity, such as the existence of the KKK. But this would be a false attribution, simply a correlation, and a weak one at that.

I don't usually post videos, and I forget where I first saw this interview with Reza Aslan (maybe it was posted on another thread here), but he really well articulates the idea that violence and oppression of women is not a Muslim problem, but a cultural problem. This video is fun to watch mostly for how Aslan completely dismantles these kinds of facile arguments by Bill Maher and the interviewers on CNN. Just watch the first four minutes is adequate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw

Reza Aslan makes a valid point on not painting all Muslims with the same brush and that some Muslin majority nations are not the right wing lunatic fringe.

He also speaks to how many Muslims read the same book and do not go to the misogynous extremes, for one example, that other nations will go to.

That does not take away from the fact that the majority of Islam promotes death to non-believers.

True that many Muslims promote non-violence but no one can say that of the Qur'an and of the vast numbers who read it literally.

If Islam cannot clean up it's own act, then it is up to the rest of us to try to help them do so when they move to the West.

Banning the apparel in question may even help us weed out the more right wing fundamental oppressors before they even get here.

It would also tell the Muslin men that if they are not ready to live like Canadians and Americans as to equality, then they should also stay the hell out of our better counties.

Regards
DL

Gnostic Bishop wrote:
Reza Aslan makes a valid point on not painting all Muslims with the same brush and that some Muslin majority nations are not the right wing lunatic fringe.

He also speaks to how many Muslims read the same book and do not go to the misogynous extremes, for one example, that other nations will go to.

That does not take away from the fact that the majority of Islam promotes death to non-believers.

True that many Muslims promote non-violence but no one can say that of the Qur'an and of the vast numbers who read it literally.

If Islam cannot clean up it's own act, then it is up to the rest of us to try to help them do so when they move to the West.

Banning the apparel in question may even help us weed out the more right wing fundamental oppressors before they even get here.

It would also tell the Muslin men that if they are not ready to live like Canadians and Americans as to equality, then they should also stay the hell out of our better counties.

Regards
DL

I do agree with some of your points. I see religion mostly as a reflection of its culture. For example, the Israelite feared and hated other ethnic groups living in the promised land and so it came to be that God told the Israelites to fear and hate other ethnic groups living in the promised land. But to another extent, religion also helps to solidify traditions of hatred of other ethnic groups as well as oppression of women.

We see in much of Europe an immigration of Muslims who very much resist assimilation into their adopted cultures. As a result there's fear of the spread of Islam to places like the Netherlands and France that are traditionally Christian. I feel sympathetic to this fear, but on the other hand, I always resist ceding any kind of individual rights to the government. I think it's misguided and a step towards fascism. And, again, I doubt that outlawing certain kinds of scarves and head coverings will do anything to stop the spread of Islam. Indeed, it seems to fan the flames of racism. On the other hand, by modeling an open and free society, aren't we encouraging the progressive elements within Islam? Muslims in America tend to be more educated and progressive than the European counterparts. I wonder why that is.

geo wrote:

Gnostic Bishop wrote:
Reza Aslan makes a valid point on not painting all Muslims with the same brush and that some Muslin majority nations are not the right wing lunatic fringe.

He also speaks to how many Muslims read the same book and do not go to the misogynous extremes, for one example, that other nations will go to.

That does not take away from the fact that the majority of Islam promotes death to non-believers.

True that many Muslims promote non-violence but no one can say that of the Qur'an and of the vast numbers who read it literally.

If Islam cannot clean up it's own act, then it is up to the rest of us to try to help them do so when they move to the West.

Banning the apparel in question may even help us weed out the more right wing fundamental oppressors before they even get here.

It would also tell the Muslin men that if they are not ready to live like Canadians and Americans as to equality, then they should also stay the hell out of our better counties.

Regards
DL

I do agree with some of your points. I see religion mostly as a reflection of its culture. For example, the Israelite feared and hated other ethnic groups living in the promised land and so it came to be that God told the Israelites to fear and hate other ethnic groups living in the promised land. But to another extent, religion also helps to solidify traditions of hatred of other ethnic groups as well as oppression of women.

We see in much of Europe an immigration of Muslims who very much resist assimilation into their adopted cultures. As a result there's fear of the spread of Islam to places like the Netherlands and France that are traditionally Christian. I feel sympathetic to this fear, but on the other hand, I always resist ceding any kind of individual rights to the government. I think it's misguided and a step towards fascism. And, again, I doubt that outlawing certain kinds of scarves and head coverings will do anything to stop the spread of Islam. Indeed, it seems to fan the flames of racism. On the other hand, by modeling an open and free society, aren't we encouraging the progressive elements within Islam? Muslims in America tend to be more educated and progressive than the European counterparts. I wonder why that is.

Likely because they came into the U.S. and Canada in smaller numbers and were not as ghettoised as in the larger numbers that ended in Europe and the Netherlands.

Islam had models of open and free societies in Europe and the Netherlands but that did not help them in the least it seems. Sharia pushes them to not assimilate and they have resisted doing so.

The battle is not really what they wear even though I would use a ban on the apparel named. The fight is ideologies and they want to import that backwards system wherever they go.

If the West does not fight back, we will lose the gains our people have fought and died for. If we let that happen, shame on us.

I have forgotten if I posted this but I do like some of his ideas of sending immigrants back to fight for their rights the same way we had to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOLcMqdpls

Regards
DL

DWill wrote: Try this as a comparison: if you call the U.S. a Christian country, then just about any craziness that happens could be attributed to Christianity, such as the existence of the KKK. But this would be a false attribution, simply a correlation, and a weak one at that.

Really? Let me explain something to you: the KKK very definitely IS a product Christianity. There is NO WAY the Klan could EVER have formed without it. There is NO WAY it would still exist except that Christianity has prolonged it. If Christianity somehow died, the Klan would die. Christian identity was developed and spread by Klan preachers and it is the ideological glue behind the far right racist groups in America--even those that don't claim to follow Christianity because virtually all of them were CI adherents at one time or another and got their training that way. "simply a correlation"? Maybe you should look up the definition of correlation. You can't look at how strong Christianity is in the American conservative right wing, whether racist or otherwise, and tell me that this is a weak connection. The connection is direct and powerful. The left wing is openly, if not almost entirely, atheistic or agnostic. The right is overwhelmingly Christian. That's not just a coincidence. And those Christians are overwhelming climate-change deniers and evolution-deniers. Yeah, that's a correlation alright.

There are sociological distinctions that need to be preserved to avoid over-simplification of this topic, which can be summarized as "the bad things that religions do." You can call Islam or any other religion a superstition if you want, but there clearly are different sources of superstition, and some will be indigenous, as might be the case for the murderous hysteria 17 years ago in Indonesia.

Your argument is simply not holding water. Islam has a history of invading other nations and stamping out their native religions by force, by murder, under the banner of getting rid of Satanic delusions. These pogroms cannot simply be chalked up to some unknown variable of indigenous superstitions. Since Islam is not indigenous to Indonesia, I'm puzzled how you can say any of this. Christianity is just another superstition to them and that too needs to be stamped out and they would do so if they could get away with it. They have no intentions of coexisting peacefully--not even with one another--and they prove it virtually every damn day.

Who could say for sure--but for Indonesia to be a theocracy in the vein of Middle Eastern countries would take more than a slow encroachment; it would require a revolutionary takeover.

There has already been a revolutionary takeover. And someday, Christianity will die out in Indonesia. It's only a matter of time, the country is only 10% Christian. Why force the issue into a bloody civil war when you're already holding the winning hand? Even in the Philippines, the largest Christian population in Southeast Asia, the Islamic morality police go into movie theaters and remove by force any Muslims watching the movie if that movie has not be reviewed by a cleric and declared acceptable for Muslims to watch. Islam is taking over Southeast Asia bit by bit. Some Christian leaders there aren't concerned but I would say they are stupid. They damned well better be concerned because the writing is on the wall and legible to everyone except them:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpict ... 48153.html

http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/news ... n-muslims/

http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Persecution_o ... #Indonesia

Alexander Aan, a 30-year-old civil servant from Pulau Punjung subdistrict in West Sumatera province gave up his belief in God as he considered the current state of the world.[10] He was reportedly an active member of the Minang atheist Facebook group. He allegedly posted statements and pictures which some people construed as insulting Islam and the prophet Mohammad.
On 18 January 2012 an angry crowd who had heard about his alleged Facebook posts gathered at his workplace and threatened to beat him. Police officers intervened and took him to the Pulau Punjung Sub-District police station for his safety.

On 20 January he was charged for "disseminating information aimed at inciting religious hatred or hostility" under Article 28 (2) of the Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE) Law, religious blasphemy under Article 156a(a) of the Indonesian Criminal Code and calling for others to embrace atheism under Article 156a(b) of the same code.

His trial began at the Muaro District Court on 2 April 2012. On 14 June the court sentenced him to two and a half years' imprisonment and a fine of 100 million rupiah (US$10,600) for violating the Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE) Law.[11]

On the morning of 22 April 2012, around 100 members of the Filadelfia Batak Christian Protestant Church (Huria Kristen Batak Protestan, HKBP) were prevented from going to their church to conduct the Sunday service. They were blocked by officers from the Bekasi municipal administrative police (Satpol PP), North Tambun sub-district police and other local government officials, who tried to persuade them to move to a place around nine kilometres away. Unable to access the church, the congregation began to conduct their service by the road. Around 500 protestors who had gathered earlier near the church surrounded them, began threatening them and demanded that they leave. Some apparently tried to attack the worshippers, but were blocked by the police. The protestors only dispersed after more police officers arrived, and a municipal administrative police officer fired a shot in the air. The previous Sunday, protestors had also blocked congregation members from getting to the church, forcing them to worship by the road. Instead of dispersing or detaining the protestors who were threatening the congregation, the police tried to pressure the worshippers to leave the area. After the service, one of protestors threatened the church leader, saying, "You're finished if you try coming back!" Members of the congregation fear that without adequate police protection, they will be intimidated and attacked at future Sunday services.[12]
On 22 January 2012, members of two radical Islamist groups – the Islamic Reform Movement and Muslim Communications Forum – gathered near the site of the Taman Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church, blocking the road with tree branches and wooden chairs. Since the church was sealed off in 2008, the congregation have conducted weekly services on the pavement outside the church, where they face continued protests and intimidation by radical groups.
On this occasion, due to ongoing fears for their safety, the congregation had decided in advance to move their weekly service to a house about 300m from the church. Protesters intimidated and verbally abused some of the congregation as they made their way to the service at the house. At 9am, around 30 minutes after worship began, at least 50 Bogor Municipal Administrative Police (Satpol PP) officers also arrived at the scene. Shortly afterwards, dozens of protesters began gathering outside the house, intimidating the congregation and shouting at them to leave. However, instead of taking steps to ensure that the service could be conducted without interference, the administrative police attempted to persuade the worshippers to leave. Despite such pressure, the congregation refused to leave while the protesters were present. This continued until the Bogor District Police Chief agreed to guarantee protection of the congregation. The congregation then left the house under police protection.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_o ... _Indonesia

actly what you're basing this statement on. Surely a lack of piety doesn't equate to less hypocrisy across the board, but rather only in a religious sense. There are other ways to be hypocritical besides religiously.

I've never seen any secular organization with as huge a child-molesting scandal on its hands than the Catholic Church. And don't say the Boyscouts because they don't admit atheists. And I harbor no illusions that if we knew the extent of sexual molestation within Islam, it would make the Catholic Church look like amateurs.

DB Roy wrote:Really? Let me explain something to you: the KKK very definitely IS a product Christianity.

Sure D.B. Jesus never said to love your enemies or to treat others as you would be treated so anyone who says they are Christian and abuses others is following his teachings.

DB Roy wrote:Your argument is simply not holding water. Islam has a history of invading other nations and stamping out their native religions by force, by murder, under the banner of getting rid of Satanic delusions.

I'm not an expert on Islam but I know there are different branches of it and it's just wrong to brand them all in the same way.

The majority of Muslims do not support the atrocities of Isil which is a particular Wahhabi interpretation which seems to thrive in it's extreme form in places like Iraq where there are wars and sectarian inequality.

DB Roy wrote:You can't look at how strong Christianity is in the American conservative right wing, whether racist or otherwise, and tell me that this is a weak connection. The connection is direct and powerful. The left wing is openly, if not almost entirely, atheistic or agnostic. The right is overwhelmingly Christian.

But here's the thing D.B. The racist, Muslim hating far right in Europe are neither Christian or Muslim but citizens of secular societies.
How many of them go to any church or practice any religion? Tiresome as it is to repeat it Communism in Russia and China was atheistic and viciously anti religious.
Go ahead D.B. IMAGINE no religion which is what you would have had if they had been successful in adding all the other millions of religious people to the dead.
All extremes are a problem.

Flann 5 wrote: Sure D.B. Jesus never said to love your enemies or to treat others as you would be treated so anyone who says they are Christian and abuses others is following his teachings.

They certainly believe they are. They couldn't care less what you think.

I'm not an expert on Islam but I know there are different branches of it and it's just wrong to brand them all in the same way.

I agree.

The majority of Muslims do not support the atrocities of Isil which is a particular Wahhabi interpretation which seems to thrive in it's extreme form in places like Iraq where there are wars and sectarian inequality.

So when a Muslim walks by you, you just know whether he's a terrorist or not. I'll put it this way--you're sitting on a plane waiting to get airborne and several Arab guys get on and there's just something about them. Do you really want to be stuck at 20,000 feet with those guys? I don't. I can rationalize that most Muslims are decent people but that doesn't make me feel any more comfortable in that situation. I'm getting off.

But here's the thing D.B. The racist, Muslim hating far right in Europe are neither Christian or Muslim but citizens of secular societies.

But not all Europeans who don't want to be around Muslims are racist or haters as I hope you well know. Some of them might actually be basing their feeling on incidents as Charlie Hebdo, the London train bombings, 9-11 or these latest attacks in Paris. People have every right to be leery of them. They'd be stupid not to.

How many of them go to any church or practice any religion? Tiresome as it is to repeat it Communism in Russia and China was atheistic and viciously anti religious.

I don't care! Go lay your rap on a communist.

Go ahead D.B. IMAGINE no religion which is what you would have had if they had been successful in adding all the other millions of religious people to the dead.
All extremes are a problem.

[/quote]

You should know, you're one of them.