You say but, yet brown isn't a race.

Then it may be racism not based on colour prejudice alone. Muslims are associated with certain countries. In the UK only about 1% of them are indigenous white people who have converted.

It IS racist to have a go at people because of their different colour. It's because they are from a different coloured race.

The other poster was talking about today. On the topic of Mohammed I believe most of his actions were in self-defence as the people in the next town kept trying to destroy him and his followers. There is also something else to note. Mohammed is not the religion. He was a HUMAN prophet. In that respect Islam is different to Christianity as Christians believe that Christ is divine. Muslims believe that Christ was another human prophet and that he will return. At that point he will become more important than Mohammed.

Sure but disliking a religion doesn't make you racist even if we think most of the people under it are 'brown'


not sure how this sentence got constructed....I think we could say something better like, its because they 'think' its a different colored race.

None the less, the title of the thread shows racism, but the question about disliking Islam is prejudice, and ignorant.

It's not axiomatic but in the UK it is counted as racist if religion is used as a proxy for race. In the UK the racist groups have just swapped from being racist against black people and Jewish people to being racist against those ethnic groups who are Muslim by religion.

There is effectively nothing on the last page that supports or refutes the claim "Islam is worse than Christianity". The discussion, for instance, of various influences in europe is entirely moot. Western law comes from roman traditions, sure, who cares? That doesn't make islam worse than christianity. It is just such a poorly defined and pernicious statement that to try to defend it - especially with things like this - is pretty lolbad.

Incidentally, it is much "safer" to just use the word "bigoted". I certainly think religious criticism often - but not necessarily - is a proxy for either conscious or unconscious racism. As in, it is not JUST that people criticism Islam because of its merits, it is also that they are deeply uncomfortable with brown people and associate brown people with Islam. However, while this factors in, it obviously isn't always the case and even when it IS the case, it is often very hard to identify.

I can't make sense of what you are saying here but I would like to.

You start by selectively quoting from my post, to make it seem like I'm stating the opposite of what I'm actually writing - and now you have the audacity to sit there and give pretense of some kind of intellectual integrity?

There is extremely little trace of Abrahamic or Hammurabic law in typical western law systems, a claim to the contrary shows extreme lack of knowledge. The typical ideal in western law is Justitia - Justice is blind/a person in and of itself. This is very far from Mosaic law/Sharia law/Hammurabic law.

Then you killed the word racism.

The irony of answering criticism of Islam with claiming it is racism, because "you don't like brown people" is considerable. It is actually so bad that the word irony could be argued as unsuitable.

@tamedeuces

It looks like I will have to spoon feed you a little more.

Islamic law introduced two fundamental principles to the West, on which were to later stand the future structure of law: equity and good faith, which was a precursor to the concept of pacta sunt servanda in civil law and international law. Another influence of Islamic law on the civil law tradition was the presumption of innocence, which was introduced to Europe by Louis IX of France soon after he returned from Palestine during the Crusades.

Why can't you do your own research instead of getting huffy and insisting that you are right ? I invite you to do this. You might learn something.

Spoon fed by way of plagiarizing, amirite?

The Muslim Times.

Thanks you saved me providing the link.

Yeah, right. [Try to lay off stealing other people's work, mmmkay?]

I was just teasing tame_deuces who knows very little but insists he knows it all. That stuff was originally from a wiki article so it's not stealing.

It's a [defunct] wikipedia article, so it's not plagiarizing? LMAO

There's no copyright on wiki stuff.

So what? You still have to acknowledge the authorship of the article(s) when reusing Wikipedia's content...which, of course, you didn't. It's a textbook case of plagiarizing, plain and simple. Stop doing it.

It wasn't in a textbook or wiki. Stop being a pest so I can carry on educating tame_deuces and Louis. He is the real loser by your interruption. I was going to tell him what Sharia law really means. I daresay that wasn't on the course either.

lol@u educating anyone on anything.

Of course almost everything cwoccwoc says is ridiculous (he once tried to argue against blowjobs...), but for the most part there is little irony here. As in, when I make a point like my previous post saying how there very often is a strong racist element to islamophobia, that isn't me making the mistake that brown people are muslim or vice versa. It is just acknowledging the reality that this factor is not nonexistent and indeed can be quite pernicious. It isn't ironic, it is mainly depressing.

As an analogy, people in the US might complain about needing more cops in ghettos or cracking down on welfare queens. Being a welfare queen is ostensibly entirely untied to race, much like being muslim, however, there remains a deeply racist undercurrent around the dialogue nonetheless.

But those same people dont usually have an issue with Hinduism or Buddhism or darker skinned people of other religions. I dont think its as big a factor as you make out.

To answer the question in the title, no. You can have relatively clear and objective criteria for determining if one religion is worse than another. For instance, I think that the Quaker religion is better than most other versions of Christianity or Islam because it has done more to promote social justice and nonviolence.

That being said, I think your impulse to worry that racism is motivating your opinion in this case is warranted. After all the evidence you presented to support your case-a few conversations with some nice, but sheltered Muslims-hardly warrants your judgement. Thus, it is likely that your temptation to hold that view is based instead on some kind of biased thinking.

However, you also shouldn't assume that the bias in question is racism. Our thinking is affected by many different cognitive biases, of which racism is only one example.

This doesn't really imply anything, in the sense that racism (or bigotry in general) rarely works as overtly as just equating every single instance of say "having brown skin = bad". Perhaps in the most egregious cases that is how it works. But for the most part, it is much more subtle. For instance, a person might genuinely have zero problem with the smart black guy at their work, yet still be influenced by racist thoughts when they, say, see some black kids on the street and are more cautious than they would be with white kids or less likely to hire a black person or whatever else. So it isn't "I dislike all black people". But nonetheless a range of associations between people who look certain ways are made. For instance, visualizing a "muslim" often results in a very distinct racial image, when of course in principle Islam is entirely race blind.

Now Buddhism and Hinduism are almost entirely outside of the national discourse so there isn't the build up of animosity towards these religions (not that they are non existent). But this certainly doesn't mean the way racial undertones work has to be identical for every brown person, and it can be amplified in brown muslims in ways it is not amplified in brown hindus. It is a bit like saying one isn't racist towards black because one isn't racist towards asians.

But I am quite happy to use "bigoted" or "islamophobic" and other expressions most of the time. The principle issue going on is a division into ingroup and outgroup thinking, and that division occurs through various identifiers. Religion is one. Race is another. Cultural artifacts are another (one might not invite the person with the name "Abdullah Mohammad Hussein" to an interview, for instance). Mostly they are blended together and hard to disentangle. I don't think the racial part plays a role of zero. But this is a pretty minor argument.