Just saying they kick down money from the top when they sense things are going to hit the fan. 19 beheadings are a horrible reality for any reason. Americans fly drones over lots of Arabic countries and kill many more than 19 innocent people. Lot of bad **** happens when people are greedily fighting over limited resources and influence.

I really think you should re-evaluate your thinking here. Beheading people for sorcery is a bit different than dropping bombs on your enemies. Americans don't wantonly attack innocents without reason. We can argue whether that reason is justified or not, but that's another topic.

One doesn't equal the other. While they may wind up with deaths, and even more deaths on the American side, the reason for why it happened is very much different.

- ummm...history says otherwise
- is there ever a reason to attack innocents?

i think afflecks way to response shows the influence guys like Reza Aslan have.
they praise an islam in the media, that doesnt reflect reality. u even showed the report where it is a fact, that even in the islamic majority states in south asia a overwhelming % is in favour of the sharia.

4k some posts and still are making trolly posts like this, nice life u got going for u sir.

I've always lingered threads like this on 2+2, usually find them very informative etc. I usually don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of said subject to throw my hat in the ring with you guys.

This subject however is unique for me, and it's interesting to see how horrifically wrong some of you usually knowledgeable types are about Islamic culture in 2014. The one facet of this discussion I can't disagree on is the fact that the economic realities of a lot of Islamic countries has played a large role in their lagging behind the west, although I also think that insinuating that Islamic culture has nothing to do with the economic situations is fairly naive. All the unconscionable social stuff aside, these are people that can't charge or collect interest FFS. In the muslim world living as "sunnah" as possible is considered most admirable. That is, living as close to the way the "prophet" did 1500 years ago is actually considered to be the goal. OFC these virtues in a countries citizens are going to make said countries lag behind in every way.

And for anyone here (thekid especially) who actually thinks Islam gets a unjustified bad rap for misogyny and gay rights etc, just stop talking, you're clueless. As an exercise go talk to Muslim women, even American ones, without their husbands or any men around, even then they probably won't open up about it, but just maybe one bold one who will, and they can disillusion you.

I think both maher/harris and afleck have good points.

As maher/Harris point out, we can and should condemn dangerous/harmful views. It's intellectually honest and not bigoted to call those things out.

I believe there is a wide spectrum on which people practice religion. For example literal interpretation of various religious texts could recommend stuff like people are stoned to death for adultery, but not all people that self identify with those faiths support those views. Yes, literal interpretation of those texts are dangerous, but religion encompasses a lot more ways of life than a dogmatic faith in the doctrine, and much of that spectrum is largely undocumented.. so it's not fair to singly point out religion as the culprit. Realistically in life, people do what they want and justify it later; through religion or otherwise. In that sense religion is not really a core perpetrator of negative acts but more of a device that shields and justifies them.

In regards to aflecks points, he shows a lot of pragmatism on the issue which i can support. At the end of the day, over a billion people are basically born into a faith, they have their daily struggles, finding food to put on the table, sending their kids to school. Whatever bigotry in the traditional commonplace views they and their peers hold, it's hard to hold them accountable. Mostly, they are victims. And of course, it doesn't justify waging any type of crusade in the middle east.

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and why is that? free will doesnt exist anymore?

Of course there isn't a religion where ALL of it's believers in 2014 take every word written in their archaic religious text as complete gospel and live in complete accordance. But the point is, a far higher % of Muslims embrace the atrocities their religious text condones then other religions in 2014, and a large % of those that don't participate in such things actively,(stoning/extremism etc), still tacitly accept it, again, a lot more so then other religions in 2014.

I think most reasonable people would agree that it's hard to vilify the individual (s) for having such beliefs if it's all they been around & taught in life. But I'm not sure what this has to do with criticizing Islam culture as a whole.

Yet Albania and Turkey it's 12%, Azerbaijan is 8%, then Afghanistan is 99%, Iraq 91%, Lebanon 29%.

What these wildly divergent results show is that it is an error to essentialize Islam. There is no magical quality about the religion that always poisons a society. We can't say the religion makes people backward, violent, and intolerant because so many millions are not. A majority in a country may actually be so, but it's a result of endlessly complex historical developments, of which a mutable religion is just one part.

Islam, like the other world religions, is endlessly flexible. People arrive at all sorts of different conclusions using its imagery. If that were not true, it would not be a world religion, it would be a local mountain cult.

The problem itt is that people are smearing something as inherently malign when that something isn't any one thing. It's what people, and history, make of it. To consider it one thing is to essentialize.

Bemoaning the existence of Islam is like saying the alphabet makes people racists because look, all the racism is expressed with words. (Yes, the theology is more tendentious than letters, but there's still a fundamental flexibility in the beliefs.)

Essentializing is Maher's error, and what shows him and Harris to be way, way, out of their depth.

What about cat stevens and rushdie back in 89? he supported execution at the time because of his new found muslim beliefs, correct?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Ste...Salman_Rushdie

Why are you mentioning my name here, as if its bad thing that I'm the guy who suggests that generalizing Muslims as bad is the wrong thing to go.

What your doing is similar to what the KKK supporters did during the 60s. Clan supporters would suggest that because a few Jews or blacks committed a crime, that society should be on the look out for Jews and blacks.

This isn't helping the 30,000 Azidis stuck on a side of a mountain, does it? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm simply saying that if you look at these guys, they are pure evil. I'd put them on a smaller scale of Nazis.

They gotta go.

I think many of you are missing a big point that Maher/Harris are trying to make. We have the liberal view that we should respect Islamic beliefs that clash against liberal beliefs. For each of you, you should ask yourself what side of the argument do you really come down on?

Do you honestly believe in free speech? Free speech means you can criticize ideas. In Islam you can't criticize the faith. You can't draw pictures of Muhammed. So where does that leave you as a person who (should) believe in that? For me it's clear : I'm not changing my beliefs because you get butthurt about it. Sorry. Certain things aren't negotiable.

For many Muslims believing in Islamic law is looked in a favorable or desirable way of living. That way of living is incompatible with things like respect for homosexuals and women. If you're ok with that, then just be honest about it. Do you "respect" those lines of thought? They are very prevalent in the Muslim world.

THAT'S the issue. It's not racial. It's not bigoted. It's looked at as incompatible with modern ideas of how societies should work. The problem with this is it puts us on the same side as the real bigots and racists who hate Arabs. I don't hate Arabs. Some of the best people I've ever met were Muslims. Good, honest, hard working, family-oriented people. One has nothing to do with the other.

First of all, I was arguing that Islam is not one thing, whether violent, peaceful, or whatever. So it makes no difference what Stevens thought when there were millions who disagreed with him.

Are you suggesting Stevens is evidence that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant?

If so, how does Stevens manage to backtrack on his original comments and still be a Muslim? From your Wiki link:

In before "Steven's denials of original statement are lame." True, but that's nowhere near the point.

I've never read it myself, but the ideas of martydom and jihad are supposed to be deeply prevalent in their religious texts. The fight against infidels and their beliefs are constantly represented. I've never read the Quran or the Hadith. If someone is a bit more informed, please add to the discussion.

I guess I'll have to do some research on this. Might take me a long time though.

Yes. Rushdie didn't believe his backtracking was earnest.

This is missing the point. Of course we do not have to accept/respect totalitarian efforts to suppress thought. What's crucial is that Islam is in the eyes of the believer and can be anything. There isn't an inherent opposition to freedom that we need to take sides on. We can oppose ISIL, but still ogle, I mean appreciate, a belly dancer.

One can find quotes to support that and so can a fascist Imam. Yet the actual practice of Muslims is of great variety. Bikinis on the beaches of Lebanon are blasphemy elsewhere. Sunni and Shia are always criticizing each others' faith but only in select neighborhoods does it become violent. The blanket statement "In Islam you can't criticize the faith" is an essentialist blunder. It is only true sometimes in some places, and never after 8:30.

C'mon man, this shows no sign of your reading anything before or after that quote. Especially the last line: "In before 'Steven's denials of original statement are lame.' True, but that's nowhere near the point."

I'm sure you can find 150 examples in the Hadith. How will you accommodate the hundreds of millions of Muslims who never kill themselves or anyone else and are sickened by al Qaida?

i lived 1 year in afgahnistan and 1 year in kosovo and bosnia. whats ur research background?

This one is fun to complicate. In Afghanistan, one of the most fundamentalist and extreme places, male-male sex is embedded in the culture of some groups. It is not culturally defined as homosexual, but it is mutual wanking and butt secksing.

"Kandahar Journal; Shh, It's an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia."

So with your background you'll be able to argue the actual points I made.

whats ur points? u said the majority is backward, violent, and intolerant. nothing to argue there for me.
yeah, 1 thing, "Islam, like the other world religions, is endlessly flexible." thatsBS!

I'm not really arguing or claiming to have knowledge on the subject. But when I listen to Bill Maher on the topic, he makes more sense to me than Chris Hayes.

If Bill is wrong and Hayes is right it's going to take a lot more explaining to reach people like me. And I would like to be reached; i'd like to be dead wrong, but what I see out there scares me.

The points are there, if you want to engage them, and no, that's not what I wrote.

So explain how 8% of Muslims in Azerbaijan favor Sharia yet in Afghanistan it's 99%. A bit more argumentation than "thatsBS!"

What you are missing is that Islam is essentially a non-factor in violence and oppression in the United States and other western societies. This should lead you (and Maher) to the conclusion that whatever flaws are inherent to Islam are swamped by other factors. So even if you are right and Islam is worse than Christianity or Judaism, the question is "So what?"

There are many reasons for this correlation, but they are not at the heart of Islam itself. If we agree that Islam can be practiced peacefully--and given the evidence we can't conclude otherwise--then that doesn't mean that people in the middle east cannot use Islam to motivate the masses and even to convince people to adopt terrorism. You guys are simply mistaking an effect--radicalized Islam--as a cause.


This is because you are obsessed with ISIS and the radicals. Moderate Islam is everywhere.

You think that people getting mad at all Muslims for the way Saudi Arabia treats women actually helps?

No, but you seemed to buy into it pretty quickly.