JCC If there is a God, then why is there evil and suffering?

Well, Wocky, firstly I think we need to agree that Islam has been fairly pissweak when it comes to criticism about it?

 

I'm not sure I'd agree to that at all.

First off, how are we judging "Islam"'s reaction as a whole? It's over a billion people, and hardly a monolith. That besides, I'm genuinely not certain how good the criticism you're trying to make is. I've not seen Muslims wasting a lot of breath on the fact that atheists and Christians call their religion false, even though they obviously do. The only real conflagrations have been around stuff that could pretty fairly be called insulting, like the political cartoons depicting Muhammad as a terrorist. Is it really unreasonable to be upset by that? Really?

 

Yes.

Wocky, in a sense, if you're talking about this you have to talk as if they're monoliths. When someone says Germany has been contrite and ashamed of their past with respect of Nazism, nobody looks for the asterisk leading to a footnote which says "except those who aren't".

Islam, generally speaking (happy now, o most pedantic of JC'ers?), does not handle criticism well and in my view this does highlight a structural weakness (it's not a judgement call on the validity of the faith from a dogmatic perspective, as that would be pointless for someone who is totally areligious).

Now, in my view (and to be fair, the view of a number of others) this is largely due to the political infancy of Islam, in that it has not had the same experience with secularism Christianity has. Christianity had the Enlightenment to get comfortable with robust and relentless critiques, and aside from some evil regressive elements (mostly in your country) it's a pretty tolerant religion.

Islam isn't, and in a modern world when you find people advocating for stoning women for adultery or where apostasy is a capital offense it's hard to argue that it's necessarily a modern religion. The modern world is cynical, critical, and irreverent. In the aftermath of the cartoon about Mohammed, to which I have to say every person who got offended really should get cancer and get the **** off our planet, the Onion published a piece in which key figures to several world faiths were depicted in sexual congress (that is, it implied Ganesh, Buddha, Jesus were all sex people) with the heading "nobody was killed for this image". Trite, but also indicative of the point.

Or remember when Muslims in Sydney ran around like animals rioting over a critical film made by an American student? I do.

Or when, you know, a Muslim assassinated Theo van Gogh for the film he made based on the writings of a Muslim woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

Yes, you can point to extremes but I see no analogous violence when any other faith gets put in the crosshairs. Kevin Smith was threatened for Dogma, but no acts of violence followed.

You may be itching to call out moderate Muslims, but too often their voice is directed at trying to enforce logical segregation between Good and Silly Islam, when denunciation of the silly ones is required.

 

The great sleight of hand in that post is confusing offense with response. This doesn't seem like a strong argument for two reasons. In the first place, I don't think Muslims are actually much more offended than are other religious groups. In the second, there's no intrinsic link between how offended someone is and how they chose to respond.

To tackle the first question, was it truly unreasonable to get upset by many of those incidents you listed? Not really. Hirsi Ali, though her experiences justify her experience, is a known bomb-thrower. She is very blunt about saying that the religion as a whole is "evil" and that it in particular enslaves and dehumanizes women in concept, beyond the specific practices that she experienced and other similar ones she has cited. I could see how anyone who actually found value in the religion--let alone practiced it regularly--might be offended by having someone tell them their entire endeavor was evil. That's not unreasonable at all.

I would contend that if, like the American Catholic League, or some other religious interest group, they confined themselves to angry press releases and lots of private grousing, you wouldn't have any problem with this at all. No one would. The problem is when that displeasure is expressed through rioting, murders, or other violent acts. But I don't see where this is intrinsic to the religion so much as the particular cultural contexts. For instance, you can criticize honor killings by Pakistani Muslims, but isn't it also relevant that there are significant number of Hindu honor killings in neighboring India? Might that not suggest that the broader Indian subcontinent has an issue around honor killings that isn't really particular to Muslims? Likewise, in assessing the response to Dutch political cartoons, ought we not factor in the way urbanized groups that feel particularly marginalized often react, regardless of religion? And if we are trying to tally some measure of hyper-sensitivity, isn't it to the credit of "Islam" that there's been comparatively little reaction to the France's rather aggressive restrictions on the practice of their religion?

I don't think you are wrong in the events you want to critique. I do think your analysis is a bit sloppy, though.

 

What in the world have you guys done with this thread while I was away...

 

Meh.... you would have done your spree of bumping all your threads, no matter what was done with it.

 

"Well, at first, it had to do something with Snickers..."

 

Welcome back. Now hit my post history and Like everything.