Evil Muslim conspiracy...

...to stand up for freedom of religion and protect their Christian neighbors. In Egypt, not the US.

quote:

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Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields"
Muslims turned up in droves for the Coptic Christmas mass Thursday night, offering their bodies, and lives, as shields to Egypt’s threatened Christian community
Yasmine El-Rashidi , Friday 7 Jan 2011

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Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

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From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as human shields for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

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We either live together, or we die together, was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the human shield idea.

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Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist and preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

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This is not about us and them, said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly Street. We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.

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In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent — the symbol of an Egypt for All. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

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The attack has rocked a nation that is no stranger to acts of terror, against all of Muslims, Copts and Jews. In January of last year, on the eve of Coptic Christmas, a drive-by shooting in the southern town of Nag Hammadi killed eight Copts as they were leaving Church following mass. In 2004 and 2005, bombings in the Red Sea resorts of Taba and Sharm El-Sheikh claimed over 100 lives, and in the late 90’s, Islamic militants executed a series of bombings and massacres that left dozens dead.

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This attack though comes after a series of more recent incidents that have left Egyptians feeling left out in the cold by a government meant to protect them.

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Last summer, 28-year-old businessman Khaled Said was beaten to death by police, also in Alexandria, causing a local and international uproar. Around his death, there have been numerous other reports of police brutality, random arrests and torture.

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Last year was also witness to a ruthless parliamentary election process in which the government’s security apparatus and thugs seemed to spiral out of control. The result, aside from injuries and deaths, was a sweeping win by the ruling party thanks to its own carefully-orchestrated campaign that included vote-rigging, corruption and widespread violence. The opposition was essentially annihilated. And just days before the elections, Copts - who make up 10 percent of the population - were once again the subject of persecution, when a government moratorium on construction of a Christian community centre resulted in clashes between police and protestors. Two people were left dead and over 100 were detained, facing sentences of up to life in jail.

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The economic woes of a country that favours the rich have only exacerbated the frustration of a population of 80 million whose majority struggle each day to survive. Accounts of thefts, drugs, and violence have surged in recent years, and the chorus of voices of discontent has continued to grow.

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The terror attack that struck the country on New Year’s eve is in many ways a final straw — a breaking point, not just for the Coptic community, but for Muslims as well, who too feel marginalized, oppressed, and overlooked by a government that fails to address their needs. On this Coptic Christmas eve, the solidarity was not just one of religion, but of a desperate and collective plea for a better life and a government with accountability.

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I'm really, really tired of watching people fall for confirmation bias. I'm mentally exhausted by the idiocy of people who say that Muslims are all terrorists, or that Islam requires "infidels" to be converted or killed. I'm exasperated beyond the point of anger or annoyance with ridiculous conspiracy theories of Barack Obama being a "stealth Muslim" intending to destroy America from the top.You'll note that this story wasn't from CNN or Fox or MSNBC. A nationwide rallying of thousands of Muslims to stand up in defense of Christians in a predominantly Muslim nation would, you woulf hope, get a little airtime (please, if someone saw this story in US-based media outlets, please restore some of my confidence in American journalism, pretty please).Here we had an incident where some homicidal maniacs using Islam for an excuse murdered a bunch of Christians as they left their church. What happened? Thousands of Muslims around the country attended Christian Christmas Eve services to act as human shields and take a stand for national unity over religious division, for peace over violence.This is what the followers of a religion of peace would do.This is what a decent human being would do.And still we have idiots painting all of the followers of a religion the same shade as an extremist minority. They quote incitements to violence in the Koran as proof that "real" Muslims (by their own definition, not that of the Muslims themselves) are required to kill non-Muslims. As if I couldn't do five minutes of research and find a dozen Bible quotes advocating murder, rape, slavery, and more. Those Biblical quotes (thankfully) no more describe the morality or obligations of "true" Christians any more than any Muslim is described or obligated by immorality in their own holy book.Every time you see another story about a homicidal maniac who happens to be Muslim trying to martyr himself through mass murder-suicide, remember this story. Remember that what you hear in the news is not a statistically representative sample, that the American media will always be biased toward tragedy over righteousness simply because of what sells...and what doesn't.Last week, thousands of Muslims stood up to defend the rights and lives of Christians, who make up only about 10% of the population of Egypt.Each and every time I'm confronted with a smarmy bigot who sarcastically mocks Islam as a "religion of peace," I'm going to point to this article.Coffee House is fine.

Of course. Religion perpetuates and encourages irrationality. It causes people to believe without any reason to believe, and to actually value self-delusion.Many faiths promote a system of ethics based not on thinking about the social consequences of actions, but rather based on authority and obedience, a system that can work well but is also extremely vulnerable to corruption...especially considering that human beings will perform astounding evils when allowed to do so by authority (see the Milgrim Experiment, or the Stanford Prison Experiment).It can magnify pre-existing hatred and intolerance. A person already predisposed to dislike people who are different from himself can very easily latch on to xenophobic aspects present in many faiths.But at the end of the day, the Koran and the Torah and the Bible and all of the other holy books are just words on paper. The sermons of preachers from Martin Luther King Jr to Martin Luther are just words.Books can't hate. Speeches can't explode. People hate and murder and torture and rape and burn and destroy.The evils of religion are a recursive symptom of the disease. A Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, can all commit murder just as easily as anyone else - they just have a specific, easy-to-point-to authority that can be interpreted as justifying their evil actions. Some people commit murder directly because of their religions. Muslim suicide bombers, Christian abortion clinic bombers, and so on. But even in those cases religion is not the root cause. Remove religion, and people will still fight wars and kill each other. Any difference is enough to make people fight, any difference at all. Give us all the same skin and we'd fight over eye color. Homogenize that and we'd start fighting over hair color. National origin. City of birth. Gender. Orientation. Favorite football team.The point of this thread is that Islam and Muslims are not inherently evil. They aren't even predisposed to evil, any more than anyone else. They are people, just like you and just like me, and every time you start to go off on how they are wicked, they are murderers, they aren't loud enough at denouncing evil, their beliefs are bad, you feed into the same tribalistic division that perpetuates virtually all of the major conflicts in the world.Specific interpretations of the Koran are irrelevant. They don't matter, not at all. What matters is that Muslims, regardless of what you say about their beliefs, stood up and did something good and true and right by embracing people different from themselves, a persecuted minority in their country, and said "we are all the same, and we're not going to let you be attacked for your beliefs tonight."

Hi Coyote.How many pictures get taken of Muslims not holding up hateful signs? How many news reports get made of all the Muslims sitting on their couches at home not blowing things up?You're usually one of the first and strongest Islamophobes to post here, so I suppose you could say that much of my original post is directed squarely at you, though not exclusively so.The plain and simple fact is, if all Muslims were terrorists, the rest of us would already be blown up. You consistently take tiny representative sample (and yes coyote, no matter how many photos of angry hateful Muslims you can find, its still a tiny insignificant representation of all Muslims, because there are over a fucking billion of them on the planet), and apply that tiny sample as representative of the whole.It is, quite literally, no different from looking at pictures of Fred Phelps and Family, and deciding that they represent all of Christianity. Or all Americans. Or all white people. Or all Arkansans.They don't. Never have.You always seem so sure of yourself when you claim that I/we ignore all of the "evidence" of Muslim evil, coyote. But you utterly fail to recognize that you're simply falling for confirmation bias, believing what you see most often without even thinking for one moment with credulity that what you see is only a tiny subset of reality.What do you believe, and why do you believe it?If you believe that all Muslims, or even most, are evil murderers in waiting, why do you hold that belief?How would the world look if some Muslims were hateful murderers in waiting, as opposed to most or all?If most Muslims were ordinary people no different from the myriad Christians and Jews and others you encounter every day, would you expect to see something different on the news?Would you expect weekly news reports showing some Muslim family at the dinner table, or perhaps a bunch of Muslims praying at a Mosque, showing how peaceful Islam is?I don;t expect to see many stories of Muslim peace, because peace most often looks a lot like doing nothing, which isn't interesting and doesn't show up on the news.I think that, with over a billion Muslims in the world, if they were all violent and hateful, those pictures you love so much would have much fucking larger crowds. And rather than hearing of small-scale terrorist attacks on occasion globally, we'd be attacked daily or hourly worldwide by a billion-strong army of jihadis.I don't have to ignore your pictures, coyote. All I have to do is look at the forest, rather than a few trees. Your rotten trees are a noticeable but awfully small part of that forest...and you are the one ignoring every single speck of evidence that doesn't agree with your predetermined hypothesis.

How important, do you think, is the specific religious instruction as opposed to a distinction separating two or more groups in causing conflict we usually blame on religion?For instance, do you think that Muslims hate non-Muslims because the Koran tells them to, or do you think that distinct groups of people (whether the distinction is race, nation, religion, or favorite football team) tend towards conflict, and the specific teaching of any religion or the words of political leaders tend to just be a convenient excuse?Personally, I think human behavior is too complicated to really be able to point at a single factor and say, "that's why."Plenty of studies and examples in history have shown that human beings will divide themselves up and tend towards conflict naturally. Further studies have shown that human beings are capable of unexpectedly evil acts when under the influence of authority. The Stanford Prison Experiment showed that, when randomly selected groups are made to play the roles of prison guard and prisoner, the guards (without prompting) adopted an authoritarian stance and even inflicted torture on some of the prisoners. The prisoners, when instructed to by guards, would also inflict violence on other prisoners. The Milgram Experiment is perhaps more directly appropriate, however. THe Milgram experiment was set up to study why Germans went along with the Holocaust in WWII. Multiple reasons for the slaughter of Jews, gays, and other "undesireables" have been suggested. Hitler drew much of his antisemitism directly from Martin Luther, father of the Protestant split with Catholicism, and continually made Biblical references. But the Milgram experiment showed that what really seems to matter is simply authority, regardless of how the authority is recognized.The experiment involved one participant and one plant, as well as the "authority," the conductor of the experiment. The participant and plant took part in a rigged "random" selection; the plant would be strapped to an electrified chair, and the actual participant would be seated at a control console in a separate room with an intercom. The control console had a series of switches, labeled from a few volts, to over a hundred volts, with the last two switches labeled only "XX." The participant was told that the experiment would study the effectiveness of punishing electric shocks on memory. Whenever the plant got an answer wrong, he would get a progressively worse shock.The real experiment was to see how the participant would respond when the plant started screaming to stop. The authority figure would respond to reluctance by saying four pre-scripted responses, after which the experiment would end:1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.Most of the people setting up the experiment expected around 1-3% to continue to the end.64% of the subjects obeyed the authority all the way to the end, when the plant, who had mentioned having a heart condition, would stop screaming and simply remain silent as if dead.I think the human response to authority, our tendency to self-divide, and our tendency to dehumanize and seek conflict with the "other" is what causes terrorism. Holy books sometimes act as an authority, and people obey that authority and do evil. Preachers and politicians sometimes act as an authority, and people obey that authority and do evil. Religion is one of many lines we use to distinguish ourselves into separate tribes, but we've also used skin color and nationality and language. Soccer hooligans only need to favor different teams to spark violence.Blaming religion, especially a specific religion, seems to me to miss the point. Terrorism is a symptom of the disease, and religion is but one possible contributing factor of many, easily replaced with any other convenient substitute authority and/or tribalistic distinction. Religion's only "advantage" in such cases is that they can typically occupy both of those roles at once.Remember, we live in a world where 64% of the people you see on the street will go right along with shocking you to death if repeatedly encouraged to do so by an authority figure. Where other human beings will divide themselves into "us" and "them" at the slightest provocation, and where people will enter violent and deadly conflict over a favored sports team.I don't think it's fair or accurate to say "Islam causes Muslims to be violent." Far, far too many Muslims are not violent for that to be the case, and far, far too many NON-Muslims are violent.

I think most Muslims manage to follow Islam without being violent mass-murderers. This is strong evidence that the perception that Muslims are violent is a flawed perception, the result of confirmation bias rather than objective analysis of fact.I think that many non-Muslims perform acts equally evil or worse than those typified in your average Islamophobic media story, including the Protestant/Catholic violence in Ireland, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unibomber, the Holocaust, the Japanese occupation of China and the rest of the Pacific in WWII, the American detention of Asian-descended citizens during WWII, violence toward German-descended Americans in WWI and WWII, race riots, etc is collectively very strong evidence that human beings are violent toward each other by nature, with little to no excuse, and therefore Islam is incidental, not causal, to the violence.I think that human history is filled with examples of man's inhumanity toward man over nearly every conceivable difference, from favorite soccer team to skin color to religious persuasion to nationality etc. I think, given the undispitable fact that this is so, it is an example of gross oversimplification and condifirmation bias to state that Islam results in violence.A rational investigation, remember, does not look by starting to seek confirmation fo your hypothesis. It starts by seeking falsifications of hypotheses. Violent Muslims, including terrorist acts, would be expected whether Islam causes violence or if human beings are inherently violent and latch on to authoritative excuses.What would differentiate those two hypotheses, Abe?I think that, if Islam caused violence, we should expect to see more violent Muslims than any other conceivable group - more acts of mass murder should be committed, for instance, by Muslim terrorists than any other social, religious, or racial group. In essence, you need to determine whether Islam is correlated with violence more strongly than other possible distinctions.Yet it appears to me that the vast majority of Muslims do not blow anyone up, nor do they chop off heads, nor do they open fire on crowds. It appears to me that the brutality seen in many Muslim countries is little different from the brutality seen in other societies throughout history (history, I think, should count - Islam has not fundamentally changed, and neither has Christianity, only social values have changed while the holy books and traditions remained unchanged). Extreme notions of justice are not limited to Muslim nations. Victimization of women is not unique to Islam - remember, in predominantly Christian nations women were treated as chattel not too long ago, and it was perfectly legal to rape or even beat one's wife. I see no overarching pattern among Muslims that does not correspond to other groups.A distinction without a difference is not a difference. If violent and oppressive societies happen regardless of religion and race etc, then those factors are incidental, and not causal. I think that's a pretty clear chain of logic.Your arguments in this thread have focused on specific Koranic verses that are sometimes interpreted as encouraging or even mandating violence toward non-Muslims. I suggest that this is analogous to the Milgram experiment - the Koran is taken by some Muslims to be a higher authority than their own internal sense of authority, and among that subset of Muslims, there is another subset that will follow the immoral perceived instructions of that perceived authority for the same reasons Nazis shoved innocent Jews into gas chambers and ovens.But I think that stopping there and saying "see, Islam does it" is intellectually lazy - you're allowing your curiosity to be satisfied when you've identified only a correlation, rather than establishing root causation, because the conclusion this allows you to draw matches your previously preferred hypothesis rather than compelling you to accept it.I get suspicious when I notice that I'm stopping my curiosity because I'm allowed to continue with my pre-existing hypothesis, rather than compelled. Your Koranic quotes are evidence, but they are not compelling evidence, and they are less so when we notice that violence and inhumanity transcend any specific faith, because that actively contradicts the hypothesis.I think most of the evidence I'm able to gather strongly supports the hypothesis that specific religions are incidental (meaning not totally irrelevant, but not causal) to violence, that the real causes for violence are social and psychological in nature.I think that the hypothesis that Islam causes violence is weakly supported by the fact that some Muslims commit violent acts, but is strongly contradicted by the fact that people of other religions commit horrors as well, such that the statistical difference between the violence rate among Muslims since the dawn of Islam is not significantly different from the violence rate among virtually any other group.I think you're committing what has been called the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy," where you fail to take into account all of the statistical evidence not in line with your initial hypothesis.

Of course it should. The enforcement of religious law directly contradicts the basic human right of religious freedom.But let's not forget that Pakistan isn't the only country with blasphemy laws on the books. And I'm not only referring to various other Muslim nations. Ireland recently enacted blasphemy legislation as well.The unfortunate fact is that religions, like any other closely-held belief, tend to create sacred cows. Nobody likes hearing somebody else say that what they believe is wrong, or stupid, or whatever. An obvious reaction, when your faction happens to be in the majority, is to force the issue by law, either legislating adherence to your own religion, or simply banning the practice and expression of other faiths as blasphemous.There are factions in the US that would love to make Christianity the official state religion and outlaw perceived blasphemy. The only difference is that they aren't the political majority.

...because you purposefully constructed a scenario for your inquiry that matches the specific type of violence typified by stereotypical Muslims.Let me try:"Oooh, have you seen the news reports of that dude getting shot in front of his church and peacefully dying? You know, the abortion doctor? Guess what religion the shooter was?"That's pretty easy. Should I ask who you think of when I talk about political prisoners being executed and having their organs harvested? Maybe I should ask about gassing Jews?You're smarter than this, onifre. Yes, it is. Do you wonder why that might be? Remember, the majority population of Iraq was Muslim, yet they didn't have terrorism problems until we toppled any semblence of order or rule of law there and destroyed the entire security structure. And their secular dictator was a violent horrific genocidal asshole without needing the Koran to rile the masses. As do the peaceful ones. That's why we have the No True Scotsman fallacy, onifre - again, you're smarter than this.If Islam causes adherents to be violent, why are we still alive? We should be drowning in the blood of Muslim martyrs about now if that were the case.Turn the question around. There are plenty of Christian terrorists. Take a look at Ireland for a "great" example, but we've had plenty of abortion clinic murderers, too, among others. Hitler used Christian rhetoric and Biblical justification for antisemitism and his "final solution" taken directly from the writings of Martin Luther, father of Protestantism. The Inquisition and the persecution of Native Americans all unquestionably had roots in the Christian faith. Do these things mean that Christianity is a violent religion?Most modern Christians are pretty peaceful. Not many witch burnings nowadays, except in the third world where they still do that (except instead of unpopular women, children seem to get targeted, and they do things even more brutal than just burning, if you can imagine that). The abortion clinic murderers are a tiny minority, though a large number of Christians don't exactly disapprove.Should we go into back farther and look at the brutal laws from the Old Testament? I mean, we're talking about ancient Jews stoning "rebellious" children on the milder side here. Hell, even in the modern day, Israel does some pretty fucked up things in response to terrorism, responding with far more force than they received, killing far more people than they lost, and deliberately antagonizing Palestinians by reneging on just about every agreement they make. Are Jews violent? Is Judaism a violent religion? Certainly nto the Jews I know.And Muslims have had very peaceful and progressive civilizations in the past, while Westerners were behind the times. Islam certainly didn't change...only cultures did, just like with Christianity and Judaism and every other religion.I'm going to restate my hypothesis, onifre, and I'd like you to actually read it this time instead of replying with outrage and mockery. I'm not some Creationist repeating PRATTS I found on some website without knowing what the fuck I'm talking about.I think that the root causes of Muslim violence are the same as those behind most other human sectarian violence. I think that, looking particularly at the Milgram Experiment, we can see that authority will very often cause people to follow through with actions they would normally believe to be immoral, right up to murder.I think that religious texts and religious leaders take positions of authority in the minds of followers, and the implication is that, if the leaders and their congregation's interpretation of the authoritative text includes violence, they'll be more likely to use violence.I also think that the Koran as an authoritative text is not significantly more violent than the Bible, or many other religious texts.I think that most adherents of religions whose texts contain incitements or even requirements for violence are, in today's society, particularly in the First World, not particularly violent.I think that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths have not significantly changed over the years, yet the attitudes of adherents of those faiths have changed.I consider the above to be very strong evidence that sectarian violence is a cultural phenomenon, not merely a religious one.Most Muslims do not cut off heads, do not shoot people, do not blow themselves up, and do not fly planes into buildings. The article I posted in my OP demonstrates an example of Muslims acting to prevent violence against "infidels" rather than incite it. I consider this to be strong evidence that Islam does not necessarily cause or incite violence, and that the generalized rule that Muslims tend to be violent is inaccurate.Islamic terrorism has been the focus of media attention since before 9/11/01 and has only gotten worse since, despite the fact that the brutal despotic regimes have not significantly changed to justify that additional coverage. Other forms of terrorism and brutality have not received nearly so much coverage, strongly suggesting a bias in reporting and public sensationalism that would very easily play into confirmation bias and result in a false conclusion that Muslims are more violent than non-Muslims.People in this thread, including yourself, continually focus on evidence that supports their position while completely ignoring evidence to the contrary. You're seeing a pattern of 2, 4, 6, verifying that 8, 10, 12 match the pattern, and concluding that the pattern is that the numbers must increase by two, ignoring the possibility that the pattern could simply be numbers in ascending order, or just random numbers. It's classic confirmation bias - you cannot verify your hypothesis by seeking positive evidence, you must seek out falsification and contrary evidence to maintain accuracy.My conclusion is that Islam is not itself violent, because adherents are not compelled to do violence as verified by the direct observation that most Muslims do not perpetrate violence. My conclusion is that Muslim violence is caused by the same factors that cause Christian violence or race riots or the Holocaust: human tribalistic separation with the human tendency towards inhumanity against the "other," a cultural acceptance of violence that has historically been present in many religions that are no longer considered to be violent, and the human tendency to follow authority such as religious leaders or authoritative texts even to ends they would otherwise identify as immoral.My hypothesis predicts that we should see violence, regardless of specific religion, that differs by cultural group rather than simply the lines of faith. For instance, we should see Christians in some cultures modern and historical that perpetrate great violence and inhuman horror. We should see Muslims in some cultures modern and historical that perpetrate great violence and inhuman horror. We should see Hindus...you get the picture. We should also see adherents of those same religions in different cultures who do not support violence or inhumanity. My prediction is that, while the authoritative texts do not change, different cultures will reinterpret or even disregard sections of those texts in accordance with their own cultural values.This seems to match reality better than the simple hypothesis that Muslims are violent. That hypothesis fails to explain nonviolent Muslims; it fails to explain violent non-Muslims; it fails to explain why American Muslims don;t tend to blow things up, while some Muslims from cultures where real violence is more accepted do; it fails to explain why Christianity, which has an undisputedly more horrific history than Islam, is not considered violent, while Islam is, despite incitements to violence in both holy texts.What do you think about my reasoning? Please, no more links or references or videos or pictures of an angry crowd of Muslims doing something nasty, unless you want me to start spamming the same for Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Chinese or white supremacist or Nazi or other monstrosities. I rather think that battle of anecdotes could go on forever without progressing any sort of discussion. I'd just like you to, as objectively as you can, analyze my reasoning and say what you think. Some of them say it. Many, many others denounce it. Most do not commit violence. The violence seems to be correlated to culture, geographic origin, and the opinions of religious leaders rather than strictly to the religion itself. Adherents of other religions have said similar things in history as well, yet we don't consider those faiths to be particularly violent, meaning we're making a special exception in our chain of logic - if we say that violent content in holy books causes violence among practitioners, we should expect equal violence to be observed among all adherents of all violent texts regardless of specific religion, and yet this is not what we see.

Small correction: any perceived authority (an Imam, the Qur'an itself when presented with a violent interpretation and focus, even just a political leader) will have a significant effect on all who see it as an authority, young or otherwise.As an aside, all of us from Christian upbringings likely know very well that different flavors of churches and preachers will focus on different parts of the Bible; when I was growing up as a Christian and as a young adult, my churches never focused on any of the violence of the Bible. I heard about Sodom and Gomorrah briefly as a tale about obedience to God (the pillar of salt), but there was no mention of Lot offering up his daughters to the rapacious crowd, or his subsequent drunken incest with them after the cities had been destroyed. Is it so hard to imagine that, perhaps, there are "fire and brimstone" Muslims just as there are more peaceful followers of Islam, and that the spread is more determined by local culture than the actual content of the texts or the historical traditions of teh religion?That's more to everyone else, Hyro, not so much to you, as it seems we pretty much agree. Amazing - Hyro and I agree almost compeltely.I think the US can afford to have some actual alliances as well as trade...but I think it's important that we not make such alliances unconditional, as is the case with Israel. I'm fairly certain Israel could start rounding up Muslims for concentration camps or nuke Iran and still retain American support, and that forces us into a corner I think we'd rather not be in.

So it seems we agree on this point - the media creates a situation ripe for confirmation bias to lead to incorrect conclusions. As usual. It seems we agree here, as well: the specific religion is less important than the current leaders and the surrounding culture. Contemporary Christians are largely different from their medieval counterparts, despite the fact that the text didn't change much aside from some translation. This seems to be where we disagree, and it looks like it's slight. I'd say this: Good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but for good people to do bad things you need authority, and religion tends to create particularly strong authority.My entire point has been that you can't really assign a generalization to an entire religion - I'm unaware of many truly "violent" or "peaceful" religions. Most major religions contain elements (or can be interpreted as) of both. My OP was merely trying to point out that saying "Islam is a violent religion" is inaccurate, disrespectful to the Muslims who do stand up for basic human rights and deserve attention, and actively serves to further polarize us along lines that are already pretty polarized.I'm not sure you and I disagree so much as it initially appeared.