Is it really Islam's teachings that make Musllims violent?

[Loren Pechtel]

Why are American Muslims not using suicide bombers to protest the American attacks, torture and killing of Muslims nonstop for over a decade?

Is it because they approve? Or is it because they live under different circumstances than Muslims who do use suicide bombers to protest American terrorism?

We don't have a religion that says you got straight to heaven when you die in holy war.

 

[untermensche]

Why are American Muslims not using suicide bombers to protest the American attacks, torture and killing of Muslims nonstop for over a decade?

Is it because they approve? Or is it because they live under different circumstances than Muslims who do use suicide bombers to protest American terrorism?

We don't have a religion that says you got straight to heaven when you die in holy war.

No, we have a religion called the modern state.

And it makes people do far worse things than any other religion. Things like the terrorist attack and invasion of Iraq.

But the question was about American Muslims.

 

[Nexus]

I'm putting you on ignore. Please do not respond to any more of my posts.

Posting on a public message board means putting our ideas up for everyone to scrutinize. You were asked to clarify whether you thought Islam teachings made people more violent than other religions. Instead of answering that simple request you have a tantrum about what a mean liar I am because I challenged your posts. Closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears when your poorly thought out arguments are exposed doesn't strengthen them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We don't have a religion that says you got straight to heaven when you die in holy war.

No, we have a religion called the modern state.

And it makes people do far worse things than any other religion. Things like the terrorist attack and invasion of Iraq.

But the question was about American Muslims.

This is nothing but a derail. How about addressing the point?

 

[untermensche]

No, we have a religion called the modern state.

And it makes people do far worse things than any other religion. Things like the terrorist attack and invasion of Iraq.

But the question was about American Muslims.

This is nothing but a derail. How about addressing the point?

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

 

[Trausti]

This is nothing but a derail. How about addressing the point?

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

'cause the fighting and dying is so much more fun over there, over there, send the word, send the word, over there: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/somali_timeline/

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/30/world/africa/somalia-us-bomber/

 

[dismal]

This is nothing but a derail. How about addressing the point?

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

Because the FBI keeps catching them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11

 

[Perspicuo]

This is nothing but a derail. How about addressing the point?

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

Learning.

1) Just like you can learn Islam from your social environment, these people live in the US, where the culture says otherwise.

2) Violence is multifactorial. Militant Islamists are learning violence from their religion in general and from the Qur'an in particular which are provided to them by their learning environment, and all you need is another set of factors from that same learning envirnoment to get a violent Muslim.

Just like with the gun culture. Not all Americans are going to be gun nuts just for living in this country. Or take the homophobia from Evangelical Christianity: it is undeniable that is what that religion preaches, but that doesn't mean every Evangelical Christian is going to be a gay-basher, just as not every Catholic is going to abstain from condom use.

 

[untermensche]

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

Because the FBI keeps catching them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11

The only way the FBI caught the majority of these is because it was the FBI that planned the crime and supplied the bombs.

Besides the two stopped by passengers on jets only one of these was an alleged suicide bomber and he was Moroccan.

But where are all the home grown Muslim suicide bombers if somehow Islam and not circumstance is the cause of suicide bombings?

 

[untermensche]

You're avoiding the point.

If it is religion and not circumstance that drives Muslims to suicide bombings why are there no US Muslims doing it here?

Learning.

1) Just like you can learn Islam from your social environment, these people live in the US, where the culture says otherwise.

2) Violence is multifactorial. Militant Islamists are learning violence from their religion in general and from the Qur'an in particular which are provided to them by their learning environment, and all you need is another set of factors from that same learning envirnoment to get a violent Muslim.

Just like with the gun culture. Not all Americans are going to be gun nuts just for living in this country. Or take the homophobia from Evangelical Christianity: it is undeniable that is what that religion preaches, but that doesn't mean every Evangelical Christian is going to be a gay-basher, just as not every Catholic is going to abstain from condom use.

In other words, circumstance.

Put humans in the proper circumstances and some will resort to suicide bombings.

It doesn't matter what their religion is.

The Japanese resorted to suicide attacks when they were desperate and so have many secular nonreligious movements.

Right now we are living in the post US invasion of Iraq world where Muslims have been attacked, killed and tortured in great numbers for over a decade. That is the reason we are seeing an increase in violence from Muslims now.

 

[repoman]

The prez should have said that we are not attacking because they are Muslim but because of the minerals, oil, opium and geographical control of land. That should stop any white guy islamic convert from strapping on a vest. Or an Idonesian muslim from being pissed off over what we are doing in iraq or Afghanistan - and save his anger over what we do to Indonesia.

This religion is making allies of people who have no logical connection otherwise.

 

[Nexus]

It doesn't matter what their religion is.

Yes it does matter but your framing this as a false dichotomy. Islamic teachings contribute to the motivation of suicide bombers in addition to their culture. Catholics in central and south America have faced extreme despair, poverty, oppression and violence caused by the US. But since Catholicism is so strongly anti-suicidal the other factors in their culture aren't enough to overcome that prohibition against self termination. Islam on the other hand encourages it and provides another tactic for the hopeless.

 

[untermensche]

It doesn't matter what their religion is.

Yes it does matter but your framing this as a false dichotomy. Islamic teachings contribute to the motivation of suicide bombers in addition to their culture. Catholics in central and south America have faced extreme despair, poverty, oppression and violence caused by the US. But since Catholicism is so strongly anti-suicidal the other factors in their culture aren't enough to overcome that prohibition against self termination. Islam on the other hand encourages it and provides another tactic for the hopeless.

There are many Islamic scriptures that forbid suicide and talk about how those who commit suicide will not go to heaven.

Some Islamic leaders have labeled suicide bombings as Martyrdom.

It is the leaders who encourage suicide bombing not any Islamic scripture.

It is circumstance, not religion.

 

[repoman]

UM,

you said that there is a religion of the "Modern State" which is not that far off in many cases. A religion in the same sense as Football is to Texas or Basketball to Indiana, but much more intense. Creation Myth, sacrifices, consecration, dogma and so on.

However, even basic Islam has the seeds in it to make a religious state to supplant the modern state. States get in wars with each other and a group vying to become a state (caliphate or similar backing muslims) will go to war with an established state government - North Africa Middle East now Europe later. It will use things similar to US Revolutionary War tactics to get independence.

 

[untermensche]

UM,

you said that there is a religion of the "Modern State" which is not that far off in many cases. A religion in the same sense as Football is to Texas or Basketball to Indiana, but much more intense. Creation Myth, sacrifices, consecration, dogma and so on.

However, even basic Islam has the seeds in it to make a religious state to supplant the modern state. States get in wars with each other and a group vying to become a state (caliphate or similar backing muslims) will go to war with an established state government - North Africa Middle East now Europe later. It will use things similar to US Revolutionary War tactics to get independence.

Saudi Arabia is the most religious state in the ME.

Are we at war with Saudi Arabia?

 

[Bomb#20]

Why are American Muslims not using suicide bombers to protest the American attacks, torture and killing of Muslims nonstop for over a decade?

Is it because they approve? Or is it because they live under different circumstances than Muslims who do use suicide bombers to protest American terrorism?

What is with your obsession with suicide bombers? Why should we care whether the guy with the bomb dies too? What matters is whether he's trying to kill innocent bystanders. Japanese kamikaze pilots were suicide bombers too, and they were heroes, because they were trying to kill the specific people who were attacking their country.

This is a thread about violence, not a thread about bombing. Like pretty much everything else, violence comes in a Gaussian curve; bombers are simply the people way out on the upper tail end of the distribution. So whether and to what extent people set off bombs is quite literally a side issue. The central issue is what effect Islam's teachings have on the mean and the standard deviation. It's not the 0.01% who want to blow up women and children that are in need of explanation; it's the 50%+ who support punishing blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality, adultery, female disobedience, and on and on. So go ahead, explain how that's the Wests's fault.

So your theory, then, is that Christianity would have been every bit as effective as it has been at turning people into sheep even if it's holy scripture had been "The Little Engine that Could"?[/sarcasm] This doesn't have to be either/or, for chrissakes! It's the combination of the people and the books that's the problem.

The combination of the books and people produces no predictable outcome.

Of course it produces a predictable outcome: it predictably pollutes and corrupts believers' minds, just like you said it does. And when the books are full of self-contradictions it predictably causes a subset of people with corrupted minds to compulsively follow one instruction and a different subset to compulsively follow the opposite instruction. And when some of those self-contradictory instructions are to do violence to the innocent it predictably causes some people with corrupted minds to do violence to the innocent.

People can use the books to justify feeding the hungry or killing abortion doctors.

Yes. Exactly. When some people kill abortion doctors because they think God wants them to, that's Christianity's fault as well as the murderers' fault.

The same holds true for the Muslim books.

Yes. Exactly. When some people kill apostates because they think God wants them to, that's Islam's fault as well as the murderers' fault.

What does produce a predictable outcome is attacking people, rounding them up and torturing them. People will resist this kind of thing with violence.

Yes. And when they "resist this kind of thing" by rounding up and murdering their own country's school girls, people who like school girls better than terrorists will resist this kind of thing back with more violence, and it all spins out of control into a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. And you look at that cycle of violence and apply your customary double standard and hold the West uniquely to blame for both sides' choices even though we're trying to rescue school girls and the Taliban/ISIL types are trying to enslave them.

And when millions of Muslims have been under attack from the West for decades those people will use the books to attack back.

This is about geopolitics and the violent intrusion of the West into Muslim nations and the response to that intrusion.

Uh huh. When a Muslim governor argues that a Muslim government shouldn't execute its own subjects for blasphemy, his own Muslim bodyguards murder him for blasphemy, and killing him makes them popular with that government's Muslim subjects, and the reason those people have that attitude toward blasphemy and the importance of killing their fellow Muslims over it is that that's just their way of attacking back against the West. Riiight.

You simply dodge the point with this anecdote.

No, you dodge the point. Islam was encouraging violence, and corrupting minds enough to perform it, centuries before the West ever handed you an outside culture to conveniently put the blame on. The vast majority of the violence prompted by Islam and carried out by people whose minds it polluted are Muslims themselves, so when you excuse all that violence by labeling it "attacking the West back", you're being ridiculous.

 

[Togo]

The central issue is what effect Islam's teachings have on the mean and the standard deviation. It's not the 0.01% who want to blow up women and children that are in need of explanation; it's the 50%+ who support punishing blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality, adultery, female disobedience, and on and on. So go ahead, explain how that's the Wests's fault.

Well, first we need to look at your 50% plus. According to the research you cited, which unfortunately for you I actually read, Muslims support punishing blasphemy, apostasy homosexuality and adultery only within adherants of their own religion. So people who are self-identifying as Muslim should be held accountable if they break Islamic law. In other words, they believed their religion should be policed. The same research shows a robust support for religious pluralism, to the extent that actively supporting people with other religious beliefs is seen as an inherently good thing.

Now certainly we have seen some cases in the Middle East where religious structures appear to be getting more influence over the country than Muslims themselves feel they should have. To the extent that the West has been systematically corrupting and supporting secular institutions in favour of 'strong men' who are easier for the West to deal with, then yes, out of control Mullahs are largely the West's fault.

It might be useful to compare with what happened in Europe after the Treaty of Versailles, when many of the same powers undermined secular democracy in Germany.

Of course it produces a predictable outcome: it predictably pollutes and corrupts believers' minds, just like you said it does.

I'm actually quite sympathetic to the idea that faulty reasoning corrupts people's minds, which is why I'm disagreeing with you. Because you've presented nothing to suggest that ordinary Muslims are any more violent than anyone else, and nothing to suggest that Islam is any more mind corrupting than Christianity, or Fox News.

What does produce a predictable outcome is attacking people, rounding them up and torturing them. People will resist this kind of thing with violence.

Yes. And when they "resist this kind of thing" by rounding up and murdering their own country's school girls,

And all of a sudden we're not talking about ordinary Muslims, we're talking about a fanatical fringe. You argued quite eloquantly that we should be ignoring the fringe and looking at the ordinary people.

And as before, attacking the educational system of the oppressor is a classic political resistance move, not unique to religion.

No, you dodge the point. Islam was encouraging violence, and corrupting minds enough to perform it, centuries before the West ever handed you an outside culture to conveniently put the blame on.

Well sort of. The early Muslims were mainly struggling against rival Arabs, including the Heshimites and the Meccans. The first Caliphate was in 750 AD, and the West arguably didn't start their 1000-year period of inteference until the first crusade in 1096. So yes, they had a good 300 years before the West entered into what is nearly a millenium of active hostility.

 

[untermensche]

What is with your obsession with suicide bombers? Why should we care whether the guy with the bomb dies too? What matters is whether he's trying to kill innocent bystanders. Japanese kamikaze pilots were suicide bombers too, and they were heroes, because they were trying to kill the specific people who were attacking their country.

Asking questions that you dodge as hard as you can is not an obsession. You don't like the question because it destroys your delusion that it is religion, not politics, at the bottom of this.

Put people in the right circumstances and some will resort to violence. Attack and kill and torture Muslims nonstop for over a decade on a large scale, and go halfway around the world to do it, and you will create chaos and further violence, as we see.

So I ask again, why no American homegrown suicide bombers if Islam is the culprit and not circumstance?

The combination of the books and people produces no predictable outcome.

Of course it produces a predictable outcome: it predictably pollutes and corrupts believers' minds, just like you said it does.

What that pollution does cannot be predicted. There is no predictable outcome from it.

But again, what can be predicted is that if you launch massive attacks of innocent people chaos will ensue and random violence will ensue, sometimes incredibly disturbing violence, like the violence from ISIS which the US is ultimately responsible for.

People can use the books to justify feeding the hungry or killing abortion doctors.

Yes. Exactly. When some people kill abortion doctors because they think God wants them to, that's Christianity's fault as well as the murderers' fault.

Here your error shines through. There is nothing in the Christian religion that instructs a person to kill people performing abortions.

Some crazed Christians do it because of the words from politicians using the issue merely to gain votes and from other so-called Christian leaders.

It is pure circumstance in other words, not something supported in the religious writings.

Yes. Exactly. When some people kill apostates because they think God wants them to, that's Islam's fault as well as the murderers' fault.

This is a huge issue and a whole thread could be devoted to examining it.

But you have two sides. Some who say apostates should be killed, a tiny minority of Muslims, the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia is a tiny minority, and some who say they shouldn't, the vast majority.

What does produce a predictable outcome is attacking people, rounding them up and torturing them. People will resist this kind of thing with violence.

Yes. And when they "resist this kind of thing" by rounding up and murdering their own country's school girls, people who like school girls better than terrorists will resist this kind of thing back with more violence, and it all spins out of control into a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. And you look at that cycle of violence and apply your customary double standard and hold the West uniquely to blame for both sides' choices even though we're trying to rescue school girls and the Taliban/ISIL types are trying to enslave them.

There is the resistance to the violence and also the ensuing chaos that arises from such incredible brutality from the West.

This is about geopolitics and millions of Muslims who rightfully feel they are all targets from insane foreign powers.

 

[TSwizzle]

This is a thread about violence, not a thread about bombing. Like pretty much everything else, violence comes in a Gaussian curve; bombers are simply the people way out on the upper tail end of the distribution. So whether and to what extent people set off bombs is quite literally a side issue. The central issue is what effect Islam's teachings have on the mean and the standard deviation. It's not the 0.01% who want to blow up women and children that are in need of explanation; it's the 50%+ who support punishing blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality, adultery, female disobedience, and on and on. So go ahead, explain how that's the Wests's fault.

The problem when discussing "muslims" with apologists is that the apologists tend to hold up nominally "muslim" or not in the slightest "muslim" as the typical "muslim". The sincere, pious followers of teh islam know what's going on.

edit: Or they hold up the nominal "muslims" they know or the solitary "devout muslim" they have come into contact with.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

The words of the Quran, Hadiths, and Imams have the power to all by themselves turn any pacifist into a violent terrorist.

The words of the Quran, Hadiths, and Imams have no influence over Muslims. It would make no difference if Mohammed had been a pacifist instead of a warlord.

I doubt anybody here would agree with either of what I wrote above, but they seem to be what people here are arguing against. You guys are still talking passed each other.

Power imbalance, western imperialism, etc has a lot to do with why we have muslim terrorists and groups like ISIS. Islam also has a lot to do with why we have that. To deny either is irrational. Can we not all agree on at least that much?