[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by longsuffering

That a boy. If it makes you feel better keep a closed mind and refuse to consider real world experiences of people who live amongst Muslims.

Anecdotal experiences are not that helpful, although I have no doubt that in the places you lived you found that Muslims almost exclusively were tolerant, decent people who had no desire to inflict suffering on other people. That's the vast majority of Muslims in the world, who either don't practice certain doctrines prescribed by the faith or interpret the harsher ones in such a way as to make them more benign, or just don't want to impose them on anyone.

That being said, some of the poll responses you'll get are alarming, like 72% of Indonesian Muslims supporting Sharia as the law of the land. The vast majority of Muslims (or at least a majority, in some places) reject violence in support of the faith, but even the minority is a lot of people, unfortunately:

Spoiler!

We're just left hoping that those minority of Muslims who say violence is sometimes or often justified aren't being truthful when they respond to those polls and are professing a more militant ideology than they actually hold.

I'm not trying to refute anything that you're saying about ISIS. What I find intolerable is that are too quick to paint all of Islam with the same brush.

Islam is largely contained in a series of writings that say what they say. "Paint with the same brush" is a turn of phrase that generally applies to people. But no one is painting all Muslims with the same brush. There's almost zero problem among North American Muslims (Adam Gadahn notwithstanding), for example. There's a difference, though, between talking about the people and talking about what's in the texts. And while there's a lot of arguably good moral teaching in there, there's also some bad ideas that people are acting on. Not surprising from a book from over a millennia ago, in the context a mediaval warlord, which is what Muhammad was.

Have you read the Old Testament? Some pretty inflammatory prose there. Should all Christians be judged for their faith as a result?

Absolutely not. The Old Testament is much worse than the Qur'an, in many ways, and again contains many bad ideas that aren't surprising given that it was written in a tribal, bronze age agrarian society. However, almost no one actually puts those bad ideas into practice anymore, and that's the full and final answer to why the bad ideas in Islam present a more pressing problem at this moment in history.

People used to put those ideas into practice, of course. And when people were burning women at the stake for purportedly being witches, they weren't doing it primarily because of geopolitics or historical grievances. They were doing it largely because of Exodus 22:18.

Your dogmatic position makes me wonder whether you're one of the anti-Muslim, anti-refugee proponents who increasingly confront Canadian Muslims going about their daily lives.

And this practice is essentially the new McCarthyism. "I hear what you're saying, and you're trying to sound rational but it all sounds like commie talk to me". Refusing to acknowledge that people are saying what they're saying, because what they're secretly doing is harbouring some sort of bigotry, is not engaging in any sort of rational thought process or dealing honestly with the issues.

Originally Posted by Iggy City

Million dollar question: If Christianity was in the middle east and Islam in the west, would we still be in the same situation as today? I'd argue it'd be the exact same. Radicalism needs an ideology to cling to and it doesn't matter which holy book it comes from.

I don't agree at all - I think, perhaps, you would still have some sort of theocratic society, but I think you'd see different sorts of bad ideas. Some of them might not be different in effect; you might still see people (e.g. gays) being executed, but more likely stoned than thrown from great heights or beheaded. I'm also not sure if you'd see the same sorts of warfare - a medieval form of Christianity is nonetheless largely about conversion, even in its worst, most holy-war-esque incarnations. It's not so much about creating a Jesus-worshipping caliphate - recall that if ISIS were to succeed in creating some sort of global Islamist regime, Christians and Jews would likely be allowed to live there under a dhimmitude system. So I suspect it would still be bad news, just maybe a different brand of bad news.

Of course, what I really disagree with is that this is the million dollar question. What might happen in a different universe is academic; what's actually happening is the important thing, obviously.