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Originally Posted by nik-
Illuminating. As I said previously, playing the bigot card to derail is "good points" if you agree with the overall sentiment. I wish I could get back that time I took responding to your posts earlier. It was obviously wasted.
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That is the opposite of what I meant. (I think if you were less infuriated with Crumpy it would be obvious to you too).
What I meant was that the emotionally charged accusations of bigotry distracted from the good points.
Such as
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are the western nations truly 100% secular? Are leaders not elected on their religious suitability
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Which I think is relevant in understanding that many things we balk at when the name of religion is Islam and the country is somewhere in Midde-East is considered perfectly normal when the name of the religion is Christianity and the place is a western country. These gut reactions badly distort the conversations.
It's especially weird since I think many in this discussion seem to be more or less atheistic or agnostic, or at least far to the secular side on their religions. People talk about the things that are going on in the Middle East as if religious nutcases never try to set up their own kingdoms of heaven in the west, as if we didn't have Christians literally preaching death to gay people without repercussions, as if we never have our own versions of honour killings, and as if there are no significant political movements in the west who get some of their most central goals straight from religious writings.
And just in general I agree with his view that people are giving way too much significance on Islam here, and are waayy too eager to dismiss the significance of sociopolitical and historical backgrounds. When really I think absolutely every expert on any even remotely connected field would agree that religion is in all this at best one contributing factor among many.
It seems to me that people have a desire for simple answers, and the sociopolitical and historical reasons are just never going to give those, especially since it would take an enormous amount of learning to even get started.
Thus it's just much easier to talk about things that are close and understandable, even if they're only extremely tangentially related. Such as the infighting of a few western liberals.