I no longer understand what either of you are saying.What exactly are the main points you both are making? Is it that the other person is a cockmuncher.
asciifaceofbob, how do you feel about the statement 'Westboro Baptist Church seriously needs to grow up', or is that not equivalent since Islam as a whole is much larger than a tiny American sect consisting of one family, but then would you deny that Islam has a distinctive culture which tends to respect those who attack gays, women, science and jews more than many another culture does?
Perhaps that should be 'a distinctive culture within it' given that Islam is very big and somewhat varied and often clashing with itself. Then again the misogynistic, gay-punishing aspect of it does appear to be the mainstream, at least among authority figures in many Islamic countries (probably there are one or two completely benign countries with prevalent Islamic-styled religion, in Africa maybe). Then again trying to define what the mainstream of anything is is, well, it's pretty subjective, although you can be sure there is one.
And then of course when I say 'benign countries' I really mean 'benign authorities', and the influential people in a country are one thing and the general masses are another, see: Iran. Having said that, they are all aspects of the same culture, although it's hard to say where the culture ends or even which culture it is (it could be the culture of the country, or the religion). If a culture can be described, it can be criticised, regardless of the fact that people are masters of their own destiny and not bound to follow whatever we imagine their culture tells them to think. The part where any individual person is ascribed to the culture, in the sense of being culpable for all the bad ideas we see in it, is unfair. Despite this, it's fair play to identify and criticise the culture as a set of ideas.
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Thu 13 Aug 2009, 23:54,
archived)
asciifaceofbob, how do you feel about the statement 'Westboro Baptist Church seriously needs to grow up', or is that not equivalent since Islam as a whole is much larger than a tiny American sect consisting of one family, but then would you deny that Islam has a distinctive culture which tends to respect those who attack gays, women, science and jews more than many another culture does?
Perhaps that should be 'a distinctive culture within it' given that Islam is very big and somewhat varied and often clashing with itself. Then again the misogynistic, gay-punishing aspect of it does appear to be the mainstream, at least among authority figures in many Islamic countries (probably there are one or two completely benign countries with prevalent Islamic-styled religion, in Africa maybe). Then again trying to define what the mainstream of anything is is, well, it's pretty subjective, although you can be sure there is one.
And then of course when I say 'benign countries' I really mean 'benign authorities', and the influential people in a country are one thing and the general masses are another, see: Iran. Having said that, they are all aspects of the same culture, although it's hard to say where the culture ends or even which culture it is (it could be the culture of the country, or the religion). If a culture can be described, it can be criticised, regardless of the fact that people are masters of their own destiny and not bound to follow whatever we imagine their culture tells them to think. The part where any individual person is ascribed to the culture, in the sense of being culpable for all the bad ideas we see in it, is unfair. Despite this, it's fair play to identify and criticise the culture as a set of ideas.