Taboo wrote:Ibrahim wrote:
Ah, well every retreat starts with the first step. You started out by echoing Harris' claim that Islam doesn't produce civil societies, now you're saying they aren't "effective" civil societies. Looking forward to see how this idea is developed.
Red herring. Where did I ever "echo Harris' claim"?
This entire thread is a continuation of your defense of Harris from the New Atheism thread, minus the vitriolic attacks on Harris' critics, and minus Harris' overt calls for violence.
You were putting those words into my mouth. No one could argue that a society has no civil society whatsoever.
You tried, and once I swatted that down in the other tread you came up with this slightly modified version. So some modest progress.
That's because of the oppressive political structure and widespread tyranny and secret police, not because of their anti-blasphemy laws. The blasphemy laws just happen to come with the package, just to pile in a bit more ignorance and oppression,
Ah, so the "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Perhaps it didn't occur to you that civil society can take place ins spite of repressive measures or censorship? What produced the revolution in Tunisia? You're describing repressive political systems in an effort to attack a religion and culture, which is an especially Spengleroid form of confusion.
No, it's more of your willful confusion. There are 2 issues: effective civil societies, which Muslim states have less of than any other part of the world is one; the anti-blasphemy laws are another. While related, the two are distinct.
You conflated them, and have used one to try and "prove" the other across two threads now. If you think they are distinct and separate issues then treat them as such. I'll wait while you decide what your position actually is and then articulate it.
as if gay bashing and abusive mistreatment of women was not enough.
Leave fraternities and the American South out of this.
I am unaware that fraternities and the American south engage in widespread honor killings.
Husbands murder their wives, and males their female partners, with depressing regularity, and almost always over some insult real or imagined. It is only a prejudicial double-standard that ignores this issue in preference to "honor killings" among certain groups alone. While this is a universal problem, the frat/South reference was more about vociferous homophobia, which is as alive and well among certain segments of the population in the developed world as it is among the most underdeveloped "Muslim country."
I was unaware of the fact that in fraternities and the American south women are denied the right to work, access to birth-control and rape by their husbands is not punished by police.
Actually the South is working harder to restrict access to abortion and birth control than anywhere else in the developed world. Rape is hugely under-reported in the utopia that is contemporary Western culture, with the last number I read being one in five women experiencing sexual assault of some form, one in ten being raped. So again, you're talking about a universal plague and applying a self-aggrandizing double standard to other cultures to further a supremacist agenda.
I was unaware of a single spot in the American south where women are not allowed to drive.
That's nice. I've never been to any place women weren't allowed to drive. You must be referring to Saudi Arabia?
I am unaware of a single spot in the US south where women would be attacked on the street because some stranger thinks they're not dressed modestly enough.
Indeed, typically women are assaulted in their own homes, IIRC statistically it is most often by a family member.
I wonder what drives this willful blindness.
I've already told you. Your willful blindness is the product of a hypocritical and self-serving double-standard.
But don't just take my word for it. Here is some data from Gallup, EVS and WVS, a series of continent and world-wide surveys. The aggregate response to a large number of civic participation questions (all sorts of organizations: church, sports, educational, labor, political, green, professional, humanities, and others). Higher numbers indicate higher participation:
You will notice that two areas, highlighted in red, stand out. Ex Communist Islamic states and Core Muslim states. Yup. Case closed.
What are you saying this data means, exactly?
That compared to the rest of the world, denizens of the surveyed Muslim countries participate in many fewer civic organizations of all kinds, from sports to charity to politics. It's quite simple really.
So in your few non-participation in government programs indicates lack of a civil society? Clearly a case of ignorance of the layers of social participation along traditional lines that these people engage in instead. Hard to understand what superficial and stereotypical view of life in these countries you are clinging to, such that you would think that these numbers indicated the absence of any civil society.
You don't seem to be able to follow the argument. As I argue, most cultures for most of history have been inhospitable, indeed deadly, to all but a small select group. Yet nobody (well, no Western supremacist) would apply this same argument to prove that e.g. Classical Greece and Rome or Victorian England had "no civil society." Harris' (and thus your) entire argument is fundamentally based on a self-serving, historically ignorant double standard.
The fact that Spaniards were butchering Jews 500 years ago is deplorable, and we can both agree that they were savages. Same goes for Nazis. That doesn't excuse this sort of behavior now. It's like saying "Punching kids in the nose is ok, because people 3 seas away were doing it 500 years ago, while we weren't doing nearly as much back then". It's an incredibly stupid argument.
Rather, you are unable to follow or understand the argument based on your historical ignorance, so you are ranting on about "who's killing more Jews," which is actually beside the point. What I am pointing out is not the European propensity for atrocity, but the historical fact that non-Muslims were able to participate in the highest levels of government in Islamic states, something that was never true of European countries or their American offshoots, and is still not true today despite the vaunted secular culture. Non-Muslim minority groups in historical Islamic states were able to participate in the civil society to a level unprecedented in Western civilization. So try to understand this and put conquistadors aside for a moment. And if you say "well it's not now!" I'll point out that this only stopped being the case in the colonial era, and ask whether or not that might be related.
That explains your myopic and comical evaluation of religions and civilizations based on a tiny snapshot built out of public opinion polls. The historical fact that Islamic civilization was, for most of its history, the global standard in diverse civil societies, shreds Harris' argument and your feeble efforts to carry water for him. But hey, you live now. I can't expect you to learn 1400 years of history just so you can make more informed slurs about underdeveloped countries.
I don't give a rats ass that in a world where everybody acted like savages, the Muslims were vaguely less savage. We live in the 21st century, and significant numbers of Muslims (not ALL, of course) across a large cross-section of the Muslim world hold such views TODAY. The past is history. Being killed for being an atheist doesn't feel better put in some historical context. "I see you're about to behead me, and that's deplorable, but I have to take into account that you guys were better than Inquisition Spain, so I guess that makes it ok!"
Seriously? I think you're just trolling, having lost the argument long ago.
Don't blame me for your historical ignorance and inability to understand the relevance of history in understanding current events. Apparently you think being atheist is some dire threat to people's lives, when its a simple fact that more people are killed just for being Muslim (or indeed any religion) than for being atheist. Are the deaths of civilians in their thousands tolerated because the victims are atheist and nobody cares about the lives of atheists? No, clearly that is not the case. The recent trend of combining supremacism with victimhood will hopefully be a short-lived one.
The hilarious bit was that supermajorities claimed to be "for religious freedom" and at the same time, the same supermajorities were in favor of murdering apostates. Not much for consistency, are they?
Indeed, nor you.
I have been nothing but consistent.
You almost exclusively provide double-standards to further your agenda. I guess that's a
kind of consistency. Being consistently inconsistent.
You're the one making the bizarre argument that criticizing the current death-penalty of Atheists in several Muslim countries is "myopic" because Muslim countries were so very nice in the middle ages, while still carrying out the occasional purge and slaughter.
A complete misrepresentation of my position, which is that historically Islamic civil societies were the most pluralistic and diverse, and moreover that there is no ongoing slaughter of atheists taking place today, despite your crying about it, whereas Muslims continue to be killed en mass by either Western/Israeli armed forces, or their own oppressive governments. And you think that the most pressing concern is how some Egyptian peasant answered an opinion poll? Laughable.
