Except that tennis shoes do not have dogma, either scriptural or cultural, that guides the actions of their wearers. I'm honestly not sure how to proceed from here because we're just talking about really basic ****. The shoes you wear do not affect how you see the world. The god you worship can and often does. No pair of Nikes has ever inspired or even been used as a spurious justification for an atrocity. Religion and Islam have. I think you've oversimplified your argument to the point that you don't even have one.
I'm not even arguing that Islam is this great evil compared to other ideologies and religions, I simply think it's dumb to dismiss it as irrelevant as so many people try to do. It's an incredibly powerful force in the lives of millions of people, many of whom use it as a pretext for violence, and whether the specific words of the Quran have caused this violence is in fact irrelevant, because these people have still derived meaning from the texts of Islam that has at the very least justified their actions in their own minds.
Whatever the specifics of the relationship between Islam and Islamic terrorists, to pretend that there is no problem in modern Islam in any way is retarded.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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