Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
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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Absolutely correct. It doesn't matter if the number of practicing Muslims who follow Wahhabism are 95% worldwide or .0001% - they still genuinely believe they're following Mohammad's ideals and doing what he would have wanted. Which in this case is conquest (Spain being a territory they wish to reclaim). They're a minority among minorities, but their actions are destructive enough that it creates a huge net effect in how people perceive Islam both culturally and idealogically everywhere else.
This isn't an issue of news coverage or not: the vast majority of the world's terrorism is being committed by people indoctrinated in Wahhabism or some variation of it. You also have the rapes and violence propagated by Syrian (or otherwise) "refugees" in Germany and Sweden. Those governments are not helping these people like they should, and it's adding fuel to the fire.
Religion in general is bull
shit, but it seems silly to equivocate the craziest fringes of right-wing Christianity with Wahhabism...because even the Westboro Baptist nutjobs aren't crazy enough to go mow down hundreds of people at an Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris of all places.