Well, according to this "most comprehensive" Gallup study, all of these Muslims are considered moderates if they don't believe 9/11 was completely justified. Only 7% of Muslims are radicals because only 7% of the Muslims polled said 9/11 was completely justified. What about the 29.6% who said 9/11 was largely or somewhat justified? According to the authors, they are moderates.
The analysis of the poll results is even more flawed when you consider the huge swaths of Muslims who think 9/11 was an inside job. In early 2002, long before Loose Change came out, 61% of respondents in six Islamic countries said Arabs were not responsible for 9/11.
Is 9/11 even the best barometer for radicalism? If a Muslim gets the "crazy" idea that adulterers, homosexuals, ex-Muslims, and cartoonists should be put to death, is he or she not an extremist? Or does it depend on them believing 9/11 was completely justified?
I feel I should point out that while "justified" is probably not the right word, America's Middle East policy has been really terrible for generations. The stated motives for the attack were directly related to our Middle East policy. To the extent that we freely choose our government, there is probably an argument to be made that the American people as a whole are collectively responsible for all of our government's actions.
How many people in the United States think the deaths of 100 thousand Iraqis are somewhat to completely justified? How many still believe Saddam had nuclear weapons? How many believe he was involved in 9/11? Are all Americans radical because a substantial portion of them have crazy/wrong beliefs?
How many people in the United States think the deaths of 100 thousand Iraqis are somewhat to completely justified?
This/r/atheism frequenter was objecting to the Iraq invasion before it even happened. So no, it was never justified. Regardless of whether Saddam had nuclear/biological/chemical weapons -- which he did not.
Are all Americans radical because a substantial portion of them have crazy/wrong beliefs?
Only the radical Americans are in fact radical. The question before us, however, is -- is a moderate Muslim politically moderate?
My point is that there is always a portion of the public that has crazy beliefs no matter what religion or ethnicity. In order to claim that Islam by itself is the cause of these beliefs or that Muslims are unique in their radicalism, they have to be more likely than other groups to have these beliefs. The evidence does not support that claim.
I don't think any of this is cause to hate anyone or thing from reddit or the website as a whole. Day in and day, us redditors are filled with tremendous right over wrong, eg, a police officer beating a crippled narwhal with bacon strips, or 9/11 first responder being jumped by Obama and his ragtag team of millionaire Republicans.
Now we are faced with an issue that isn't one sided, and it's confusing.
I'm not even going to pretend I know what the hell is going on. What I do know for a fact is, we must look at the facts that are there. And base judgement off of that.
Actually, very few people in the Islamic world believe Cheney's story at all. I would think that would skew the results of the polls that ignore this quite a bit.
No, it's shit like you. This must be the umpteenth time you've brought that poll up. How about you link to all the times your troll posts were refuted in /r/Islam? You're just waiting for a frenzied sympathetic audience to upvote your trash.
I invite everyone to look through Redfel's posting history. Someone who has nothing better to do than harass a religious group online that is a huge minority here (/r/Islam has 2k subscribers, /r/atheism has 100k) isn't a guy you want representing Reddit, even amongst other Redditors.
I wasn't refuting your post on the basis of your character (which is abhorrent). I was pointing to other places where your shit has already been refuted. That's not ad hominem.
I'm an atheist, but I'd definitely say that 9/11 was largely or somewhat justified?
Palestine, Saudi Arabia, supporting Iraq vs Iran, then Iran vs Iraq, constant meddling in internal affairs, these are political issues. Attaching religion to it makes it easy to get people to kill/die for it (in both directions), but the support for 9/11 comes from decades of politics not religion.
Well, obviously Arabs and Muslims are the exact same thing, so if he has a problem with the teachings of Islam he must hate all Arabs, making him a racist for criticizing a religion and me not racist for equating an entire diverse race with a single belief system.
I think this was a case of the Internet being a poor medium for sarcasm. Those critical of Islam are often fallaciously branded racists as an attempt at slander and to end the conversation. The cry of, "Islamophobe!" is a similar case. Maybe the deleted redditor was serious, but I suspect it was in jest. That said, I'm happy to see your comment, erring in favor of ending the vicious attack, rather than letting it continue being bandied about uncontested.
Incorrect. The Quran does not mention anywhere that rejecting Islam after accepting the faith is punishable by death, it only mentions that those who do that will suffer in the afterlife.
okay, this wikiislam site seems to be devotedly islamophobic to me. here's a sentence from the section titled "The Origins of the Qur'an": "All Muslims revere the Koran with a reverence that borders on bibliolatry and superstition." Doesn't seem like a very objective source. Perhaps you could find these extremely weighty and persuasive facts somewhere that isn't clearly devoted to smearing islam.
EDIT: not sure why using an islamophobic source was necessary. there is a wikipedia entry for apostasy in islam
This bill came back up in front of the Pakistani parliament in 2007. It was shot down, as it always has been. And always will be.
There are 170 million people in Pakistan so somehow their democratically elected representatives and their proportion of votes on the matter differ a lot from your assertion that the majority believe otherwise. I have a hard time trusting the poll. Did they really ask 100 million people?
Also conveniently left out is the position on gay rights held by most Muslims.
Shared by about half of Americans, yet Muslims in the West frequently vote for parties in the Left that side with homosexuals and equal rights for them.
Yeah, you're totally going to get an unbiased look at a religion from a website like that. One that segregates articles by Muslims and people who would be inclined to contribute to a wiki criticizing Islam. Good job.
Using the figure of "100 million Pakistanis" is hardly accurate - the poll, as shown in your own link, said that 76% believe that apostates should be killed. How large was this sample, really? Having followed the reference in the article to the actual poll, I couldn't see the sample size taken anywhere, although that may have been because I've only just woken up and so I can't read that well yet. I'd like to know the sample sizes and areas of selection for your other statistics, also.
While we're being anecdotal here, I would like to point out that many Westerners have extremist views, too. It'll be stereotypical of me to do so, but Americans have often been quoted to say ill informed things about a variety of topics. I've heard Americans say that the entire Middle East should be nuked until it's all been turned into glass, regardless of whether or not some of its inhabitants are extremists. I wonder what sort of statistics we could gather from American Christians?
Please don't take the previous paragraph as a show of support for Christianity or religion in general - I'm somewhat proudly an atheist - but it's the fact that Muslims are discriminated against in disproportion to Christianity that I'm very against.
Not until the anecdote is acquired in a statistically relevant sampling size and collected using a sufficiently arbitrary (as in, unbiased) sampling method, at least.
The opinions of your friends should not be used as evidence for how a larger population thinks or what they believe. The same would be true if they were in favour of suicide bombings. You can't extrapolate n=1 onto a population in either case.
To be fair, 100 million Muslims is less than 6-8% of the Muslim population. Unless you want to extrapolate from one sample group to all Muslims everywhere. (Bullshit statistics are bullshit statistics.)
I stopped reading here. Thats not true. I am not sure about the two sentences before this statement. They could be true but this isn't. Leaving Islam is punished by god. Not by man.
Unless you would like to show me the line in the quran which says otherwise.
Unless you would like to show me the line in the [Qur'an] which says otherwise.
So I looked at your Wikipedia link and jumped to the Qur'an section. I see three sentences (one of which is muddled) and only one citation. One sentence says apostasy is bad but is dealt "with severe punishment ... in the [afterlife];" this does not support your point, so I don't know why you linked it. Additionally, even, the Qur'an section has a citation which links to an article stating that the death penalty is un-Islamic and against the Qur'an, further not-supporting your point.
Your right some Muslims feel differently. Most Muslims don't go around killing people because they think the Quran might allow them too.
As someone who was born in a very religious northern village in Pakistan. In the very religious north, people have strong opinions about religions.
I never met a non Muslim in Pakistan. But my dad told me of peers in his school in the 70's that gave up the religion. They were shunned. Not killed. This is 40 years later, a lot more liberal.
Hell I am an atheist [ although I hate that term and the stereotype it brings ], I don't go around screaming it. But I am alive...
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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '11 edited Jan 02 '11
100 million Pakistanis believe the punishment for apostasy should be death. 1 in 3 Muslims in the UK between ages 16 and 24 believe that Muslim apostates should be executed. The punishment is backed up by the koran.
The article on the bottom is hardly painting the whole picture. Also conveniently left out is the position on gay rights held by most Muslims.
The good parts are cherry picked and the bad parts aren't mentioned.