There is no doubt that over history and especially today the religion of Islam has been a cancer on humanity. Let’s take a look at some facts:
- The first crusade was in 1095, by when Islam, by violent conquest, had conquered two thirds of Christian territory.
- For 800 years the Muslim conquerors committed vast genocide on the Hindus and Sikhs of the Indian subcontinent. This was greater than the European Jewish holocaust.
- Islam treats women abominably, as mere chattels.
- Many current Islamic countries are engaged in civil war. Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, North West Pakistan and arguably even Turkey.
- Many current Islamic countries are brutally oppressive of their own population. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran are possibly the worst.
- Nearly all terrorism in the World is committed by Muslims and sponsored by Muslim states. Atrocities against the West are now almost a weekly occurrence.
- Islam is massively intolerant of all other religions. It seeks to wipe them all out. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia.
- Muslim migrants have brought a huge crime wave to Europe. Theft, violence and sex crimes on an epidemic scale. Your police, politicians and press have sought to suppress the knowledge of this.
- Barbaric social practices are commonplace within Islam. Beheadings, amputations, stonings, the Burqa, honour crimes, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, paedophilia.
There is a lot to fix there. Two main problems are that Islam never had the equivalent of the Christian Reformation, so primitive beliefs dominate their societies. The second problem is that the Saudi government spend billions promoting the evil extremist cult of Wahhabism across the world, making Islam far more violent and repressive.
However there are a small number of Muslims who are intelligent and educated and who can both clearly see the glaring faults with their religion and are willing to talk about them and do something about it. Some of these have just formed a new movement, the Muslim Reform Movement:
As you can see they seek to make Islam into a God bothering superstition, just like any other religion. They want to get rid of the many evils. To treat women equally, to obey civil law, to respect other religions and cultures, to desist from barbaric practices. This is a huge ask, but if they can carry it off the benefits to the world would be immense.
Click here to open the Muslim Reform Movement website.
Click here to see the Muslim Reform Movement on Facebook.
And on Twitter they are @TheMuslimReform.
What they need now is government help. Western governments, out of self interest, need to fund them and to adopt their Declaration in all their domestic and foreign policies. The world would be a vastly better place if Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan behaved like this. And their citizens would lead supremely better lives.
But knowing the torpidity, stupidity and vested interests of our politicians this is hardly likely. Why bother trying to solve many of the world’s greatest problems?
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Dear Bruce.
There are so many things wrong with this post. First I find the title sickening. You are generalising a religion that has over 1.6 Billion followers.
And as for Islam being a violent religion, once again you are using an example from a small part of the Muslim population from a millennium ago during the Crusade. How is that even a valid example for today, hundreds of generations later?
As for women’s rights, you are once again generalising. Of course there are regimes that have atrocious treatment of women – everyone one knows who they are. What you are forgetting is that Islam is not only practiced in Saudi Arabia and Iran. The largest Muslim population, Indonesia, has a better history with the treatment of women.
Your point about Muslim countries being in a civil war. So? How do those few countries mean that the whole Muslim population is, as you say, “cancerous”. Britain had a civil war. So did America. So did France. Is Christianity cancerous too then? I hope you now see how ridiculous this point is. Especially when you consider a lot of the instability in the Middle East is the blowback from our naive western intervention.
I do sympathise with your point about a lot of terrorism allegedly being funded by countries like Saudi Arabia. Where you fail to convince me is that you don’t seem to mention our British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, who inturn send these weapons to countries on our very own Foreign Office blacklist.
Overall, whilst I don’t agree with a lot of your posts, they still have some drop of justification. This post I found was verging on fear-inciting fascism through generalisation.
-CS
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The English civil war was not over religion, nor was the American. I don’t recall a French civil war as such perhaps you are thinking the revolution which had its share of civil unrest which did I guess have a small religious component (albeit church of Rome rather than the whope religion. Either way you then go on to accuse poor Bruce of being a fascist. Now this is not only wrong but suggests that maybe you are a bit lost on what it means. Now Bruce is clearly a person leaning to the right but has clearly ‘liberal’ ( as in its old fashioned meaning) leanings. This would be incompatible with fascism which requires an authoritarian bent (like your typical muslim country for example). What you really meant to say that was as an unbeliever, Bruce (and I guess myself), will leet our doom In the lake of fire as that famous liberal text , the Koran describes. Anyway, must go and cut my hand off for blasphemy and marry a 6 year old.
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CS
Islam surely is an intellectual cancer. No good ideas can come from it. As Sam Harris put it, Islam is the mother-load of bad ideas.
What their scriptures enjoin is abominable. Its overall message is hate.
Their prophet was a trader then a warlord, at best.
Rushie on Muslim culture: “Christianity has as its opposite poles sin and redemption. There’s no original sin in Islam. There’s no idea of original sin. So, the question of original sin doesn’t exist. What exists instead at the opposite poles are honor and shame. The trouble with honor culture, is that if you look at the way in which it is applied, inside societies which hold to those values, it’s first of all been used tremendously to oppress women. Oddly, honor is believed to reside in the male, but shame is brought about by the behavior of the female. And so in order to prevent the man from being shamed by the behavior of the woman, you have to stop the woman from doing more or less anything. Some of this is ludicrous and comical. I remember at the early days of the Iranian Revolution, when a number of bizarre issues like this were being debated by the Ayatollah. One of the questions, and this is not a joke, that was asked was that if a woman is wearing head to toe chador but she’s wearing Western clothes underneath, a skirt underneath, is that okay or not okay, given that she’s completely covered, and all you can see are her eyes? And it was decreed that it was not okay. The reason it was not okay was that the friction of her thighs against each other inside the skirt would generate sexual heat. And this heat would be transmitted through her eyes to men who observed her and might inflame them in various ways and that of course was not acceptable. The best of these arguments, actually, has to do with the limits of incest. They were asked to determine what is okay and not okay, can you marry your first cousin, etc. etc. The question arose of the aunt by marriage, was that an incestuous relation if you were to have relations with your aunt by marriage. It might be improper, upsetting to your uncle. But was it actually incestuous? They decided that it was. But there was an exception. The exception was that if you were unable to control the entry into your bed of the aunt by marriage. What then followed was not your fault. For example, they said, if the aunt by marriage lived in the bedroom upstairs, and the floor collapsed, and the aunt by marriage landed in your bed, well, no man could be expected to restrain himself. I’m telling these as funny stories, but you can see the problem of honor culture leads to these appalling aberrations. And at its worse of course, it leads to the phenomenon of honor killings, which sadly, are not less prevalent than they used to be.”
Rushdie on the Koran. “First of all the Quran, as you know, is less narrative than the Old and New Testaments, it is much, much less narrative. I would say only about 1/3 of the Quran tells stories. A lot of the Quran is lawgiving and a lot of the Quran is fulminations against the unbeliever. There are three major sections of writing in the Quran. One is, ‘if you’re not a believer, you will die and go to hell.’ The other is, this is how you should live, the law, and the third is narrative. The narrative sections are highly derivative, not only from the Old and New Testaments, but actually from the versions of Bible stories that were told in Arabia at the time by Nestorian Christians. The cult of Nestorian Christianity was only in the Arabian Peninsula and one of the things that Nestorian Christians did was they ran a lot of the oases, they were like the innkeepers. And of course the prophet Mohammed, before he was a prophet, was a very successful merchant. He was trading on all the caravan routes and the first places he would have heard Bible stories would have been at the oases in Nestorian versions. And the versions in the Quran are most are less identical to the Nestorian Christian versions. So, for example, the story of Jesus in the chapter of the Quran which is called Maryam, Mary, is where the story of Jesus Christ is in the Quran. Jesus Christ is born in an oasis under a palm tree and that is exactly the Nestorian variation of the Christian story that was in use at the time. So, of course, if you believe that the Quran is the uncreated word of God, then what I’m saying is blasphemy. If you believe that it’s an historical document, and you can see the way in which the experience of the Prophet influenced the telling of the tale, then this stuff makes complete sense. That’s the narrative aspect of the Quran. It either recapitulates what we know from the Old Testament or it offers local variations, which predate, preexist the Quran. For me, the thing that is really interesting about Islam is that it is the only great religion born inside recorded history. This is one where we know who the Prophet was, where he lived, what his economic situations were, what his family was, who his wife was, what he did for a living, we know a great deal about his character, we know a lot about the social and economic situations over Arabia at the time and we can see how all of that is relevant to the ideas expressed in the Quran. But that historical approach, of looking at the Quran as an event inside history, is prohibited by Islamic orthodoxy because if this is the word of God, then presumably God is not affected by the social and economic conditions in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. It can be intelligently studied, but it very often is not intelligibly studied because of these anathemas.
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The point that seems to me not often mentioned, is that for a rational logical mind and maybe only have read just a few pages of koran, hadiths or other claimed passages to have come from a god of some sort, would have to conclude that anyone believing some sort of devine diety had any thing to do with any of it but only a demented devious mind or minds for their own reasons that today we can only speculate on what they hoped to achieve. So to me that can only mean every muslim is illogical and irrational or by fear, claim to believe in all the so so obvious BS. Henry Ford was quoted saying,”The hardest thing for a man to do is think and that is why so few engage in it’ or said something very simular and so seems to hold true for all muslims that claim they seek the truth. Any one who thinks islam in any form is a good idea has to be as insane as all muslims apparenly are.