DEBATE What are your thoughts on Celebrities Defending Islam?

Both sides have extreme viewpoints. There's the people who say that Islam is peace and love and flowers, and there's people who call it a cancer on the ass of Western civilization. Neither of those viewpoints is accurate. Islam needs a renaissance like Christianity had. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people, of course terrorists only make up a tiny minority, but terrorism isn't the only issue, and it doesn't just miraculously appear out of nowhere.

If we could have these conversations without either assuming the other side has some ulterior motive, we'd be better off.

 

Truthfully? Far too many folk.

 

the christian renaissance was due to muslims bringing them developments and technology.

 

no, it was largely based on modern humanism (in turn based on old greek humanism) which is utterly foreign to Islam infact it is heracy in Islam. What you are talking are mostly greek writings which the Islamic empire preserved while they were making their way into europe slaughtering countless. These european writings were rediscovered by europeans after the muslim opressers were driven out of europe. Infact some of these came to italy with greek refugees fleeing from the muslims (Ottomans) after they sacked Constantinople (Istanbul). Muslims never brought any significant "development" or "technology" to europeans.

 

As an atheist I think defending any mythology is pointless. You don't need to be holy to be moral. There's only one god, and that's Nature. And guess what? Nature doesn't give a fuck about your homespun deity, and the laws of nature are absolute. They're not some ridiculous bullshit someone invented to keep the masses in line. Religion and politics are flip sides of the same coin. It's one thing to have to deal with your government, but why anyone would choose (yes, you have a choice, if only in your mind) to burden themselves with further regulation at the hands of a make believe oppressor is beyond me. Religion is a fucking joke, and I don't respect it.

 

Middle East ... Morocco?

 

No, we save that for Christian radicals.

 

nonsense. learn your history.....europe was undeveloped before the moors came......most of europe was unclean and illiterate. 

 

who created nature?

 

No, it was most certainly not that.

 

What makes you think it was created? The very nature of Nature is that it continuously evolves over time. What we see today didn't just suddenly come into existence at some point. Even creation itself is a process. Women don't suddenly become pregnant and give birth the next day. Everything in it's own time.

 

Apparently almost 63M listened to one last November.

 

Nobody. Or somebody. Who knows? Certainly not you.

 

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I did, and I was afraid- very afraid.

 

If you re-read, I don't think samspartan implied that Morocco was part of the Middle East, merely that movies set in the Middle East are sometimes filmed there. This is no different to some Hollywood movies being filmed in Australia, despite it obviously being thousands of miles away from their supposed location in the US (The Great Gatsby) or Japan (The Wolverine).

Anyway, the boring thing about this kind of thread is the insults to the other side. I feel the term SJW is particularly idiotic because who doesn't believe in social justice? Conservative people believe just as much in social justice (commonly, e.g. strong punishment for crime, merit-based selection etc.) as anyone else, but have differing experiences/priorities that lead them to favour some policies over others.

Everyone agrees they wants things to be fair and just, almost all the arguments are simply over what constitutes fair and just - in budget allocations, in tax breaks, immigration, employer/employee relations, sentencing for crime and so on. And it becomes extra complicated because all of these things are linked and every simple policy will eventually encounter cases where the simple policy produces an outcome that seems unjust. People complain, so exceptions are made. And now you have complex policies, which people complain about because they want things to be simple and those exceptions seem undeserved to them, so the circle continues.

 

the big bang......nature didn't always exist.

 

Did I say I did?

 

actually it was.......You have no evidence to counter that point...Learn history my friend......do you know the moors?

 

You're assuming that the Big Bang was a singular event and that nothing came before it. There's no evidence of that, just like there's no evidence of gods.

 

You provide no evidence to support your claim. Feel free to do so. The Moors were not responsible for the European Renaissance. And Islam itself played literally no role. The best that can be said about Islam during the Dark Ages is that, for a time, it was not hostile toward scientific inquiry. The actual ideas, and ideals, behind the Renaissance were not Islamic, but owed to the Ancient Greeks, a time and culture not tainted by monotheistic dogma.