Religious flamewars are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't conduct them here.
In fact, your comment ("we need to shame islam", "toilet paper", etc.) is egregious enough to be a bannable offense. Please don't post any more like this.
With rhetoric like that and actions backed by such rhetoric you will make Saudi Arabia into a prime candidate for ISIS takeover after a power vacuum of ridding the region of Islam.
Muslims in general are mercurial. And not all people in the region have the same social attitudes. The whole point is to enable secuarlists while disabling orthodoxy. That's not done through such violent rhetoric.
America has not been following this policy of backing up the secularists and disabling the orthodoxy. Instead, it has used the orthodoxy for its own political/geopolitical games, and as a result empowered them in the whole region. It empowered the Saudis to essentially spew Islamist literature all over the world, at times coordinated with them to do so for instance in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
The West has further been giving refuge and a platform to the orthodoxy and basically leaving them alone to concoct plans to overthrow governments as is the case in Iran. Even now there are many Islamists sitting comfortably in America and Britain preaching hatred, religion, and orthodoxy and nothing is done to curtail this.
In fact the West totally does not know how to spread secular, Western values other than to bomb countries and help them achieve Capitalist objectives. Instead of using its covert apparatus to espouse good values, it instead uses it for other purposes to increase its power and its influence often at the cost of humanism and secular values.
Islam in south-east asia seems a lot friendlier that islam in Saudi Arabia. Hell, islam in Saudi's neighboring states seems a lot friendlier, too. It's not just islam that is the cause of Saudi's human rights abuses.
I'm a strong atheist and generally agree with your sentiment, but Saudi's transgressions are not purely religion-based, otherwise we'd see them as strongly in other islamic nations.
We do see the criminalization of blasphemy or apostasy in many of those countries, for example, so we still have a lot of gains to be made for human rights against harmful ideologies.
> We need to shame islam and take it kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Half of the quran needs to be declared to be toilet paper and nothing more, and then we can talk.
Wahhabism exists in the present, you know. And who's this "we"? Liberal Americans and/or Europeans? Who has the standing to dictate religious beliefs? Anyway, the problem is the US government. Or at least, changing its policies is the only workable strategy.
1) We is everyone, including perhaps most importantly, muslims.
2) Why do I even have to defend that islam should be criticized ? Name one single other ideology where you would ask that question if I asked you if it was okay to smear it. Of course islam should be critisized for being a medieval and stupid faith. So should every other one, of course, but these past few years islam clearly seems to need it significantly more than other faiths.
Somehow a superiority complex has gotten into this fucked-up ideology. That, above all else, needs to get destroyed. 80% of muslims worldwide should think the simple truth about basic subjects, like that sharia is a horrendously stupidly and cruel idea. That their prophet was a paedophile warlord that is a despicable monster NOT worthy of imitation. Things like that.
It is in fact exactly what the commenter said: “a specific religion”, “holding Islam to the standard of modernity”, rejecting half of the Quran as trash, etc. are blanket references to an entire major world religion.
I cannot say whether it was due to bigotry or gross ignorance but neither is helpful to anyone other than groups like ISIS or their fortunately less-successful Christian fundamentalist counterparts who are trying to spin this as a war between religions.
The comment said "Islam", but you said "Muslims". There's a difference in this case. I think the meta point behind that comment is that cultures, philosophies, and religions need to excise harmful ideologies from themselves for human rights to progress.
Some forms of Christianity need to remove their hatred of gays or other races.
Some forms of American culture need to value non-American life more highly.
Some forms of Islam need to discard their love of theocracy, male superiority, and jihad.
Though you've probably heard plenty of Muslim bashing and "Christians vs. Muslims" idiocy, that's far from what's going on here in this discussion. It needs to be possible for us to separate people and ideas in our minds, so we can elevate people while dismissing the harmful ideas that motivate harmful behavior.
That's all fine and dandy but none of that nuance is in the comment you're defending so I'm not sure why you're trying to retcon it in now.
That's what made it so strikingly offensive: it's trying to portray 1.6 billion people in many countries around the world as a uniform group with a single belief.
"The problem there is not the US government. The problem there is religion - a specific religion to be extact."
One might say that China's militant atheism is in many ways similar or even worse than Saudi Arabia's pervasive Islamism. Both have "religious" police. But China is even more brutal.
