341–350 of 489 posts
Speaking on Today, [Omer el-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain] said causing offence “just for the purpose of offending” was not freedom of speech. Distancing yourself from the extremists [FAIL]
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I think no religion preaches violence, including Islam. Its the followers that have their own interpretations.. Do we relate the acts of Hitler to Christianity?
The only non-violent religions I know of are Jainism and Theravāda Buddhism. The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain passages encouraging their followers to torture, kill, and otherwise harm non-believers. Mainstream adherents followed these directives for millennia. It's taken centuries of conflict with enlightenment values to relegate such views to extremists. After September 11th, I read the…
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Your proposition makes no sense, simple warning someone would offend them that way. I relate to the OP that trigger warnings are an insult to my intelligence. If such a thing offends me, I should be able to judge it by myself or stop reading. The title is explicit enough to assume the "triggering" content is present.
Trite response: if trigger warnings offend you, you can choose to stop reading when you encounter them. Or just skip them, they take up one line in any given article. Problem solved! Longer response: I accept that you, and others like you, don't like trigger warnings. What concrete action would you like me to take in response to this? If the answer is "stop posting this thing that I don't like", well... sorry, but I'…
You think it does, but you couldn't be further from the truth. The very concept of trigger warnings are costly: Anytime you want to voice an opinion, you're forced to enumerate all the possible ways every reader might be offended or triggered or upset by what you're saying. It's an unscalable solipsistic self-centered notion that implies people are not in control of their own feelings and emotions and how things affect them (I say this as someone who has dealt with mild PTSD). Trigger warnings on banal content trivialize the whole thing, and encourage people not to help themselves.
Getting triggered sucks and is painful and throws everything off balance and is just a horrible thing to experience. But only a fool feels those things and blames the stimulus that brought up the associations. The last time I felt those feelings, I realized that I needed to get help or I was always going to be a broken, unhappy, scared person.
The problem as I see it comes from the fact that a bunch of teenagers on tumblr co-opted trigger warnings from legitimate uses (like on PTSD and abuse forums) and started applying them to idiotic things like fat shaming and otherkin.
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I don't think one Christian terrorist is enough to say that Western Christianity "certainly" is violent. I wouldn't even say that about Islam even though I think Islam has some problems with violence that Western Christianity doesn't have.
I'm not saying western Christianity in general is violent! Certainly Breivik is a lone extremist with absolutely no support by any mainstream church. But it doesn't change the fact that he was a christian and what he considered christian values (in his own eccentric interpretation) is part of what he believed he fought for. That makes him a christian terrorist, unless you apply some kind of "no true scotscman" filter…
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Religion might be better analogised to firmware - installed early in the lifecycle by the manufacturers, difficult to replace; most end users would not do so or even consider doing so. If we look at someone who is born into a religion, lives their life holding those religious beliefs, and dies as a member of that same religion - is it valid to assume that they could have separated themselves from their beliefs? Just…
> If we look at someone who is born into a religion, lives their life holding those religious beliefs, and dies as a member of that same religion - is it valid to assume that they could have separated themselves from their beliefs? Ofcourse that's fully possible. My parents was Christian. They raised me a Christian. It wasn't until my late teens, when I got a job that I was exposed to a critical thinking crowd. They…
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> I find such warnings an insult to my intelligence and a trivialization of people's personal responsibility How so? If an article says "trigger warning: (rape/Mohammed/spiders/flashing lights)", then people who don't want to be exposed to those things (e.g. due to PTSD, religion, phobias, epilepsy - or simply because it upsets them and they don't particularly want to be upset right now) can choose not to read it. Ho…
> If there's a largish number of people for whom ... make life less stressful... This kind of thinking, that society should accommodate a populations likes and dislikes, is why we get groups that want to forbid Mohammad cartoons and others in the same country that want to forbid religious clothes like Burqa. No matter the combination, forbid one, forbid both or neither, you will always end up with one or both groups…
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I don't know the answer to your specific question, but where is Christianity today COMPARED to 1500? Where is Islam today COMPARED to 1500? That is the real question in my mind, at least.
The answer to that question is simple: Christianity experienced enlightenment and Islam did not. So they're effectively to be compared with pre-enlightenment Christianity and then the differences are much smaller. The world does not move in lockstep. Sooner or later Islam will also experience its enlightenment (hopefully sooner) and then we will see the end of this nonsense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enligh…
"Christianity experienced enlightenment and Islam did not"?
Surely you're not so ignorant as to dismiss the thousand years where the Islamic world was the abode of knowledge, science and civilization while Europe was in the dark ages.
Yes, shit sucks for them now. But to say they never experienced enlightenment (btw, the effects of the Islamic world on the "enlightenment" is well known). Part of the problem is that we're not over our colonial instincts. Just look down on the other cultures, we're obviously the best. Our country, our people, our skin color, right?
I've read about outwardly atheist and vocal scientists and philosophers from the 1100's in the Islamic world. And he was pretty revered (although today they wouldn't be able to walk down the streets of most Muslim countries with their head intact).
Many of our principles are borrowed from Islamic civilization that preceded us. It's the equivalent of dismissing Egyptians and saying their problem is that they never achieved civilization like us.
I still can't express how shocked I am at the shallowness of your comment. I really hope it is because you're upset.
EDIT: btilly was kind enough to point out where I misinterpreted what jacquesm was stating. I took his comment as a slight, whereas it was far better thought out observation.
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Why? To make you feel smart or better than someone else? If there is an idea you think is bad and you want the other person to realise it is bad mocking it is a stupid way to go about that. Charlie Hebdo took ideas it thought were bad and didn't simply mock them but used satire and cartoons to explain why they were bad or ridiculous in a humorous way.
I agree with your sentiment that mocking should have its limits, but I subscribe to the view that "if you cross the limits of good taste, you're just being an asshole", and definitely not to the idea of shooting such people instead. People should have right to express their opinions safely, even when those opinions aren't in good taste.
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> I find such warnings an insult to my intelligence and a trivialization of people's personal responsibility How so? If an article says "trigger warning: (rape/Mohammed/spiders/flashing lights)", then people who don't want to be exposed to those things (e.g. due to PTSD, religion, phobias, epilepsy - or simply because it upsets them and they don't particularly want to be upset right now) can choose not to read it. Ho…
> If there's a largish number of people for whom ... make life less stressful... This kind of thinking, that society should accommodate a populations likes and dislikes, is why we get groups that want to forbid Mohammad cartoons and others in the same country that want to forbid religious clothes like Burqa. No matter the combination, forbid one, forbid both or neither, you will always end up with one or both groups…
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Exactly this. The folks in places such as the White House are very quick to condemn some silly anti-Islam YouTube video, yet when the Palestinians make suicide bomber anti-Jew Seasame Street clones, the White House says nothing about the potential for such productions to be "irresponsible." It's like Muslims are little retarded kids and we aren't allowed to make fun of because the power to control themselves is not e…
>However, conditions of extreme unemployment... Islam isn't the cause of terrorism I think underestimates the influence of the founders. Jesus mostly preached to turn the other cheek and didn't kill anyone. Here is a list of people killed by Muhammed http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Suppor... It goes on a bit and the sources vary in their authority but overall impression is pretty pro violence. M…
Any muslim who kills a satirist who mocked islam has pretty good grounds to be saying that their actions are in line with what Mohammed would have done!