pearnon: Since Godwin has already been invoked, more than half of 1940s Germany would indicate that they weren't in favor of concentration camps or blitzkrieging the rest of the world, and we all know where that led. As a very smart lady called Brigitte Gabriel once said,
the peaceful majority is irrelevant (
http://bit.ly/1ZdWfo8 ). Especially when a radical minority manages to assert itself or use the majority as cover or leverage.
What do you aim to say with that? You, not the public / speaker / author / right leaning (that's putting it gently)
Brigitte Gabriel quoted out of context
also Bosnia (though Saudia Arabia heavily sponsors a more radical version of Islam there lately)
pearnon: Heh. Hedging your bets and exempting Bosnia from agency in one sentence. Nice.
No, not hedging my bets just understanding that these things are more complex than a black and white morality and absolutist world view, and indicating that stable countries can turn. Anywhere on this globe. That was a massive part of my post - see allusion to Iran / Afghanistan / Iraq / Egypt, and possibly soon Turkey who all were quite secular countries once. Just as Germany was in the grips of a violent Ideology for a time, so other places can - and have in the past switched from one to the other and back. History is complex and power changes and radical ideologies don't arise to power out of nowhere. They are not a force of nature.
ISIS precisely aims at that as a strategy, in the West, too. Radicalise people, and hope for a reaction from society so it drives more recruits to them. It's a published strategy even - publicly available. And one hard to defend against.
In the case of Bosnia Saudi Arabia, as in so many other cases, is a major destabilising influence. One that's despite all the War on Terror posturing not touched whatsoever by Western politicians. And by stating that I am not, either, abolish people in the region from their responsibility. Just as we can't simply abide whatever historic and current political and economical influence our countries enact in those regions.
Also note just as there's a quite large variety of Christian sub-divisions, so is the case with Muslims. Some of those Christian sub-divisions are far from progressive
pearnon: You say "progressive" like it's the gold standard to evaluate religions and their impact on societies. That's a bit of a tone-deaf case you're making, when the main issue is one religion whose adherents are slaughtering each other as they have been doing for centuries, and now are slaughtering Westerners as well. In this day and age. Time and again.
Please read things in context. My response was to someone who'd quite definitely asked all Muslims to display a single unified progressive front as Muslim communities expecting them to speak as a single voice. Or how else would you read the statement that only when there's women priests in Muslim faith - widespread - that he'd consider them making ... progress. Do you have a better word for describing that than progressive values? So I replied with examples that already illustrate that certain parts of Islam have progressive branches. And that the Christian church he held up as a more progressive religion isn't equally progressive to the very high standard on that scale of the Finish variety either. I am sure people in Finland can get abortions easily. And yet no-one takes the Irish Catholicism position as a representative of the whole faith.
Chiefly because of the type of moral relativism and virtue-signalling equivalences you're espousing.
Please be precise in what you criticise. These are so over used and unspecific words that I can't debate them.What precisely do you identify as
moral relativism and "virtue-signalling" (which is actually, still, not a word with any clear definition, whatsoever) in my posts?
