Dammnit, you are right! I have been scammed! Fake diploma awarded!

now if you want a REAL PhD, may I tell you about my courses in cryptozoology? For only 15,000 USD per credit, you can learn all about not finding big foot, the loch ness monster and the chupacabra. Plus, I teach a summer course on how to take out of focus pictures and videos.

Silly game mention ---> Silly game raves ---> Silly game jeers ---> Silly game debate ---> Gaming debate ---> Ethics debate ---> Ethics IN gaming debate ---> Religion debate ---> Tolerance debate ---> Religious tolerance debate ---> Hitler ---> Rationality ---> Circumcision ---> Health care ---> I think your medical degree is a fake.


Okay there a brief synapse of this thread.

I hope everyone here can appreciate how totally screwed up we all are. :P

i revel in my screwed up-ed-ness. *dances*

have you ever thought about a career in cryptozoology? *hands tinyE a pamphlet*

TW2?

And how exactly is that going to be accomplished by insulting their religion and making it easier to cast us as the enemy?

That reminds me of the mindset I had when I was 12, slow to recover from insults. Eventually I had to grow the fuck up and not let other people bother me. If we continue to treat Islam like the adolescent religion it truly is, afraid to hurt anyone's feelings, its followers will never learn to take criticism.

These questions pop up in the same way at the same time in every discussion about the topic.
I apologize in advance for the audacity of giving you yet more "homework" aka videos to watch but this is important stuff, and I was fortunate enough to find videos that address the issues and questions at hand in a way I can approve of so this saves me a lot of typing. This may appear as the lazy way out but it's the most efficient way as there's no point in spending so much energy and time when I can communicate the exact things I want to say with less effort:

Brigitte Gabriel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI74lOgfxk4

Christopher Hitchens: (I don't always agree with Hitchens on everything but I agree with everything he says in these videos)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZZ96SArpuc

I agree with you that all religions are equally unnecessary but they aren't all equal in terms of troublemaking at the same time. In present times, Islam (via overly motivated followers) is causing clearly more trouble than Christianity or Judaism or any other religion. It's simply bonkers trying to build a case around the claim that all religions are equally responsible for causing trouble when all evidence is pointing to the contrary. A couple weeks ago, one of our cherished forum members pulled up some FBI statistic that claims there was more Jewish terrorism in the US than Muslim terrorism in a specific year (when in doubt, blame the Jews...right?). And tried to insinuate that US invasions of Muslim countries are Christian terrorism that are due to "Dominian strands in the US government".
Not making this stuff up, this is the extent of apologetics one has to hear nowadays and it's always the same old.
When it's non-Muslims singing the everybody is equally bad song, it's usually just that they are too afraid to be called racist if they dared to point fingers at specific religions for specific problems. It's always ok to bash the Catholic Church for sexual child abuse but no we can't blame the Muslim world for honor killings and the sort, now that would be so racist. Only problem is, Islam isn't a race. And when Islam is implemented into the legal system via Sharia law, I would go a step further and say it doesn't even deserve to be called a religion but a political system instead. And as a political system, it can't claim to be protected from satire and complete ridicule. Even as a religion it deserves ridicule because it arrogantly puts dibs on being the final divine revelation ("we has the last word!") but no one would go out of their way to insult Islam if it didn't trample into the porcelain store like an elephant in a very political way, telling you what you can and can't say, who you can do the hanky panky with and so on. It's political Islam that should get and does get most of the ridicule. And since Muhammad is the main politician of this political party, guess what? He is not exempt from ridicule, either.

My best friend has known me for about 17 years but clearly he doesn't know me as well as you know me after a handful of forum interactions. In fact, you're so enlightened that you can even judge my friend despite not having talked to him, truly impressive.
The only question is when you will be so kind as to upgrade me from half nazi to full nazi. I feel I've been slacking it seems, as according to schedule you're supposed to afford me full nazi status in all its glory by now...

Nobody said Islam needs to be wiped off, personally I think it needs to be reformed from within rather than violently fought from the outside, unless it's acute like ISIS who are waaay too far gone and need to be taken out by force. There is no hope that extremists like ISIS will ever grow up, they are evolving backwards rather than forwards and there's no fixing that.
So I think reformists like Irshad Manji and other counter-narrative offering Muslims like Maajid Nawaz need to be given as much of a platform as possible and channels like Fox shouldn't have disgusting radicals like Anjem Choudary on anymore, one time is enough to see what they are about but that's it. Better focus on the constructive members of the community.
It's quite unfortunate that neither Irshad Manji nor Maajid Nawaz have much support from the establishment in the mainstream Muslim community, however the younger generations are changing and many are open towards these new views. That's the Obi wan Kenobi hope, the best one imho.

I quickly want to say my opinion too and after I say my stuff you're immediately only allowed to talk about flying blue elephants.

I invite you to watch the Cristopher Hitchens videos I posted above. Especially this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM

Let me rephrase that: There's enough bigotry coming from political Islam as it is, we don't need more under a faux religious shroud.
Also, while there exists unwarranted bigotry towards Muslims in general, there can generally be no such a thing as bigotry against political Islam aka Islamism, because bigotry is defined as irrational dislike and there's nothing irrational about disliking political Islam.

Yes, the politician's rally was a rather disgusting display of hypocrisy considering the poor state of press freedom in some of the countries of those who walked in that march. Those weren't the ideal champions for freedom of speech but the message is important nonetheless.
The Muhammad sex game is childish and it's crap as a game but surely you realize that this wasn't made for getting a few cheap childish lolz, it was made as a reaction and protest against the incessant bullying and complete arrogance and baseless superiority claims coming from political Islam that tells you what you are allowed to say and what not - or else all bets are off.
When Life of Brian came out in 1979, conservative Christians protested and Monty Python even got a couple death threats. But none of those threats of violence were ever carried out, and neither do you see Jews getting all riled up and murdering cartoonists who keep publishing deeply antisemitic cartoons in Arab newspapers.
Carrying out acts of violence as a response to religious satire, criticism and ridicule is in present days almost exclusively a Muslim phenomenon.

Witcher 2.

On a more major note, Nintendo was forced to change a few things in the N64 Zeldas, including the mirror shield, a track, and other such things because the Islamic Community back them had poking swords too.

Yes, that's one of the messed up things.
When he still was a mechant Muhammad said, be nice to each other but when he had power, he immediately became a warlord and changed his mind, calling to war, murder and oppression as much as possible and rephrasing his "be nice to people" stuff to "be nice to fellow muslims".
How can anyone worship such an opportunistic, megalomaniac and pedophiliac asshole? I seriously don't understand that, being indocrinated from birth on hearing how great he is just shouldn't suffice if there is any ability to think for yourself at all.

Exactly. There's lots of ridicule in every direction, but many muslims like the victims role, because it makes justifying terrible deeds easy (we da good guys, no matter what we do!).

I also second your opinion about religious and political islam.
If the ridicule would be directed towards islam as a religion, we woulh see more silly comics about kneeling on a rug with a built-in compass 5 times per day all the time, but instead we see ridicule of the one thing islamists try to forbid us to depict or talk bad about (in our own contries!) by punishment of death regardless of actual law in the country where it's made, because shariah law is meant to be higher than anything else.
The political aspect of Islam is the big problem anyway, because the book is a script for world domination indeed, there's even a tax mentioned (Jizya) to be paid by christians and jews in order to stay alive, while of course they have to accept having less rights. It is highly political indeed.

Nice! If you're going for the personal attacks (and yes, misrepresenting what I said to someone else to build a case that I'm a...what...desperate jew-hating liar? is a personal attack), why not go in fully?
I was neither attacking jews, nor christians, I was simply making the same argument Crewdroog is, that claims that Islam is somehow uniquely better suited as a motivation towards violence are not backed up by the facts. And it was not a "specific year", it was over the course of the time the data was collected (from the mid-80s to a couple years ago, whenever the report was written). And are you accusing the FBI of being anti-semitic, or was that another dig at me?

And yeah people definitely will look at you funny when you "Blame the muslim world for honour killings", because again, it is neither a problem exclusive to muslims, nor a problem with a greater muslim proportion. In fact, the highest percentage of honour killings occur in India.

As for Brigitte Gabriel's response, it is totally meaningless, considering that muslims (leaders, preachers, regular people, etc.) already speak out against these terrorist acts (every single time they happen) in hundreds and hundreds, not that it makes any difference to the bigots who like to paint with a big brush. The concept of "The Silent Majority" is an imagined one.

Yes. You have been a great teacher to all of us! ;-)

Sorry to hear that, I hope you got over it :)