Richard Dawkins slams Islam as ‘most evil religion'

[seymourflops]

I hear its flooded with feces and urine, people trying to leave in droves.

I know thats true, because I heard it on my am radio programme. And am radio doesnt lie. They tell the truth about the Librulls.

I'm in Texas and I see a lot of California license plates these days.

I appreciate the best argument you have against his position(s) is to call it hate, and equate it to some form of insanity. It's a failed effort but again, if that's all you have I appreciate your need to run with it.

Again, your hyperbole ruins any attempt at a coherent argument.
Dial it back about 3 notches and try again.

Tell me what is false in my premise so I can accurately correct my post.

 

[Deuce]

You seriously think that someone who is this obsessed with hating religion is qualified to talk to laypeople about science in an unbiased way?

Why, do you think the two subjects are related somehow?

 

[seymourflops]

Why, do you think the two subjects are related somehow?

Why sure.

Have you never heard of conflicts between religion and science?

Assume you have or you will be good enough to google it, I'll answer on the assumption that we both agree that there have been conflicts between religion and science. They are related in that they sometimes find themselves at odds when explaining specific events.

It is one thing for a science minded person to say that a religious myth like Adam and Eve is not the scientific explanation behind the origin of humanity. It is admirable when a science minded person defies a powerful church to say that the heavenly bodies move with the Earth not being in their center.

But to make a career out of attacking religion and now to single out Islam as the "most evil," strays far away from what a scientist is supposed to do.

 

[Deuce]

Why sure.

Have you never heard of conflicts between religion and science?

That conflict is invented entirely by the religious.

Assume you have or you will be good enough to google it, I'll answer on the assumption that we both agree that there have been conflicts between religion and science. They are related in that they sometimes find themselves at odds when explaining specific events.

It is one thing for a science minded person to say that a religious myth like Adam and Eve is not the scientific explanation behind the origin of humanity. It is admirable when a science minded person defies a powerful church to say that the heavenly bodies move with the Earth not being in their center.

But to make a career out of attacking religion and now to single out Islam as the "most evil," strays far away from what a scientist is supposed to do.

And in proving my point, you cite the church trying to murder people for scientific inquiry.

Does your stance work both ways? Any time a religious person criticizes anything outside of religion, they are "straying away from what a religious person is supposed to do?" Religious people shouldn't talk about movies?

 

[Buckeyes85]

I'm in Texas and I see a lot of California license plates these days.



Tell me what is false in my premise so I can accurately correct my post.

That Dawkins is obsessed with hating religion and that my objection to your characterization of that as being the defense of Islamophobes.

 

[Peter King]

The most evil religion? I don't agree with that, all Abrahamic religions who are evil almost equally. In the past catholicism was the most evil religion, at some time the Jewish faith was it, at other times the protestant might have been seen as the most evil.

But I don't think religions of themselves are evil, extremist followers are the ones who are evil. IRA and the Ulster terrorists were evil, etc., etc.

At the moment the religion with the most violent followers is islam. But there are plenty of violent followers of christianity.

 

[seymourflops]

That conflict is invented entirely by the religious.

And in proving my point, you cite the church trying to murder people for scientific inquiry.

Does your stance work both ways? Any time a religious person criticizes anything outside of religion, they are "straying away from what a religious person is supposed to do?" Religious people shouldn't talk about movies?

Yes my stance works both ways.

 

[seymourflops]

That Dawkins is obsessed with hating religion and that my objection to your characterization of that as being the defense of Islamophobes.

Is Dawkins an Islamophobe?

 

[Deuce]

Yes my stance works both ways.

So, as a religious person, why do you keep commenting on politics or vaccinations or evolution? You're outside your field. Whatever it is you do for a living, you should only comment on that field.

Right?

 

[Deuce]

Is Dawkins an Islamophobe?

I think he is confusing the causal relationship between a religion and the actions of some of its followers. Evil people love to claim religious justification for their actions, but the religion is not what made them evil nor did it actually drive the decisions they made or the actions they took.

50 years ago in Iran you had women in bathing suits at the beach with their face uncovered. It's not like someone rewrote the book. The book didn't change. The people running the government did.

The words in the book don't matter. People use them to justify whatever they already believed. It's how you have alleged followers of the word of Jesus Christ just stand hardline against everything the man actually stood for. They've all got their way of convincing themselves they are righteous.

 

[stevecanuck]

Christians have a secret agreement among ourselves that we are going to collectively close our minds to some of the truly horrible rules, prohibitions, retaliations, and war crimes demanded by God in the Old Testament. They will not exist for us. And so we filter out the horrific and give our attention only to the verses that can be applied to modern live. We are very tolerant of the atrocities of our religion.

But when we read the Qur'an we Christian go straight to the verses that permit war crimes, retributions, petty hates, obsessive rules that demean and permit violent retaliation in the name of Allah/God. We are very intolerant of someone else's religious atrocities.

Christians have a second half of the bible to steer them straight. There's the whole 'New Covenant' thing that they're happy to invoke to the exclusion of all the crap in the O.T.

The Qur'an goes in the opposite direction. The 86 Meccan surahs were almost indistinguishable from the O.T. It told and retold the stories of Moses, Noah, Abraham, Adam, Lot, etc. Mohamed's only recruitment method was to try to scare the Meccans into following him with endless repetition of stories about a vengeful god they didn't believe in. Brilliant.

Then he fled to Medina (Yathrib) and the Qur'an changed overnight. It started making rules that were unique to Islam. One of those rules was that, "fighting is prescribed for you", and the war was on. The next 10 years and 24 surahs saw the conquering of the Arabian Peninsula, the first incursion against the Byzantines, and repeated commands to fight "in the cause of God".

Forgotten in our enthusiastic condemnation of the Qur'an is the empowerment of women, the welcoming of strangers, the admiration of the religion of Jews and Christians and the tolerance of other's and their religions.

This is interesting, don't you think? I do.

All the above is a lie that we're told by Muslims who don't want us to know what Islam is about.

- Strangers, non-Muslim strangers are not at all welcome in Mecca. We are not allowed anywhere near the Kaaba because we're "dirty". If we don't pose any threat to them or their religion, then we are treated mostly well on an individual basis.
- Women may have been empowered relative to the 7th century, but those rules can never change. Verses 4:34 explicitly states men are in charge because they're superior. Verse 2:223 say women are a field to be plowed, and do so as you like.
- The admiration of other religions???? That's the biggest lie of all. I could quote hundreds of verses showing that's not true. Christianity is called "a monstrous beief so bad as to make the earth quake".

We are fed a steady diet of politically correct lies about Islam. The truth is ugly.

 

[stevecanuck]

The most evil hammer. The most evil table. The most evil chair. Religion is an inanimate abstract social object. It has no will of its own.

Well, that was absurd.

Religion is a set of rules and beliefs. There's nothing abstract about it.

 

[mrjurrs]

I agree 100% with what Dawkins says about Islam. The manner in which it uses "official doctrine" to subjugate women is terrible. Then again, it's not exactly the fault of the religion, per se, because many many Muslims have integrated into the culture and democracy of the United States, but rather the problem is with the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that holds the Middle East Muslims in thrall.
Then again, fundamentalism in any religion causes problems of intolerance, such as we see with the politically motivated Republican-oriented fundamentalist Protestants in the United States, or the fundamentalist Jews in Israel who are driving the "settlement" movement of simply taking as much Palestinian land as they feel like.
Anyway:

"Author Richard Dawkins told an audience last week that Islam is the “most evil” religion in the world while scolding President Donald Trump for his anti-terror rhetoric.

Attendees at this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, received more than a lecture on evolution during Mr. Dawkins’ prepared remarks. The biologist, on hand Sunday for the June 6-11 event, said it would be a mistake to create a moral equivalence between religions.

“It’s tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it’s a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they’re not,” the “Science in the Soul” author said, the U.K. Telegraph reported Sunday. “If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world, it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

The author, whose views mirror fellow “new atheists” like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, was quick to add a caveat.

“It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it,” he said. “Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else. They suffer from the homophobia, the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, ISIS and the Iranian regime.”

Richard Dawkins slams Islam as ‘most evil religion,’ then Donald Trump for travel ban rhetoric

Author Richard Dawkins told an audience last week that Islam is the “most evil” religion in the world while scolding President Donald Trump for his anti-terror rhetoric.

www.washingtontimes.com

You mean compared to that bastion of equality the Catholic Church. Just out of curiosity, do we see the same horrific levels of child abuse in Islam as we do in Christianity?

 

[stevecanuck]

I think he is confusing the causal relationship between a religion and the actions of some of its followers. Evil people love to claim religious justification for their actions, but the religion is not what made them evil nor did it actually drive the decisions they made or the actions they took.

50 years ago in Iran you had women in bathing suits at the beach with their face uncovered. It's not like someone rewrote the book. The book didn't change. The people running the government did.

The words in the book don't matter. People use them to justify whatever they already believed. It's how you have alleged followers of the word of Jesus Christ just stand hardline against everything the man actually stood for. They've all got their way of convincing themselves they are righteous.

The Qur'an exists for the sole purpose of creating and defining Islam. The "words in the book" ARE Islam. To claim overwise is beyond absurd.

 

[Deuce]

Christians have a second half of the bible to steer them straight. There's the whole 'New Covenant' thing that they're happy to invoke to the exclusion of all the crap in the O.T.

Well, until you want to invoke the O.T. to justify your politics, anyway. Plenty of Leviticus quotes in those gay marriage protest lines.

 

[Deuce]

The Qur'an exists for the sole purpose of creating and defining Islam. The "words in the book" ARE Islam. To claim overwise is beyond absurd.

You've entirely missed the point if you think that's what I've claimed.

 

[stevecanuck]

Well, until you want to invoke the O.T. to justify your politics, anyway. Plenty of Leviticus quotes in those gay marriage protest lines.

Yes I know. I'm not saying the O.T. isn't still a thing. I'm saying that the mitigation of it by the N.T. is what makes Christianity a basically good religion.

 

[stevecanuck]

You've entirely missed the point if you think that's what I've claimed.

Ok, you're saying that regardless of the words in the book, there will be those who pretend it says what they want it to say. Correct? I can't argue that that doesn't happen.

 

[seymourflops]

Is Dawkins an Islamophobe?

I think he is confusing the causal relationship between a religion and the actions of some of its followers. Evil people love to claim religious justification for their actions, but the religion is not what made them evil nor did it actually drive the decisions they made or the actions they took.

50 years ago in Iran you had women in bathing suits at the beach with their face uncovered. It's not like someone rewrote the book. The book didn't change. The people running the government did.

The words in the book don't matter. People use them to justify whatever they already believed. It's how you have alleged followers of the word of Jesus Christ just stand hardline against everything the man actually stood for. They've all got their way of convincing themselves they are righteous.

You misunderstood I guess.

It was a four word question with a one word answer, either way.

THEN you are free to explain all you like.

 

[seymourflops]

So, as a religious person, why do you keep commenting on politics or vaccinations or evolution? You're outside your field. Whatever it is you do for a living, you should only comment on that field.

Right?

I'm not a religious person.

What do you do for a living so that I can remind you of your rule?

 

[weaver2]

Christians have a second half of the bible to steer them straight. There's the whole 'New Covenant' thing that they're happy to invoke to the exclusion of all the crap in the O.T.

The Qur'an goes in the opposite direction. The 86 Meccan surahs were almost indistinguishable from the O.T. It told and retold the stories of Moses, Noah, Abraham, Adam, Lot, etc. Mohamed's only recruitment method was to try to scare the Meccans into following him with endless repetition of stories about a vengeful god they didn't believe in. Brilliant.

Then he fled to Medina (Yathrib) and the Qur'an changed overnight. It started making rules that were unique to Islam. One of those rules was that, "fighting is prescribed for you", and the war was on. The next 10 years and 24 surahs saw the conquering of the Arabian Peninsula, the first incursion against the Byzantines, and repeated commands to fight "in the cause of God".



All the above is a lie that we're told by Muslims who don't want us to know what Islam is about.

- Strangers, non-Muslim strangers are not at all welcome in Mecca. We are not allowed anywhere near the Kaaba because we're "dirty". If we don't pose any threat to them or their religion, then we are treated mostly well on an individual basis.
- Women may have been empowered relative to the 7th century, but those rules can never change. Verses 4:34 explicitly states men are in charge because they're superior. Verse 2:223 say women are a field to be plowed, and do so as you like.
- The admiration of other religions???? That's the biggest lie of all. I could quote hundreds of verses showing that's not true. Christianity is called "a monstrous beief so bad as to make the earth quake".

We are fed a steady diet of politically correct lies about Islam. The truth is ugly.

If you remember I said the verses that came from Mohammad first visions were pragmatic. The Qur'an was written down by many authors over a much longer time than Mohammad's lifetime and it is presented as poetry not in chronological order so the first sayings of Mohammad are scattered through the entire Qur'an.

I understand perfectly that Islam as interpreted by radicalized cults is a misanthropic, misogynistic, blood-soaked abomination. That said there are millions of practicing Muslims men and women living in the US that are generous, hard working, tolerant and intelligent.

The necessity to seek out in the Qur'an reasons to hate all Muslims is born out of fear, insecurity and lack of education.

If you think the New Testament is all about love, you haven't really read the letters from the various "saints" to their fledgling congregations. Nor have you read the early writings of the Catholic Church nor many of the 20th century.

 

[Deuce]

Ok, you're saying that regardless of the words in the book, there will be those who pretend it says what they want it to say. Correct? I can't argue that that doesn't happen.

Yes. The Spanish Inquisition read the same book as you. The variable isn't the book. The variable is the person reading it. The books aren't evil or good. The people reading them are.

We're better off learning what makes a society or an individual more prone to violence than we are worrying about the words in the book.

 

[Deuce]

I'm not a religious person.

What do you do for a living so that I can remind you of your rule?

My rule? This was your rule!

But to make a career out of attacking religion and now to single out Islam as the "most evil," strays far away from what a scientist is supposed to do.

 

[NatMorton]

I agree 100% with what Dawkins says about Islam. The manner in which it uses "official doctrine" to subjugate women is terrible. Then again, it's not exactly the fault of the religion, per se, because many many Muslims have integrated into the culture and democracy of the United States, but rather the problem is with the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that holds the Middle East Muslims in thrall.
Then again, fundamentalism in any religion causes problems of intolerance, such as we see with the politically motivated Republican-oriented fundamentalist Protestants in the United States, or the fundamentalist Jews in Israel who are driving the "settlement" movement of simply taking as much Palestinian land as they feel like.
Anyway:

"Author Richard Dawkins told an audience last week that Islam is the “most evil” religion in the world while scolding President Donald Trump for his anti-terror rhetoric.

Attendees at this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, received more than a lecture on evolution during Mr. Dawkins’ prepared remarks. The biologist, on hand Sunday for the June 6-11 event, said it would be a mistake to create a moral equivalence between religions.

“It’s tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it’s a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they’re not,” the “Science in the Soul” author said, the U.K. Telegraph reported Sunday. “If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world, it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

The author, whose views mirror fellow “new atheists” like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, was quick to add a caveat.

“It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it,” he said. “Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else. They suffer from the homophobia, the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, ISIS and the Iranian regime.”

Richard Dawkins slams Islam as ‘most evil religion,’ then Donald Trump for travel ban rhetoric

Author Richard Dawkins told an audience last week that Islam is the “most evil” religion in the world while scolding President Donald Trump for his anti-terror rhetoric.

www.washingtontimes.com

I think it's less an "evil religion" and more about a religious culture that has not matured or developed the way much of Christianity has.

There isn't a great deal of difference between the attitudes and actions of what we'd call a "radical Islamic sect" today and that of the Christianity 600 years ago. Brutal suppression for apostasy and for challenges to church authority were the order of the Catholic day in the 1400s. The west has since had its Age of Enlightenment. That day is pending for much of the Islamic world.

 

[seymourflops]

So, as a religious person, why do you keep commenting on politics or vaccinations or evolution? You're outside your field. Whatever it is you do for a living, you should only comment on that field.

Right?

I'm not a religious person.

What do you do for a living so that I can remind you of your rule?

My rule? This was your rule!

My mistake @Deuce I missed the sarcasm.

No I Never said people can only comment on their field of employment.

If someone says, "hi I'm Dick. How about those evil Musims? Of course Anyone who believes in God is delusional IMO," that isn't "science," and it isn't claiming to be.

When a person represening himself as speaking from science says those things, that's off the rails.