Also, is it a right to offend religion? I think free speech allows (should allow) a person to say what they want and it is the person that is hearing/seeing a religious/non-religious position to choose whether or not they want to see it anymore.

If a Muslim sees Charlie Hebdo satirical cartoon, offended or not, they have to get over it.
If an Atheist hears someone pray, offended or not, they have to get over it.
If a Christian sees a crucifix in urine, offended or not, they need to get over it.

None if these issues are anything other than the "offended" making a big deal out of what other people do. People have a right to be offended, but there is not a right to make others change to meet your desires.

[edited for grammar error]

bbauska

I took that you use "whataboutery" to point out that Christianity has done the same thing.

I was using the actual historical record of religions to show how they have evolved when encountering reason.
If I was using "whataboutery" I would have pointed to isolated instances of Christian terrorism and said, yeah but what about.....
For instance ...what about the KKK? Or anti abortionists?

After 1981, members of groups such as the Army of God began attacking abortion clinics and doctors across the United States.[93][94][95] A number of terrorist attacks were attributed by Bruce Hoffman to individuals and groups with ties to the Christian Identity and Christian Patriot movements, including the Lambs of Christ.[96] A group called Concerned Christians was deported from Israel on suspicion of planning to attack holy sites in Jerusalem at the end of 1999; they believed that their deaths would "lead them to heaven".[97][98]
The motive for anti-abortionist Scott Roeder murdering Wichita doctor George Tiller on 31 May 2009 was the belief that abortion is not only immoral, but also a form of murder under "God's law", irrespective of "man's law" in any country, and that this belief went "hand in hand" with his religious beliefs.[99][100] The group supporting Roeder proclaimed that any force is "legitimate to protect the life of an unborn child", and called on all Christians to "rise up" and "take action" against threats to Christianity and to unborn life.[101] Eric Robert Rudolph carried out the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996, as well as subsequent attacks on an abortion clinic and on a lesbian nightclub. Michael Barkun, a professor at Syracuse University, considers Rudolph to likely fit the definition of a Christian terrorist. James A. Aho, a professor at Idaho State University, argues that religious considerations inspired Rudolph only in part.[102]
Terrorism scholar Aref M. Al-Khattar has listed The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, Defensive Action, The Freemen Community, and some "Christian militia" as groups that "can be placed under the category of far-right-wing terrorism" that "has a religious (Christian) component".[103]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism

You are correct RickyP. There are nut cases on all sides.

Do you think there are a higher percentage of Muslim people who support the attack on Hebdo, or Christian who support the murder of Tiller?

I think we are all in favor of freedom of expression, no matter how stupid, hateful, or bigoted it is (or are we?). We should be allowed to think as we like and expression is thought made verbal. In the US, the 1st Amendment gives us all the right to piss off other people by what we say. There is no such Constitutional right against being offended, though there is a clear attempt in some circles to make it so. Thus, we have various laws against "hate speech" which are often arbitrary, ambiguous, and based on somebody's sense of being offended.

Is it not ironic (or hypocritical) that France recoiled at the attack on Charlie Hebdo as an infringement upon freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Then the French police went out to arrest people for hate speech, ostensibly those supporting the Islamic extremists. I certainly do not imply the French are the only ones involved in this duplicity. Here in the US we have ample examples of this politically correct dual standard.

George

bbauska

Do you think there are a higher percentage of Muslim people who support the attack on Hebdo, or Christian who support the murder of Tiller?

I have no evidence to back this up, just now, ...but I think the percentage of Muslims living in North America that support the Charlie Hebdo attacks are about the same percentage of Christians living in North America that support shooting abortionists .

Why do I think this.. Both groups live within a society that has evolved to accommodate and adapt to reason.(Except for parts of the US south ) And both live in a society that has evolved to become more tolerant of of the expression of other ideas as a result.
On the other hand, many Muslims growing up in many parts of the world are less exposed to both reason, other ideas, or the notion that other ideas must be tolerated. Mainly those are people educated in religious schools, or who live in Wahabist nations or areas where fundamentalists dominate. (the tribal region of Pakistan for instance)

The greatest hope the world has is that exposure to reason will evolve thought in every religion, and with every national peoples, and give way to an age of greater tolerance and acceptance everywhere.

RickyP,
You made an important distinction. You want to compare Muslims in the US to Christians in the US. That will segment of the most extreme of the Muslim population, and only calculate the more passive. That is not a fair example considering the number of attacks that are coming from all over the world.

You are playing a statistics game, and my statistics teacher always said, Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

I would also hope that those who are offended by the sight or hearing of religion can get over it as well. People should be allowed to practice how they see fit, as long as they are not forcing others to practice or not practice.

Is it not ironic (or hypocritical) that France recoiled at the attack on Charlie Hebdo as an infringement upon freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Then the French police went out to arrest people for hate speech, ostensibly those supporting the Islamic extremists. I certainly do not imply the French are the only ones involved in this duplicity. Here in the US we have ample examples of this politically correct dual standard.

Yes, it is somewhat hypocritical. Sadly it's the way of the modern world, and more often than not it's used to protect religious extremists rather than to punish them. The recent fad for 'hate speech' laws is a serious infringement on liberty and has resulted in (predictable) unintended consequences that anybody with a truly liberal mindset should be deeply uncomfortable with.

bbauska wrote:Is/was the IRA responding to Hebdo? Or were they trying to overthrow English authority? I think we have 2 different things here.

Well, no and no. It wasn't the "English" but the majority Ulster Protestant population of Northern Ireland (predominantly of Scots and Irish descent) who they were up against, as they wanted to remain "British".

But confining Catholic or Christian terrorism solely to the question of whether they responded to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is a little disingenuous. There are groups in Central Africa, India and other places committing acts of terror and war crimes on behalf of Christianity. What provokes them is not necessarily the issue.

That the Pope came out with the meaningless idea that speech should be free, apart from when it insults religions, and hey, sometimes expect a violent response (I've heard from Catholic defenders that this was "metaphorical", but they don't elucidate what it is a metaphor of).

Yes there are what seems to be hypocritical governments which restrict speech, even in the wake of the events in Paris. The reality is that there are some types of expression that are not protected: threats, libel, incitement, nudity on kids TV....

Absolutism is not always the best way to go on any issue. And "political correctness" should be more about using free expression to challenge other expression, rather than legal bans. On the other hand, it also means people not having to be forced to carry or pass on expression they don't want to.

On religion, I don't mind the sight or sound of it. It's when it starts (or rather, continues) to exert power over me through laws etc that I object.

bbauska

You made an important distinction. You want to compare Muslims in the US to Christians in the US

.

You noticed. Good for you.
And the reason its worth compariing is that it compares how practitioners of Islam in the modern world compare to Christians in the modern world.
What this does is indicate that it isn't the religions themselves, but how states use the religions that matters. And what has altered this over time is the acceptance of reason, and science over faith and theology.
This is not a "numbers game". Its an exercise in examining the influence of the modern world on the way religions effect things.

That is not a fair example considering the number of attacks that are coming from all over the world

.

Salmon Rushdie was a panelist on Bill Maher's show last week. He made the point that what is going on is a battle within the Islamic world. The terror events aimed at the west are largely side shows, mostly enacted by lone wolves with fairly unique experience as immigrants to the West and often mentally ill persons.
Most of the violence and terror by extremists is meted out on other Muslims or neighbors.
And its mostly aimed at turning back history. The Wahabist want to turn back the modern world to what the imagine the Islamic world was in the 900's .
To do that they need to shut out the world and control what their young people are exposed to in schools.
Its no surprise that the attacks in Pakistan were against a modern school, and against women being educated. Boko Harem actually translates to mean "against the book".
In order for these regimes to assume and maintain control they use a perverse version of Islam as the reason for their controlling policies.

So by looking at muslims who've been living and have been educated in a modern western society we can understand how their religion acts when it isn't used in this way... And its largely benign.
Sure there are the isolated and mentally ill, but as we can see with the Christians murdering abortion providers .... there are always the nuts.

And by the way, one of the concerns we should all have is when religions control whats taught in schools. That's the crack in the door.

Ricky, I appreciate your long view and comparing Islamic and Christian violence in the North America, but this is of limited solace to people living in the rest of the world. There is an arc of violence from Africa to Europe to the Middle East to much of Asia that is fueled by Islamic radicals. There seems to be limited (or at best insufficient) assimilation within these countries resulting in carnage for large parts of the world. Telling people to wait 20 to 300 years until Islam sorts itself out as a result of reason and science condemns millions or even billions of people to violence for the rest of their lives.

ray

Ricky, I appreciate your long view and comparing Islamic and Christian violence in the North America, but this is of limited solace to people living in the rest of the world. There is an arc of violence from Africa to Europe to the Middle East to much of Asia that is fueled by Islamic radicals. There seems to be limited (or at best insufficient) assimilation within these countries resulting in carnage for large parts of the world. Telling people to wait 20 to 300 years until Islam sorts itself out as a result of reason and science condemns millions or even billions of people to violence for the rest of their lives

.

What is your evidence for the "lack of assimilation"? Please offer such .
Do you know for instance that

findings from a special study on Muslims in Germany carried out as part of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Religion Monitor project. The study shows that Muslims in Germany have close ties to the state and society. For example, 90 percent of highly religious Muslims are very supportive of democracy as a form of government.
The majority of Muslims in Germany are devout and open-minded at the same time. The study shows that 63 percent of those adherents of Islam who consider themselves fairly or very religious say they re-examine their religious attitudes at regular intervals. Roughly 60 percent of those respondents say they support same-sex marriage, something that also applies to 40 percent of highly religious Muslims who say they rarely look at their religious principles.

http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/en/t ... on-monitor

Thats right more Muslim Germans support gay marriage than republicans in the US.

I encourage you to stop listening to Sean Hannity and pick up

The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?
By Doug Saunders
It explodes a lot of the baseless nonsense about how Europe is becoming Islamic. (No nation has more than 7.5% Muslims and that's France who had much immigration from their colonies decades ago). In France only 5% of Muslims attend mosque on Friday and only 40% consider themselves religiious. In fact they are pretty much like other French in their disdain for the organization of religion.
In England most Muslims are from Pakistan or India, and yet studies there have shown that they are very supportive of democracy, and actually have slightly more nationalistic feelings about GB than natives..
A link to a site about the book: (I hope it works it looks excessive...)
https://books.google.ca/books?id=gR-0SR ... ys&f=false
Assimilation, and the way people think, changes when they are exposed to new ways of thinking and living. Especially when they are immersed in a new culture. We have centuries of evidence to show that this happens. We also know that both crime and extremism tends to be fueled by socio economic conditions, in particular income disparity and quality of life issues.
You have more crime in the US than exists in most other western nations, in large part because of socio economic conditions... (Disparity)

The murderers of Charlie Hebdo were orphans, who gave into the romanticized nonsense about Islamic jihad. Even then, when they decided to act out, they were rounded up on their way to the battlefield. Only to end up sharing prisn cells with an Al Queda leader. (This does not seem like a good plan, to put the mad men together...That's also how ISIS got its start in Iraq)

If security forces concentrate on finding the few who become radicalized then, instances like Charlie Hebdo will be few. Although it will always be difficult to find and stop individual nuts with guns like the shooter in Ottawa.
There will be ten or twenty times more school shootings in the US this year than instances of Islamic fanatics. Partly because the incidents of radicalization aren't that great, and because the authorities can identify the risky "Islamists". However, they can't seem to stop the school shooters.
The greatest danger of Isamic fanaticism and is really only in the countries where groups are seeking political AND religious control of the people. That is a physical reality.
When even the mullahs in Iran came out and denounced the Charlie Hebdo killings, then something is going on in the Islamic world too. They see the ISIS as a threat to their authority and understand that the radicalization must be confronted. They understand the madness of Boko Harem, and the other African extremists..

http://muslimtide.com/

link without access to readable content

Ricky, when you use quotes, you should quote actual words that someone wrote, not your misreading of their words. Also, I wasn't only talking about Europe. I was talking about Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

According to a poll in August, 2014 16% of French support ISIS; given that only 8 % of French are Muslims...there are a lot of a French Muslims supporting ISIS. http://www.newsweek.com/16-french-citiz ... nds-266795

The questions in the poll you cited Ricky were of the softball variety; also, keep in mind that Muslims in Germany are almost all from Turkey and therefore predisposed to be more accepting of a secular variety.