I commend everyone

[meekon5]

...Sam Harris pointed out we just can't afford to tolerate a religion like this given the clear and deadly risks it poses. I agree. I'm not willing to continue risking my life so muslims can freely practice a religion of hate. The only rational counter to "convert or die" is "renounce your faith or be exterminated."

And when Hitler said this about the Jews it was a bad thing, and don't argue that the Jews were not killing people. I can provide any number of instances where the Nazi's "proved" they were.


Depiction of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of Ernst vom Roth

[BikerDude]

...Sam Harris pointed out we just can't afford to tolerate a religion like this given the clear and deadly risks it poses. I agree. I'm not willing to continue risking my life so muslims can freely practice a religion of hate. The only rational counter to "convert or die" is "renounce your faith or be exterminated."

And when Hitler said this about the Jews it was a bad thing, and don't argue that the Jews were not killing people. I can provide any number of instances where the Nazi's "proved" they were.


Depiction of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of Ernst vom Roth

Hitler's hatred of Jews was in fact more about racism than religion.
Judaism is unique. Antisemitism is racist. Because there are 2 things.
Being Jewish ethnically and being of the Jewish religion.
Hitlers lunacy was all about race. 
A person was "guilty" of being Jewish as a matter of bloodline in Hitler's view.
It was not about the Jewish religion.
A person can adopt the Jewish religion but not the ethnicity.
The same does not hold true for Islam or Christianity.
There is no ethnic component.
A person is Islamic or Christian by choosing to follow a set of beliefs. 

[BikerDude]

Sam Harris pointed out we just can't afford to tolerate a religion like this given the clear and deadly risks it poses. I agree. I'm not willing to continue risking my life so muslims can freely practice a religion of hate. The only rational counter to "convert or die" is "renounce your faith or be exterminated."

I would never personally support that.
In my opinion the greatest counter to irrationality is rationality.
The real problem is that Islam seems uniquely determined to isolate it's self from outside influences. At least in a good number of Islamic countries.
All things being equal I really believe that the secular world will eventually provide a more appealing option. As long as people are allowed to have choices.

[meekon5]

Sam Harris pointed out we just can't afford to tolerate a religion like this given the clear and deadly risks it poses. I agree. I'm not willing to continue risking my life so muslims can freely practice a religion of hate. The only rational counter to "convert or die" is "renounce your faith or be exterminated."

I would never personally support that.
In my opinion the greatest counter to irrationality is rationality.
The real problem is that Islam seems uniquely determined to isolate it's self from outside influences. At least in a good number of Islamic countries.
All things being equal I really believe that the secular world will eventually provide a more appealing option. As long as people are allowed to have choices.

Thank the gods!

Your first post (on antisemitism) missed the point entirely.

In my opinion the greatest counter to irrationality is rationality.

I completely agree and that's the point I was trying to raise.

With the comment

Sam Harris pointed out we just can't afford to tolerate a religion like this given the clear and deadly risks it poses. I agree. I'm not willing to continue risking my life so muslims can freely practice a religion of hate. The only rational counter to "convert or die" is "renounce your faith or be exterminated."

All I was seeing was make Muslims wear badges so we can spot them more easily, mark their homes and businesses, and fire up the ovens in Auchwitz, Buchenwald, et al.

[meekon5]

Another interesting article off the back of What is your Government doing to you now whilst they are throwing images of Muslim atrocities at you.

Particularily:

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron

In 2013, the British prime minister publicly threatened to use court injunctions against newspapers that published information from the Edward Snowden leaks. When the Guardian published anyway, technicians from the GCHQ arrived at the newspaper's office and forced editors to destroy their hard-drives with angle grinders.

[BikerDude]

Another interesting article off the back of What is your Government doing to you now whilst they are throwing images of Muslim atrocities at you.

Particularily:

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron

In 2013, the British prime minister publicly threatened to use court injunctions against newspapers that published information from the Edward Snowden leaks. When the Guardian published anyway, technicians from the GCHQ arrived at the newspaper's office and forced editors to destroy their hard-drives with angle grinders.

Another front in the battle over freedom.
You would think that people would have learned something from Snowden.
Nope. The far right in this country generally call him a traitor and support this type of monitoring.
Proof that paraquat comes in many guises. Politics and Religion.
Both take away people's right to be an individual. And both are enemies of privacy.

[BikerDude]

All I was seeing was make Muslims wear badges so we can spot them more easily, mark their homes and businesses, and fire up the ovens in Auchwitz, Buchenwald, et al.

You see this is the problem!
People react with no middle ground.
It is impossible to express any type of condemnation of religion without it going to extremes. This is completely off target.
It's like Sam Harris says elsewhere. "We must be able to criticize bad Ideas".
And criticize them as harshly as one feels is appropriate
Religion continually engages in special pleading where any criticism is tantamount to racism and out of bounds.
It is this sort of reaction that gets in the way.
People have to be able to state the obvious. Otherwise the absurd rules where we are asked to accept the typical liberal view that all religious ideas are inherently benign and it's just a few bad apples. Despite at this point ridiculously abundant evidence to the contrary.

[BikerDude]

Well if anybody really cares anymore now that we've gone down the undude rabbit hole again,
let me be clear. I'm about freedom. Freedom for people to worship whatever they want and freedom for others to express their opinion about other people beliefs if they want to.
And to disrespect people based on what they believe if a person so chooses.
And in my personal opinion any person who identifies as a Christian or Muslim or whatever else does not get to then choose some sub set of belief. They buy the whole package.
Otherwise it would be like people after Hitler wanting to remain Nazi by making the case that it was only Hitler and Gerbles and all of them that were the bad apples and all the stuff that it says in Mein Kampf comes down to interpretation. Any person can be Nazi's if they so wish but they can't legislate what people should generally think about Nazi's and they have no choice but to carry all the baggage.
Especially when there are still some "Neo Nazi's" beating gays and jews and spreading the virulent version with all it's attendant hatred. In the world of political correctness this is the norm except when it comes to matters of religion. No one suggests, or should suggests that we need to respect a subset of Nazi's who don't beat gays and jews.
I don't accept that I should apply a different metric to someone who is one of the "good" nazi's vs one of the bad Nazi's. Because the problem is with the ideas that define what a Nazi is. It should be the same with religion. I don't really want a better Nazi party. I would rather have no Nazi party and I'd rather have it that being a member of the Nazi party generally disqualifies a person from any serious consideration. Because of the ideas that they choose to ascribe even if they personally redefine those ideas to some more palatable version. The label is enough to condemn a person to supporting hatred. As it should be.
I really believe that we need to apply the same exact metric to religious people. No more bullshit about "interpretation" and "the living word" bla bla bla.
Buy the tshirt you take the ride.
I don't think it's possible or even really desirable  to convert people. I do believe it's possible to marginalize them. This has already happened in some countries with very large segments of society being non believers.
Very slowly over generations. It's a matter of changing perceptions.
We can only hope this video is true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyBu9TV4z5M

I'm done. I swear.

[Hominid]

Well said BD, and I agree with everything you say.  I'll add a couple of points.

1) As you say, it's about freedom to believe whatever you want - pick your religion.  Or not.  The point needs to include freedom FROM religion; that - for example - to be told I have to be a Christian to hold public office...  WTF?  It seems to be getting worse in the states - I blame it on the degradation of public education, but that's another discussion.

2) Anthropologists tell us religion developed at the same time language did.  As much as I want to hope religion is on the decline, it provides many personal and cultural needs that will take us a long time to evolve away from as a species.  I like the new atheist movement, and whether or not I agree with it 100%, fact is more and people are becoming open about their non-belief, some risking careers, some risking life and limb...   

May the Nones flourish!

[jgiffin]

I should clarify that, to my knowledge, Harris hasn't endorsed the essentially genocidal (loosely termed) conclusions I've reached. I doubt he would. My paraphrasing was accurate, though, and it's the logical endpoint to many of his premises. He, however, takes an evolutionary approach, placing hope in people's eventual adoption of bio/meta/ethical stances in lieu of sacred ancient texts. To be honest, he kind of loses me here. Not much basis in fact to believe people subject to adopting the latter beliefs (often inculcated during childhood) are reading The Lancet or back-ordering copies of The Philosophical Review. A metric fuck-ton of innocent people are going to die for Kafka-esque reasons before that happens.

Despite the well-known and immutable internet tenant that the first to invoke the Nazis loses the argument, I'll point out a few distinctions between what I've endorsed versus perpetrating another holocaust. First, I suppose, the Nazis were, in their own view, primarily biological racists not religious persecutors. Yes, "jewish" is properly a religious and not a racial descriptor but that's what they said - we should take crazy people at their word when they issue threats.  And, sure, Nazis also targeted gypsies and homosexuals but these aren't religious factions, either. Nazism, itself, wasn't really concerned with what the jews or anyone else believed, it was focused on shaping German beliefs about who the victims were. That's pretty handy when trying to scapegoat a group; they can't run from a label defined by who they are. (Also, see, Nazi collusion with catholicism). On the other hand, muslims could prove me wrong by not continuing to kill people. I'll give anyone 1,000 - 1 odds if they want to take that bet.

Another component of Nazism relevant here was the primacy of its attack on alternate political beliefs. (A fairly solid working definition of fascism is the absorption of the state within a single party concerting with business interests). In fact, towards the end of the war, Nazi invective against Bolshevism (i.e., communism) was more sharp than that against jews - probably because jews weren't overrunning the eastern front. I admit it's kind of apples to oranges in comparison with religion. Then again, it's apples to oranges to our comparing the Nazi holocaust with my final solution (tongue firmly in cheek) to stop muslim aggression. No one is saying islam is bad because muslims tend to vote republican, yo, its because they kill people through acts of terrorism. Can anyone find three borders between muslim and non-muslim areas ON THE EARTH that are not subject to frequent violence? St. Christopher of Hitchens, himself, noted that islam has perpetually bloody borders.

Nazism, moreover, only picked up attention when it became aggressively expansionist. Well, that's frankly what islam is trying to do. My proposition of stopping them from killing people and taking over the world (hey, it's their self-professed, if absurdist, goal) is more akin to when people stood up and said, "Uh, hey, maybe this Chamberlain guy is giving up too much ground to that little German fella."

I dunno, man, there's a lot more. I'm more perplexed than anything at this point. I just don't see how a continued tolerance of this nonsense is rational or helpful. They are not going to change. At least not within our lifetimes. I guess enough of us (most critically those in power) are patient enough to let muslims kill others for the foreseeable future. Posterity might look favorably on that indulgence. Of course, posterity, by definition, won't include those who died at the hands of islam.

[jgiffin]

Also, I just saw that an islamic cleric declared jihad against all snowmen.

http://jordantimes.com/saudi-cleric-condemns-snowmen-as-anti-islamic

I shit you not. These are the people we are talking about. My condolences if anyone you know has or is killed by these fucktards. (Muslims, not snowmen...although, well, that would be interesting, too).

[Hominid]

My opinion...

[meekon5]

I should clarify that, to my knowledge, Harris hasn't endorsed the essentially genocidal (loosely termed) conclusions I've reached.

I have to be completely honest.

The point I have been trying to make:

I do not see genocide as a particularly Dudeist response to any situation.

IMHDO of course.

[meekon5]

Also, I just saw that an islamic cleric declared jihad against all snowmen.

http://jordantimes.com/saudi-cleric-condemns-snowmen-as-anti-islamic

I shit you not. These are the people we are talking about. My condolences if anyone you know has or is killed by these fucktards. (Muslims, not snowmen...although, well, that would be interesting, too).

The Amish have banned buttons and dancing.

Also according to one Pharisee ruling I can not carry a handkerchief on the sabbath as it is work, but if I tie it around my waist it's a belt and therefore is permissible.

[meekon5]

And in my personal opinion any person who identifies as a Christian or Muslim or whatever else does not get to then choose some sub set of belief. They buy the whole package.

You've said this before.

Please can you explain how this point of view applies to the Thirty Years' War, Henry the Eighths dissolution of the monasteries, and the Troubles in Ireland?

I'm just curious.