"Progressives" and Islam

[darthbrowser]

Faux progressives and the politicization of Islam are starting to annoy the hell out of me.

You've all seen them. One minute they're decrying the Assad regime, the next complaining about intervention against ISIS. One minute they're proudly talking about how forward thinking their countries are, the next pushing for large influxes of Muslim refugees. Best of all, the same people who relentlessly attack Christians turn a blind (if not supportive) eye towards Islam.

Unfortunately for them, Islam isn't progressive.

As I detailed in this post, ISIS and friends are actually following Islam quite well. The Ummah in general looks like Medieval Europe when Christianity was at its height, with additional helpings of forced polygamy and female genital mutation. This is little wonder, since all the Abrahamic religions worship the same violent, misogynist god.

So why do "progressives" love nothing more than supporting Muslims, even as they attack the sister religion of Christianity?

Why politics, of course! Conservative Christians hate Islam, like everything else, so supporting Muslims becomes a way for one to show off how "tolerant" and "open-minded" they are, in contrast to Republican voters.

What Islam actually teaches or causes is completely ignored in the more urgent "us vs them" political point contest.

For example, my absolute favorite is when feminists and equal rights activists support Islam. It shows just how little effort they can be bothered to put into studying Islam before they support it.

The Qur'an has lots of things to say about women:

• From the second Surah, The Cow;
  
  “You shall not wed pagan women, unless they embrace the Faith. A believing slave-girl is better than an idolatress, although she may please you. Nor shall you wed idolaters, unless they embrace the Faith.” Quran 2:221
  
  “They ask you about menstruation. Say: ‘It is an indisposition. Keep aloof from women during their menstrual periods and do not approach them until they are clean again; when they are clean, have intercourse with them whence God enjoined you….'” Quran 2:222
  
  “Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields whence you please.” Quran 2:223
  
  “Women shall with justice have rights similar to those exercised against them, although men have a status above women.” Quran 2:228
  
  “Call in two male witnesses from among you, but if two men cannot be found, then one man and two women whom you judge fit to act as witnesses…” Quran 2:282

• From the fourth Surah, Women (yes there is a Surah all about women, it says what you'd expect);
  
  “A male shall inherit twice as much as a female.” Quran 4:11
  
  “[Forbidden to you are] married women, except those whom you own as slaves.” Quran 4:24
  
  “If you fear that you cannot treat [orphan girls] with fairness, then you may marry other women who seem good to you: two, three, or four of them. But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them, marry one only or any slave-girl you may own.” Quran 4:30
  
  “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them.” Quran 4:34

And that's just in two Surahs! There are 112 more! "Progressives" clamoring to support this are a joke.

This nonsense comes down to the simple fact that these people want to score political points but just can't be bothered to study what they claim to support.

There is no excuse for this in the Information Age. A quick search for "online Qur'an" immediately gives me these results:

A professional and complete presentation of the Qur'an, divided into the Surahs for easy access, maintained by the Muslim community of Imams and available in many translations,

Qur'an Explorer, a site tailored for Muslims seeking Qur'anic education and featuring the complete Qur'an,

Al-Qur'an, another full Qur'an again with various transitions maintained by theologians in Denmark,

and finally Tanzil, which is aimed at Arabic Muslims and those who wish to study the Qur'an in the original Arabic.

Again, the first results. This in addition to the great wealth of other easily accessible information regarding the history and theology of Islam and the other Abrahamic religions.

Please, don't support something you haven't bothered to even glance at. It's painfully obvious to those of us who have.

[Harmless]

Welcome to politics! Frankly, I'm surprised many of these politicians haven't been called out yet for contradicting themselves on multiple levels. And we're in 2015, soon to be 2016.

._.

[MessengerOfDreams]

Islam is not a progressive religion and needs to be toppled. Christianity though... Eh. It's good if you're not a woman, gay, trans, or one of those evil colored folk from the Muslim land

[darthbrowser]

Islam is not a progressive religion and needs to be toppled. Christianity though... Eh. It's good if you're not a woman, gay, trans, or one of those evil colored folk from the Muslim land

I don't understand what you're saying here.

The point of my post is that the Abrahamic religions are more or less the same in their ideas of morality. It doesn't make sense for someone to oppose Christians and yet support Muslims.

Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, etc. have all executed LGBTQA people and women in the past five years, all in the name of Islam. Muslim refugees from countries susceptible to ideologies like ISIS are arch-conservatives, imagine Christians teleported from Black Death-era Europe.

Do you think they take kindly to "women, gays, trans, etc?"

A large part of the revolution against Assad involved the fact that he is a secular ruler promoting a secular state, if clumsily. Hence why Turkey (the poster child for a secular Muslim state) was never happy about the Free Syrian Army. It was also never difficult to see a majority of the Free Syrian Army transitioning to ISIS forces.

Just because some Christians conflate Muslims with "brown people" and act accordingly doesn't somehow exonerate Islam. This is exactly the politicization of Islam, using it as little more then a idealogical snowball, that I was referring to.

[Harmless]

I feel like a lot of religions in general have the need to ostracize "non-believers" "infidels" and whatnot for the sake of their identity. Of course, just because you believe in a supposedly omnipotent power doesn't place you any higher than anyone else.

I kinda wish a lot of religious extremists (of any religion, Islam, Christianity, and many others included) could see this. Of course, the same could be said for Atheism.

[Kimonio]

People are fickle. Give them a book, they won't read it. Give them someone who has read the book, they'll call them a heretic or shame them.

But give them someone who applies the book and cites the book's happy parts, while condemning others, and you have a martyr.

I'm looking at you, Jeanine Pirro.


In fact, I argued on Tumblr with a SJW Muslim who didn't even know their own quran. I'm dead ♥♥♥♥ serious, they were that ignorant...and like a Christian in America, they insisted to show me how ignorant I was.

Religion is...nasty. Intriguing, innovative, but nasty

[Bogdan]

We need an Atatürk in every country of the Earth.
Now slightly back on the topic, as previously mentioned, major problem with muslims is that their fanatics aren't silenced or authorities take poor actions against them. Everyone will stare and yell "insensitive islamophobe" if you try to criticize their religion and society in general. We only notice and become alarmed when they start to bring their culture in our countries (so basically "I don't care if you stone your wife and decapitate your son, as long as you don't do it in my country"). And even then we treat it like "oh, it doesn't represent the whole islamic community, it's an isolated case". I don't know more about islam than your average-Joe, but I can notice that those isolated cases become a little bit more frequent? Or that no other religion as far as I know has a "State"?

[Doram]

All right, not a ton of time here, but I keep missing my opportunity to jump in on these. I HAVE studied religions, and, yes, all 3 of the Abrahamic ones have more than their fair share of violently crazy groups that are allowed to run rampant across an innocent world (from Israelis hunting Palestinians in Israel, to Christians hunting abortion doctors, to Islamics wandering around with bombs strapped to whatever).

That being said, I do not believe that the entire concept of religion needs to be abandoned. More modern religions are much more reasonable, and, more importantly, from a larger point of view, we invented religion for a reason, and it serves very specific functions in a person's life (when done right) that ARE valuable, such as providing further framework for beneficial community interaction, allowing for a person to develop and maintain a healthy connection to nature and the rest of the world around them, and while the answers are not exactly final or completely satisfying, they give SOME answer to the basic questions of human philosophy: Where did we come from, why are we here, and what do we do?

[Harmless]

That being said, I do not believe that the entire concept of religion needs to be abandoned. More modern religions are much more reasonable, and, more importantly, from a larger point of view, we invented religion for a reason, and it serves very specific functions in a person's life (when done right) that ARE valuable, such as providing further framework for beneficial community interaction, allowing for a person to develop and maintain a healthy connection to nature and the rest of the world around them, and while the answers are not exactly final or completely satisfying, they give SOME answer to the basic questions of human philosophy: Where did we come from, why are we here, and what do we do?

See, that's where I end up having to say; It's not good enough. Yes, good people have emerged from religious backgrounds, but so have bad. And frankly the bad are having a much bigger impact than the good at this rate.

We invented religion for a reason, but right now we're twisting that reason. People are using religion as an excuse to feel superior and lock their minds from adapting and thinking about other's thoughts. People are thinking of religion as a reason to ostracize instead of accept and welcome. We're not seeing the true definition for religion - as a belief. That is literally what religion is. A belief. And if you need a belief or some higher power as your only reason to be remotely nice to people (or in the worse case, just others who share your point of view), then you SERIOUSLY need help.

They do give some answer to the basic questions of human philosophy, but is that answer right? Well, we'll probably never know considering we're still trying to figure out where exactly we came from. Did we come from Africa? From Asia? From the Middle East? From outer space? Who knows! As long as we don't have evidence or facts we're going to get nowhere. Because without evidence or facts, we can't draw connections and start forming conclusions. Sure, we have the bible, but we also have tons of misinterpretations and revised editions to the point were I don't even see it as a valid source anymore.

[Charcoal]

I've been hearing things about the Muslim faith that are messing with me. I thought the terrorists were taking one part of the Quran too seriously. Now it's terrorists are actually practicing the Quran correctly and the non-terrorist Muslims are lukewarm in their faith.
I looked at those Quran quotes, and those seem really harsh to me.

As for Progressives: does seeing a billboard advertising a Christian church that has a red slash through a picture of evolution count as anything? This also might be another reason why I stopped going to a Baptist church. The euphemism was extreme there, and I don't think it was really helping me grow in my faith.

I don't know if I am understanding the progressive term very well.