Reza Aslan absolutely destroys CNN and Bill Maher on Muslim violence

[Indy Texas]

Islam is not a progressive religion.  By that I mean, Islam is a set of rules for every facet of life and those rules do not change.  Islam is a religion, but it also contains a set of cultural norms that date to the early middle ages in Arabia.  Is there dispute about those rules?  Sure.  Many Muslims believe music is allowed.  Many Muslims believe that women should be allowed to travel alone.  But, the general attitude is that these rules are not debatable or permissive if you find a clear statement from the Islamic scriptures.  In that way, Islam more resembles Christianity in Europe before the reformation democratized Christianity with vernacular texts. 

Basically. I think there's inherently some tension between Western liberals who want to be pluralistic and respectful of other cultures, and the fact that in its current form, Islam is not compatible with Western liberalism.

You can be a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay Christian. There are Christian denominations like the Episcopal Church and United Churches of Christ that formally accept and accommodate socially progressive and theologically liberal viewpoints.

You can't be a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay Muslim. There is no sect of Islam that formally accepts those sort of modern, Western values. If you are a Muslim and consider yourself a liberal, I'd argue that you're not a very good Muslim and you need to find a different religion to be a part of. I have Muslim friends and acquaintances who drink alcohol, eat pork products, and generally heed a 21st century, post-modernist view on most social issues. But if they were to go to their mosque and be upfront about these things, they'd get taken to task by the religious elders and by members of the congregation. By comparison, there are churches and synagogues that Christians and Jews with comparable lifestyles can go to and not be reprimanded.

I tend to think that if American Muslims want to put the phobia and bigotry to rest for good, they might have to just have a "schism" of their own and form a new sect of Islam that's more compatible with the society they live in. It would be more forward-thinking on social issues and not interpret the Koran literally. Men and women would not be segregated during prayers. Women would not be obliged to wear hijab.

[Indy Texas]

Islam is not a progressive religion.  By that I mean, Islam is a set of rules for every facet of life and those rules do not change.  Islam is a religion, but it also contains a set of cultural norms that date to the early middle ages in Arabia.  Is there dispute about those rules?  Sure.  Many Muslims believe music is allowed.  Many Muslims believe that women should be allowed to travel alone.  But, the general attitude is that these rules are not debatable or permissive if you find a clear statement from the Islamic scriptures.  In that way, Islam more resembles Christianity in Europe before the reformation democratized Christianity with vernacular texts. 

Basically. I think there's inherently some tension between Western liberals who want to be pluralistic and respectful of other cultures, and the fact that in its current form, Islam is not compatible with Western liberalism.

You can be a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay Christian. There are Christian denominations like the Episcopal Church and United Churches of Christ that formally accept and accommodate socially progressive and theologically liberal viewpoints.

You can't be a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay Muslim. There is no sect of Islam that formally accepts those sort of modern, Western values. If you are a Muslim and consider yourself a liberal, I'd argue that you're not a very good Muslim and you need to find a different religion to be a part of. I have Muslim friends and acquaintances who drink alcohol, eat pork products, and generally heed a 21st century, post-modernist view on most social issues. But if they were to go to their mosque and be upfront about these things, they'd get taken to task by the religious elders and by members of the congregation. By comparison, there are churches and synagogues that Christians and Jews with comparable lifestyles can go to and not be reprimanded.

I tend to think that if American Muslims want to put the phobia and bigotry to rest for good, they might have to just have a "schism" of their own and form a new sect of Islam that's more compatible with the society they live in. It would be more forward-thinking on social issues and not interpret the Koran literally. Men and women would not be segregated during prayers. Women would not be obliged to wear hijab.

I absolutely agree with all of this. However, the headline on CNN was "Does Islam Promote Violence?" which is utterly absurd. Being a Muslim requires you live your life in many outdated and reactionary (in a social sense) ways, but violence is only promoted by the fringe minority of lunatics who think their violent acts against society are good in the name of God. Does the ultra religiosity of Islam (that in many areas of the world prohibit progress) make it likelier that religious terrorism will exist? I would say yes. Is it a problem with Islam itself? No.

And I do find Aslan annoying as Sanchez said at times but I think he has it right here.

If there isn't a problem with Islam itself, why do no other religions have the equivalent of al-Qaeda or ISIS?

[Indy Texas]

But you're attributing that to being a problem of Islam in and of itself. The vast majority of Muslims are not members of ISIS.

Oh also the Holocaust. Christians did that (although the Nazis had a bit of a weird relationship with the rest of Christianity, much as ISIS does with the rest of Islam).

There's a difference between someone doing something with Islam being their primary motivating factor, and someone who just happens to be Muslim doing something harmful or violent.

I get so tired of people clutching at straws trying to find remotely modern examples of Christian mass-murder and resorting to the KKK and Nazi Germany.

The Klan was a race-based organization. They sought to harm non-whites. If the Klan was acting in the name of Christendom, most of their victims wouldn't have been people who were also Christian and whose religious tenets weren't significantly different. (It wasn't something like Protestants killing/abusing/tormenting Catholics. It was relatively conservative evangelical Protestant white people killing/abusing/tormenting relatively conservative evangelical Protestant black people.)

Nazi Germany's violence, again, was a race-ethnicity-based. The role of Christianity in the Third Reich is mixed. But it's pretty obvious from the way they tried to ape ancient Nordic-Germanic pagan imagery and rituals that they weren't by-the-letter religious fundamentalists. Even the genocidal civil war in Yugoslavia was about ethnicity more than religion.

Notice that with the Islamists, it's the opposite. It's always about religion and nothing but it. The mujahideen in Afghanistan were a pan-ethnic, polyglot movement of Afghans, Arabs, Persians and others working under the banner of Islam. Ethnic, national and linguistic identity had no role. The Islamic State has no interest in pan-Arabism; it welcomes non-Arabs into its ranks and wants to expand its reach beyond the Arabic-speaking world; it, too, is an overtly Islamic movement.

The fact is that there is no comparing the desire of fundamentalist Islamists to unite "the Muslim World" against the collective mass of non-Muslims. No one ever speaks of "the Christian World." To the extent that politicized fundamentalist Christianity exists and has existed, it inevitably gets wrapped up in nationalism of some sort and thus by its nature is always localized and limited in scope. There are no Christians calling for other Christians to detonate bombs in non-Christian cities and countries. I haven't heard about any Buddhists or Hindus flying airplanes into buildings or speaking of global religious holy war.