Quote:
|
Somewhere up there, TM focused a bit on fundamentalism, and I think that is right. Fundamentalism of all sorts causes bad shit - there are Buddhist fundamentalists you do not want to deal with. Islam is not the only religion to experience a wave of fundamentalism, but it has experienced a wave of it and, perhaps of more concern to us, that fundamentalism has been tied up in anti-Western sentiment, to a great extent because it grew in reaction to some of our friends doing bad shit.
|
I'm not so sure it's the anti-Western sentiment as much as the, well, ancient character of radical Islam's worst offenses. Beheadings, slavery, stonings... These are things radical Christianity got over a long ago, becoming far more subtle in its crimes against humanity. It's hard to look at a group behaving as the Taliban did, or Isis now is, and not reflexively conclude the texts they profess to follow literally must be the problem because... Well, what else but an ancient text would cause such ancient forms of barbarism?
Quote:
|
Maybe part of the problem here isn't just Islamic fundamentalism, but the fact that we get included in its targets.
|
Moderate Muslims are not lumped into the problem. No rational critic, including Maher, takes the position individual people adhering to a benign faith are complicit in the perversions of its small minority of mentally ill followers.
