How the liberal left loses the argument. Ceding criticism of Islam to the Right.

[el_bryanto]

151. This is a key point in this argument where people are talking past each other

Some of those who want to underline the religious aspects of this set of murders, do so because they want to push a criticism of religion further into the mainstream - and, like you say, not just criticism but ridicule as well. While I agree that pretending that these murders had nothing to do with Islam is neither accurate nor practical, the next step of using these murders to argue that religion is a net negative in our society is probably less of a winner, politically.

Or to put it another way, the difference between this critique and the critique you might see on fox news is that fox news wants to paint Islam and Muslims as uniquely bad among religious folk (to be more precise, they actually believe that Christians are uniquely good among religious folk, but they don't spend a lot of time on other faiths). This critique here ad DU isn't saying that so much as it's saying all Religion has the potential to lead to murder, therefore we should start critiquing and mocking religion.

Bryant