General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Saying Islam has nothing to do with the Paris attacks... [View all]DirkGently
(12,151 posts)What you can't reasonably do, is try to fight or destroy *a* religion, or dismiss its adherents as the enemy, which is where conservatives are always trying to drag us.
They think better in simple terms, and being at war with Islam would suit them much better than criticizing bad ideas coming from it.
Because religion is mostly determined by culture, that way of going about it boils down to simple bigotry. Those people bad, these people good.
That just doesn't reflect reality, though. The reality is that people and countries live in all different types of ways, with any number of empirically false and morally flawed religious traditions. People do horrible things; people do wonderful things. They always frame them in whatever tradition they inherited.
I agree it would be nice to eliminate dogma as a way of thinking -- including political and cultural dogma of all kinds -- but that option really isn't on the table. People don't generally choose religion. It's almost always an element of culture we are born to.
What we can do is insist that we will not be governed by bad ideas, whether it's trickle-down economics or casual racism, or crazy end-of-the-world prophecy nonsense.