Norwegian Muslims volunteer to protect synagogue

[skepticscott]

17. Thanks for confirming

that your entire argument is just one steaming pile of No True Scotsman crap. For those interested in rationality, let's make it clear and simple:

Claim: Islam isn't inspiring people to hate and violence and can't possibly be.

How do you know? People who say they are Muslims are committing acts of violence and saying that it is because of the dictates of their faith.

Claim: Those aren't TRUE Muslims and what they're practicing isn't TRUE Islam.

How do you know it isn't TRUE Islam?

Claim: If it were TRUE Islam, it couldn't be inspiring people to violence, because TRUE Islam can never inspire people to violence.

In other words, transparently using your conclusion to try to prove itself. Dopey, circular, fallacious thinking, not worthy of being taken remotely seriously.

Of course,that's not even the full depth of the nonsense you're spouting. You also have this deluded notion that there is some pure, holy ORIGINAL version of Islam (or other religions) for these people and their religion to have been corrupted FROM, which is codswallop. It assumes (without any proof) that Islam and other religions are anything but entirely human inventions. If the original "pure" version is just a human invention, then it is no more legitimate as a religion than all of the "corrupted" versions which were other human inventions. Even if you don't want to call those other versions by the original Islam (r), that doesn't alter their legitimacy as alternative religions one bit, any more than the legitimacy of Lutheranism as a religion is called into question by someone calling it a "corrupted" version of Catholicism (which as we all know, since it tells us so, as you do, is the ONE TRUE CHURCH).

And if it's leaping to your mind to argue that a "legitimate" religion could never espouse hate and violence, don't waste your time. That's just more NTS bullshit. Nowhere in the definition of "religion" is it required that something can only espouse goodness and benevolence to qualify. Anyone with the least knowledge of religious history knows that many of the gods humans have worshipped through the centuries have been anything but good and benevolent. Maybe you WISH religion were that way, and maybe you think religion OUGHT to be that way, so that you can feel all fuzzy-wuzzy about it, but big, fragging hairy deal. That has just exactly zero to do with how religion IS, as real people practice it in their real lives in the real world.

Of course, even if the "pure" version of a religion was actually handed down from an actual omnipotent, goddish being, you have zero evidence that that version is what's being practiced in the 21st century (when most of us live). There is no way to know that the "original", "god-given" version wasn't much harsher, and that a few good-hearted humans softened it up a bit before passing it on, somewhere along the way. In either case, saying that some religious believers are "doing it wrong" is just bunk. There is no single, unquestionable, objective, original core of "it" that you can point to at the center of ANY religion for people to be doing "right" or "wrong", your wishes and wants to the contrary being, as noted, utterly irrelevant to actual religious practice and belief.

As far as people being "corrupted", sure they have. That's the point. The plain simple fact is that religion does a really fracking good job of manipulating and corrupting people. That's why it's such a shitty thing in so many situations. When you start selling people on unalterable, unquestionable dogma, when you start telling people that their orders come from an all-powerful being, it's easy for them to rationalize the most horrible shit imaginable, in ways that no other way of thinking can inspire.

I think we're done here. I'm going to leave you Bobbing in the water. Try to keep your socks dry!