It's interesting that the same people who apologize for them tend to shit on Christians - namely liberals.
Someone posted in that thread that it has something to do with Liberal Democrat's attitude towards protecting minority groups. In any case I think there's notable dissonance in their rhetoric between freedom of religious expression and a desire to advance society's secularism.
Can we just admit Abrahamic religions are violent as fuck and should be thrown in the bushes? If 30-40% of your religion believe it's ok to kill people who disagree with them...throw them in the bushes.
The issue I take with these blanket statements is that it looks at something as diverse and indeterminate as faith without its proper context and dismisses it wholesale. Militant insurgency within Islamist groups can't be looked at without considering the socio-economic climate that arose in the Middle East in the postcolonial period. Islamic militancy is, in many instances, wed to the national rhetoric in many countries in the Middle East while they were fledgling states. Educational standards are still incredibly lacking compared to the west (althoughin some areas better than a lot of people in the west tend to imagine, imo). Even looking at Islam as a monolithic abstract concept is disingenuous, and leads to people like Maher constructing racist rhetoric in order to advance his patronistic pseudo-liberal agenda.
I study religion (off-hand, not as a legit grind) because I believe (
) that belief and faith are a part of our collective human legacy and requirements for social cohesion, not bygone superstitions/obstructions in a deterministic, linear path of human progression. That's why I cape for this shit, that's why I'll always provide alternative explanations when I hear arguments that frame religion as a foreign and atavistic other. Religion and religious rhetoric is imagined and reimagined regularly depending on what an individual, group, and/or society finds most suitable to their interests; it's no different than any other social construction in this respect.
When statistics like these are brought up in western media they read, to me, like hand-wringing more than anything else. There is no excuse for insurgent violence -violence period for that matter- if for nothing else than because it doesn't endear you to whomever you're being violent towards, nor does it foster amicable long term relations in an increasingly centralizing global climate that demands interconnectedness. 30-40% of a surveyed group condoning violence is obviously a dangerous opinion to have. Also dangerous is accepting statistics like these at face value without being willing to understand how they were compiled, how the questions were worded, who the interviewees are, and most importantly, why those individuals might hold those views to begin with.
