The world would be better off without Islam

Thanks for the detailed response Con. I’m always interested to learn how different Muslims view the Quran. I don’t claim to be an expert; and I am certainly not a Muslim. My problem with arguing for historical context is this: In no way does that excuse the behavior of these Bronze Age warriors. We shouldn’t be finding ways to apologize for the actions of brutal warriors, we should be studying them like we study most ancient civilizations. Only when you introduce religion to a historical figure do the apologists come out of the woodwork. Muhammad died and war immediately broke out. Yes, once that war was finished the Islamic Golden Age began. Let’s not forget that the Golden age was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Back then, it was much harder to be an atheist, much less a secularist, being that secularism wasn’t thought of until the Enlightenment. This is why other great scientists like Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of them all, were all mostly all theists. They didn’t know about modern physics, or Darwinian evolution. God was the only answer until fairly recently. Using a period of history to say that our modern world needs Islam is a shallow argument. The Golden Age occurred in spite of Islam and religious teaching, not because of it. One of the main reasons the Islamic empire collapsed (after the conquest of Genghis Khan, Crusades, etc.) was the preference of taqleed thinking over ijtihad. What truly killed the scientific and technological improvements of this time period? The caliph Al-Mutawakkil, whose reign is now marked and remembered solely because of his attempts to downplay the Greek philosophy they had been studying by labeling it “anti-Islamic”, his attempts to downplay science and reason in favor of religious interpretation and divine revelation, and his enforcement of the Quran and the Hadith. What killed them was the attempt to have more religion. 2:191 – That’s not strictly true. Muhammad is often the aggressor (Meccan caravans, the Battle of Khaybar, etc.). It says do not fight them in the place of worship, sure, but that’s only in the place of worship. It also just says seek them out and destroy them until they give up and convert. It’s a generalized command. Slaughter those who don’t believe the same as you. Kill them until they convert. 193, “And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.” This is in stark contrast to say, Jesus’ call for the unbelievers, who, I might add, was just as persecuted, if not far more so; when he says, “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” in Matthew 5:39. I don’t condone Jesus, but as a comparison, you tell me which is easier to interpret as a call to arms. 3:151 - You’ll have to explain to me how that can be only interpreted in the context of heaven, and more importantly, how that makes it any more acceptable. 2:216 – Again, you are going to have to explain to me how that is a self-defensive. What’s most vile to me isn’t the call to fight, it’s the call to ignore what you think is right or wrong and just trust that Allah knows best. That disturbs me. 4:6 – This verse mentions a ‘marriable age’ and nothing more. Let’s look at Muhammad. He married Aisha when she was six or seven, (which is bizarre enough), but he deflowered her at nine or ten. Bukhari, Vol. 5, Bk. 58, Num. 236, “He stayed there for two years or so and then he married 'Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consumed that marriage when she was nine years old.” If they set laws up to raise the minimum to a reasonable age for marriage, be assured that this is also in spite of what the Quran sets by example, and in spite of Muhammad. Hadith Sahih Bukhari, Vol.4, Book 52, Number 262 – You can’t wiggle your way out of this one. Muhammad says it plainly as anybody could. He says, “Kill them.” That’s it. So either you admit he was wrong and made a big, big, mistake or you accept the command. Again, if Muhammad gives an excuse for people to murder those who leave the religion, even if no Western Muslims follow it, the vileness of this verse still exists separately. It still marks the teachings of Muhammad. 2:222 – This isn’t really a big deal, but labeling menstruation as a sickness is not conducive to logical, respectful treatment of women. It’s not a sickness. The Quran is wrong. It’s a wholly natural process every woman goes through. 2:223 – This is a big deal. A farmer and his dirt is in no way comparable to a female human being and her male partner. A marriage is a two-way street. A woman is not a cow to be impregnated in order to produce goods. She is a human being to be respected. Surely you must understand this. She has just as much freedom, power, and civil rights as a man does. This is a deeply offensive verse to me. It really does offend me, and I’m a man. 2:228 – Even if I submit to that interpretation (which I absolutely do not), how is that any less offensive? No, a man does not have more responsibility over a woman. A woman is free to do whatever she wants. If she wants to leave the man because he’s an intolerant fool, that is her right. After surviving two abusive Fathers I have special experience in this area. Men are often truly evil creatures. To say that my step-dad had a special right to stay with my Mother would be sentencing not only my Mother but our entire family to years more of physical and emotional abuse. Too long have women been kept scared and servile to men like that over religious nonsense. As a working Journalist, I have publically attacked Fox News – I’ve personally taken great joy in shoving them out of media scrums whenever possible. Don’t tell me I’m like Fox News. 2:6 - You have redefined what a disbeliever is. That’s a very poor semantical argument with just about no factual basis. That’s not what disbeliever means. Unless you have better proof for this point I don’t think it stands up to any logical analysis. 4:144 - “…dumb Pickthall translator thingy” Really? Here it is in four other translations: Sahih International “O you who have believed, do not take the disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do you wish to give Allah against yourselves a clear case?” Yusuf Ali “O ye who believe! Take not for friends unbelievers rather than believers: Do ye wish to offer Allah an open proof against yourselves?” Shakir “O you who believe! do not take the unbelievers for friends rather than the believers; do you desire that you should give to Allah a manifest proof against yourselves?” Sam Harris, along with myself, do not ‘hate’ anybody. I don’t care what you look like, I don’t care what tradition you come from, I really, really, couldn’t care less. A bad idea is a bad idea; I seek out bad ideas and criticize them for what they really are: Bad ideas. That’s it. You made an error here. There are 671 verses of violence in the Bible, there are 109 verses that directly call for war with unbelievers. That is unique to the Quran. The Bible doesn’t call for Jihad – it doesn’t even imply it. Jesus says stuff like, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” In Matt 26:52. What really separates these two books isn’t that the Bible is all good and the Quran is all evil. The Quran has some great stuff in it, and the Bible has some great stuff in it. When we talk about bad stuff, the Bible is rife with bad stuff, but the Quran’s bad stuff is directly dangerous to modern society. It can so very easily be interpreted as a call to arms. The Bible requires more of a nut job to spin its verses into any kind of Jihad. To blame America for thousands of years of brutal religious conflict is disingenuous. These people have been slaughtering each other for thousands of years. The Muslims kill the Jews, the Christians kill the Muslims, the Muslims kill other Muslims, the Jews kill other Jews, etc. etc. I mean, if you seriously think that area was peaceful until 1949, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. WW1 really messed the region up, but they’d been fighting forever – (https://en.wikipedia.org...). We both agree on Israel. I’m totally on your side there. Why do they keep meddling with the Middle East? It rhymes with ‘toil’. I’m in no way Pro-America. I’m Canadian. We don’t like America. I never even remotely implied that the biggest problem in Islam is rape. You projected that – a strawman argument. What I did was provide a real-world example of what happens when we use Islamic teachings and the Islamic view of women to prosecute rapists. The Quran is oddly silent on rape. You’re right, it does talk about adultery, but not rape. Neither does the Bible for that matter. As for this preposterous view of male superiority: If you want to solve poverty, there is only one way to do it, and it works every time. Empower the women. Let the women control their birth rates. Let them choose when to get married and when to have kids and let them contribute to society. 4:15 – Thank you for making sure I understand it’s only life in prison and/or that it’s been updated to lashings. Using another totally separate issue to distract attention away from the issue we are currently discussing is a cheap tactic. U.S. interventionism is another issue I am wholly against and one that seems to be improving. We aren’t talking about U.S. interventionism, we are talking about Islam. I’ve rebutted almost all of your verses. You haven’t brought up any actual proof of a modern society that improved drastically when Islamic rule took over. You tried to use the Islamic Golden Period as a kind of real world example, and I showed how it was Islam itself that killed progress the Islamic Empire had made. Sources http://www.unwomen.org...