Every Muslim living in the West should read this...

[JEDIYoda]

Actually someone already did, and he did respond.

Here's the thing that prevents Islam from spiraling back towards 1400 years ago: most humans have a pragmatic side. They selectively enforce portions of their religions and pay lip service to the rest, because enforcing all of it is impractical and unpopular. The Pope is against things like abortion and contraception yet you will find many Catholics who disobey.

Now, that's not to say that Muslims are just like everyone else--they are overrepresented among international terrorists and if you look at Muslim polls, a shocking number of people actually agree with things like the penalty for apostasy. ("But in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, medians of more than half back both severe criminal punishments and the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their faith.") So I think it's pretty apparent that as far as religions go, Islam is one of the harder-core ones and has grown more conservative in the last 50 years, in part due to Wahhabist funding from Saudi Arabia that has influenced its neighbors. If Saudi Arabia's official religion were a more lenient version of Islam, then I don't think we'd see as many problems with Islamic terrorists over the last several decades.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

I think Turkey is an interesting exhibit of what a modernized Islamic country might look like. Ataturk was a closet atheist who successfully introduced education to women, banned religious garb in government buildings, and Romanized the Turkish language, among other things. It was a top-down imposition, so even today you see the divide within Turkey: the liberal elite secularized cities vs. the conservative rural heartland. It's like the USA where you have lots of secular cities on the coasts and religious, conservative cities on the interior, but more so.

For years Turkey's army ensured that the country would remain at least nominally secular, but the thing about religious idiots is that they tend to make lots of babies, babies who grow up into crazy religious idiots like Erdogan, who is doing his best to undo Ataturk's secular legacy. Mr. Recep "Muslims discovered America" Erdogan served as Prime Minister already, wants to stay in power Putin-style (illegally). He's trying to make his current illegal leadership of the country legal by amending the Constitution, and the thing is, HE KEEPS WINNING ELECTIONS. Because religious crazy people make so many babies. This is why I keep saying that the best thing to do is to mandate high-quality education among women, so they stop cranking out so many poorly-educated nutjobs like Erdogan.

I thought it was too early to pick your kinky mushrooms??

 

[BurnItDwn]

Proably all Jews, Christians, Hindus, Budhists, Jainists, and even Sikhs should act like people too. Ooh, even Atheists and those confused agnostic atheists who claim they are not atheists can also read this.

Its kinda stupid to single out one particular type of person.

Some of the worst terrorists In my lifetime: Ted Kaczynski, Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols ...

The problem has nothing to do with religion at all. The problem has to do with fanaticism.