Apparently, those who disapprove of minarets do so because they have lost their own faith.
Minarets are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith
Poppycock! What is it about the religious that they cannot understand those that have no faith, need no faith and can manage perfectly well without it? I’m uncomfortable with the minarets vote, but the groan really does scrape the barrel. There are no wounds in which to rub salt.
But if the Swiss and other Europeans were self-assured about their own identities, their Muslim fellow-citizens probably would not strike such fear in their hearts.
The reason it strikes fear is because Islam is a proselytising faith that will use any means open to it to convert or subdue. It is a primitive, mysoginistic belief system that cannot separate the religion from the culture and legal system. Islam is where Europe was in the middle ages. Europeans, quite reasonably, don’t want to return to that. Indeed, it is because we are comfortable with our identities without believing in supernatural deities that we worry about the rise of this archaic alien superstition.
Like most CiF contributors, Ian Burma is an idiot. Not least for his closing comment:
That said, it would surely help if we had fewer referendums. For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.
What good judgement?
“For, contrary to what some believe, they do not strengthen democracy. They weaken it by undermining our elected representatives, whose job is to exercise their good judgment rather than voice the gut feelings of an anxious, angry people.”
Yeah, the Beeb has been pushing the ‘Oh, noes! Democracy – do not want!’ line too…
.-= My last blog ..Experts May Be Full Of S***, Claims Everyone Else… =-.
Good judgement from politicians? I suppose in theory it’s possible, just because I haven’t ran across it myself shouldn’t preclude its possibility.
A bit like God, really and about as rarely experienced 😉
Perhaps it is Mohammed’s injunction to “convert by the sword” that makes Europeans wary of his religion of “peace”. Europeans haven’t yet understood that his religion is also a warfare manual and a system of government all wrapped up in one.
What we give as religious tolerance, they take as our submission to their dominance.
Quite.
The reason it strikes fear is because Islam is a proselytising faith that will use any means open to it to convert or subdue
A characteristic that is common to most religions. They just want to spread the ‘good news’.
No, they don’t “just” want to spread the ‘good news’. They want to enforce it, together with their primitive rules and prohibitions, upon others.
No, they don’t “just” want to spread the ‘good news’. They want to enforce it, together with their primitive rules and prohibitions, upon others
And that’s different from other God bothers in what way? Jeez, it is not so long ago that a God bothering Christian succeeded in criminalising consenting adults for engaging in consensual BDSM. Forgotten about that, junior? But I guess that’s perfectly OK because she wasn’t a Muslim. Freedom hatred is freedom hatred, whatever the religion.
Indeed – and if I had been a pagan during the rise of Christianity, I might have said something similar about that religion. Perhaps the biggest difference between Christianity and Islam is that the former has been through an enlightenment and is no longer (in most countries) able to operate a theocracy. Doesn’t mean that they don’t want to, though.
I am an equal opportunity despiser when it comes to religion – a plague on all their houses.
the former has been through an enlightenment and is no longer (in most countries) able to operate a theocracy
Tell that to the victims of the extreme porn law.
This was not a product of theocracy, it was politicians jumping onto a bandwagon. Not the same thing at all. if you want to draw a comparison with that one, draw it with the handgun laws or dangerous dogs act. The analogy is closer.
Listen, Grandpa Stephen, I’m in my 80s now and played a leading role in the campaign for the Wolfenden reforms in the 1950s and ’60s, and also did public battle with Mary Whitehouse and her “moral majority” friends in the ’70s and ’80s, so there’s not much you can tell me about Christian intolerance. There aren’t many would-be Christian theocrats around now – except maybe the Pope – but there are plenty of Muslim ones; the whole basis of Islam is that there is no distinction between religion and government.
Like Longrider, I want none of any of them, and they still have to be fought off, alas.
I was waiting for that comeback 😀
This was not a product of theocracy, it was politicians jumping onto a bandwagon
It was a product of religious ideology.
So? Neither Anticant nor I have said what you have suggested that we have said. Indeed, your argument here almost amounts to a tu quoque.
Bandwagon jumping was precisely what his case was – irrespective of the seeds from which it was sown. That does not make it a product of a theocracy.
Ah – the religious!
The thing that strikes me is that they ALL, of whatever faith, want you to be like them. They want you to believe what they believe, adore what they adore and worship what they worship.
Funny thing is, you NEVER hear of Militant Atheists blowing up shopping centres, you NEVER see Fundamentalist non-believers beheading kidnap victims, you NEVER learn of hard line agnostics machine gunning schools.
Atheists don’t prowl the neighbourhood at evening meal times, knocking on doors and wanting to convert you into non-belief.
All atheists, non-believers and agnostics want is to be left to believe in what they believe in, and not to be ‘converted’ into worshipping some invisible sky fairy.