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Your prerogative. I just don't think they believe you. Where's the great groundswell of support for the banning of Muslims? Even Europe, which has much more serious problems, probably won't.
So what's the point of catering to people like you anymore? You lost, as they see it. If 9/11 and the rise of ISIS or the grooming gangs didn't cause a ban or rethink nothing will.
If any part of my post is sympathetic to the case it makes about how people think it's that we all know it won't stop at this. Plenty or even most American Muslims tolerate this (I grant there's just a seemingly impossible to filter minority that become deranged and use violence that punches way above its weight) but "live and let live" is a lie. The minimal secular state is a lie.
Liberalism doesn't really compromise, it just pauses to reload. On many matters American Muslims are just conservative religious people circa a couple of decades ago and that is theoretically acceptable within the secular framework of the country, but will constantly be put under pressure by liberal hegemony.
What exactly has the constant compromising bought Christians? Have evangelicals stopped being the boogeymen? Did the liberal state take the win on gay marriage and leave it at that? Or is it demanding the right to trans and indoctrinate your kids as well? And what's the response to complaints? That it's just like gay marriage, which you were on the wrong side of history for. This argument actually works on people.
Muslims might be willing to accept some sort of millet system or one where each faith has its own way but with neutral strictures to protect freedom but clearly that's not what's being debated.
The debate is one side saying Muslims are incompatible with the country, and the other side saying they're compatible so long as they cede moral sovereignty and start down the long road of becoming Unitarians or some other faith colored appendage of globohomo that's gonna die anyway (the churches with the lowest apostasy rates are not the ones that just go along to get along). Hell, it's arguably already begun with Mamdani and co. You can see why people don't want to give inches away rhetorically.
You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now, but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.
Liberalism is the compromise. If you don't care for it, the alternative is Deus Vult and blood eagles and the red ruin of your culture.
Yes, because he said he would do it and then ran into a series of legal speed bumps precisely because he said he would do it and then settled for a much less ambitious policy. Even his attempts to target Somalis specifically yielded very little, because many of them already had citizenship.
And Muslim immigration continues, and will continue after Trump. And Muslims are now politically relevant in Democratic primaries and will continue to be so.
The high watermark for this sort of thing was 2016 and even then it didn't get particularly far.
In Europe it's even worse.
Okay? My goal wasn't to evangelize for Islam.
You can put my post on a flyer if you want but I just don't think it'll help you. IME progressives are incredibly stubborn about this. People will sit with an exmuslim who grew up in the faith and they'll listen to them tell them things like this and they'll decide they know better, when they don't even know anything about Christianity. Limits on white/mansplaining go completely out the window and you get subject to Tafsir Al Kaffir about what the religion obviously meant when the Qur'an or scholars said X or how this or that American policy or material conditions are why people are being killed for making the wrong cartoon.
Much smarter, more eloquent people like Sam Harris have been trying their entire career and achieved nothing.
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I think education is and always will be the crux here. The progressive view trends towards the idea that religious freedom is a right to be exercised by legal adults making an informed, personal decision as to which religion seems true to them after being exposed to the full spectrum of options, such that attempts by parents to raise young children within a particular religion scan as prima facie sinister attempts to box in their thinking before they're old enough to make up their minds for themselves as they're entitled to. The conservative view, meanwhile, is rooted in a deep feeling that the right of parents to raise their children within their hereditary belief system is sacrosanct, and any attempt by the state to mitigate this amounts to a sinister totalitarian plot to brainwash kids and break apart communities. One is individualistic, the other is communitarian.
These are idealized views, of course: religious conservatives would struggle to defend against the charge that they're just upset at somebody brainwashing their children other than themselves rather than anything more principled, while progressives don't cover themselves with glory with regards to "okay, but are you actually giving young minds an unbiased range of options or are you just weighing the scales in a different direction". And misc. interference patterns arise from the ol'Oppression Olympics, such as progressives sweating bullets when asked to criticize sharia schools as their principles should normally dictate. But nevertheless, I think that's the basic dichotomy at work, the scissor-statement nature of "the state should stop parents from indoctrinating children into their religion" as a proposition.
The religious conservative view is not that parents have a right to propagate their worldview. It is that we are right and you are wrong, and children are highly impressionable and need paternalist guidance.
I mean, sure. But there are, in my experience, religious conservatives who, to the extent that they tolerate other faiths, think it is in order for children of those faiths to be educated as their parents see fit, even if those parents are wrong - while it is in some deeper sense not in order for the state to indoctrinate them into anything. They regard it as much more degenerate for the state to teach e.g. Jewish children to be woke communists than for their Jewish parents to teach them to be Jewish, even if they think Judaism is a profoundly blasphemous heresy. Part of this may be strategic thinking about what equilibrium most favors their own religion, but I've always gotten the sense that there's a deeper instinct at play, a sincere belief about the natural law and disgust at the state muscling in on what should be the prerogative of the family. Maybe that doesn't apply to you, but it's a thing, and I suspect it's a fairly widely-shared gut-instinct.
Yeah, as a religious and relatively conservative person, I would say that the natural role of a parent is to take care of their child and a child to be instructed by their parent. Thus, while the parent (or rarely the child) can do something bad enough to warrant severing that bond, severing the parental bond is itself an act of violence and should only be done in extreme circumstances.
Thus I wouldn't want to take kids from "woke communist parents" or whatever - even if I was absolutely convinced that they were wrong, taking kids away from their parents is a good way to convince them you are wrong. Whereas I think that a good parent-child relationship and familial relationship serves as a model and a stepping-off point for other relations in society. Turning someone towards religious truth (or social or political truth, to the extent that there is such a thing) is, I think, more difficult if their first relationship (with their parents) is disordered. Thus, while a sufficiently disordered relationship may be cause for separation, disordering a sufficiently ordered relationship may itself make a person's relationship with society (and God) more difficult.
Hopefully that makes some sense.
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But what do you think they think of woke communist parents indoctrinating their children to be woke communists?
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You're definitely correct about everything except that the Muslims are also going to go gay and trans just like Christians did.
Take a look at the cratering birth rates in Muslim countries. Look at the absolute softness of their military forces. The selection process of modernity hasn't even fully hit them yet. Can Abdul from Riyadh resist internet porn and video games? Doubtful.
Well Western Muslims likely could there's already gay affirming Mosques in the West. Non Western Christians don't hang rainbow flags in their churches either.
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Don’t Islamic countries actually have very high rates, comparatively, of online Vice- gaming, porn, gambling, etc?
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You're thinking like a Puritan. The point isn't to eliminate sin, it's moral hegemony.
Abdul from Riyadh can both watch porn and still be all for the murder of any gay person who got uppity and tried to challenge the faith.
Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order. (A lot of Muslims love to sin while vociferously resisting pork since it's an outgroup marker, for another example)
The real problem is whether Mohammed bin Salman feels the same. The state can only keep it's people fat on oil-created do nothing jobs for so long.
Lots of western Mohammedans eat regular bacon, and don’t check what the content of their sausage is, and eat whatever a bbq joint specializes in… while still refusing a pork chop. I’ve even met some who will drink vodka like a fish and then refuse beer or wine because Islam.
Right, homosexuality was a lot less stigmatized when everyone agreed it was a distasteful personal Vice.
You know, I can understand trying to rules-lawyer with the notion that the Qur'an only refers to fermented grapes when it says khamr is haram (most schools read the prescription as being against "intoxicants", period, but I think a minority did try that) but being fine with vodka but not beer is very odd.
Wish I knew what exegetical maneuvers justified that.
When I got to college I preferred vodka too, but that was because I came to alcohol late and just hadn't acquired the taste for beer and decided I'd rather get fucked up as fast as possible. But I was past justifying it religiously.
I suspect that ‘exegetical’ was not these people’s reason.
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...Then what are honor killings about?
Oof, fair. It's about your daughter/sister/relative being a whore and harming the family's collective honor, and needing to correct this (presumably because she refused to be corrected the easy way).
Geographic and class bias but, ime in West Africa, killing your daughter for being a slut wasn't something commonly contemplated but the idea that the gays and their flags were not to be tolerated and the President could just handle them harshly enough to drive them out or at least underground was much more common. It was bad for the President to be torturing locals but those people...eh.
Meanwhile, heterosexual sex tourism was apparently ineradicable.
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I'm more thinking that the only groups that have successfully resisted modernity are the ones that have extremely strict systems set up to defend against it like the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Even groups like Mormons are getting steamrolled. I think Muslims will get steamrolled too. They might still maintain their "otherness", but they'll abandon their true belief and become feminized just like other groups have.
The Amish and the Hasidim have(often badly dysfunctional; these are not paradaisical cultures) worldviews alternative to modernity. The Mormons are fundamentally modern people. That's the difference.
And Islam comes with a complete premodern worldview and value system, complete with legal code straight out of the eighth century.
So did pre-enlightment Christianity and Judaism. Canon Law and Jewish law aren't that different from Sharia.
The haredim are the only people that take halakha seriously… and canon law is not actually very similar to sharia.
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