@Monkey:
Ah I see, in your universe we have many strange phenomena that doesn't exist for the rest of us.
Facts are silverlinings.
Moderate countries are distractions.
And the details and complexities of discussing many incarnations across time and space of social customs are "splitting hairs".
Also somehow anything but the Taliban is irrelevant to the discussion of veils.
I have posted a comment about places where people are unveiled every single comment I've made thus far. I have not mentioned the taliban by name in a single one of them. And I have also explained my position on this matter a hundred times, but apparently, you can learn a whole lot about your personality by listening to other people's impression of it.
@Monkey:
Do you have any idea what a package deal fallacy is?
The word is new to me, but I think it is quite selfexplanatory.
@Monkey:
There are religious people everywhere in Turkey. It has high religiosity. Secular btw is not a belief stance in regards to religion. It indicates a society more acknowledging on the individual's freedom in regards to religion or lack thereof, rather than a crazy group think.
Also associating progressivism with low religiosity is fallacious as fuck. Finland, the Baltics and the Czech Republic are infamously irreligious. How then is that they are lagging on the gay marriage issue? Hell the Baltics are downright homophobic. Even Russia apparently has low religiosity, do I need to describe to you their problems?
And East Asia, oh East Asia, so free from western ideas of religion, graced instead by random scraps of Buddhist ritual mixed with philosophy. Surely those countries are free of sexism and homophobia. Truly.
When did I ever say that homophobia can only be manifested through religion? Hatred of homosexuals and biases against women can definetly be hold for a myriad of reasons. But if you're going to tell me that religion plays absolutely no part in this whatsoever, then you are so full of shit it's essentially bursting out of your ears. Religion gives an extremely strong rationale for hating homosexuals and treating women like absolute crap. At least islam and christianity. The difference between religion and for instance political ideologies or just other forms of dogmatism is that there is a strong taboo in criticizing religion. We will never find leftists defending the ideologies of nazis and try to ask us to see that ''some nazis don't actually think about the purity of the aryan race and don't hate jews, just have some prejudice''. However, on the subject of religion, we have intelligent, western people who are non-religious who will defend iron age superstition because… I actually don't know why you feel the urge to defend people's irrationality.
@Monkey:
Little choice to talk about what?
You very clearly were at odds that people were talking about hijabs in healthy environments, rather than the non-discussion of the unhealthy ones where everyone in this forum would have agreed on the topic.
Instead the discussion became one where a bunch of (mostly!) non Muslim westerners from Europe and N America alike sort of explored some of our preconceptions and prejudices a bit. As is relevant in our own countries since we don't live in Afghanistan or Iran. We live in places like Sweden, Finland, the USA, Canada. So yeah actually unlike Iran, where we have zero effect on their gender and government issues no matter how much we complain online…this discussion actually does produce good things in our own countries.
Okay, then I am going to put out the fact that women are forced to wear veils by their parents in Toronto and Malmö too. Now what? Are you going to tell me over and over and over that every last one of them are not forced, which I have not denied? All I've said is that in many, many, many MANY cases women who wear veils do it involuntarily. And even if they do it voluntarily, they would be excluded from their community if they decided to stop. Are there women who wouldn't suffer from this? Are there families where the oldest daughter does not veil herself and the middle child does? Absolutely. But for the 100th time:
as long as women are forced in many, many cases and would be suffering if they would choose to unveil themselves, this is not as important.
Let's just say New York state would implement a law that admonishes polish men to wear Victorian wigs. This issue surfaced on this forum and it turns out some polish guys in Oregon wear these wigs. you would not be one of those people who talk about all the polish men who want to wear these wigs. Now, just exchange this subject to ''girls from the muslim world who wear veils'' and all bets are off, we have to be sensitive towards the fact that not all women will suffer stigma ( legal or otherwise ). Is it because of religion? Is it because muslim people generally speaking are not from the west? I have absolutely no idea, the deeper point to be made here is that the time you've wasted branding me an intolerant bigot is really under the guise that religious savagery thrive.
@Monkey:
What you're saying here is "Yes I CAN fix my car with a rubber chicken!!!".
Moving on I guess.
@Monkey:
Do you even know what a hijab is, or is this entire discussion based around the idea that every veil type thing is a burqa.
A hijab is a piece of cloth you place on your head. A Burqa is the fullcover, mosquito web clothbag that I wouldn't defend even if there were women who wasn't forced into it.
@Monkey:
Sorry but that atheist victimhood thing doesn't really work when it's me you're arguing with lol.
I would take the victim cloak, unfortunatly religious people have claimed it for themselves.
Oh morals has nothing to do with that. Naivete and being very sheltered in a homogenous uber secular northern European cradle probably plays more of a role. I thought you were being sarcastic? Because this is something you actually believe. And among the dumbest too.
I seriously get the feeling that you really did grow up surrounded by nothing but irreligious Swedes, and then SUDDENLY MOOSELIMBS ARRIVE IN THE CITY FROM BUMFUCK PAKISTAN. No wonder you're so skewed on this. It's all you've ever known and interacted with.
You need to do more interactions with a wider spectrum of people from all sorts of shit.
You have a very wierd view of Sweden:
We have many people from other countries, in particular countries like Iraq, Iran, Chile, Yugoslavia, Thailand, Eritrea and so on. On top of this, we have many half thais, mulattoes ( of which I am a part off ). As a child I went to school with mainly immigrant kids ( had to change school though, since the black kids were bullied bullied by the arabs). When I changed school, I ended up with both immigrant ( including arabs ) and swedish kids working in harmony. Essentially all of my romantic relationship has been with non-swedish girls, out of which 2 have been from the Middle East ( Iraq and Lebanon ). So yeah, I'm not exactly the poster boy for the insecure white man. Will you change tactic now that you know I'm a minority? Will you perhaps ramp up your tolerance? Or will you stop calling me more or less ''an intolerant cracka'' and rightfully label me an uncle Tom or something like that?
@Monkey:
lol what the fuck is wrong with you
I don't know man. According to the quran I suffer from a disease that Allah has put in me to disbelieve.
@Monkey:
Because my extended family on my dad's side, (far outnumbering my mom's side) are Catholic. My more visible and tangible ethnic affiliations are also culturally Catholic.
And my entire region of country is largely Catholic as well. I may have zero interest in the religion personally, but we're talking kin and countrymen here. Yes, I am sensitive to people being dumb about them. Somehow this confuses you?
Okay well, there you have it. I gave you my opinion on the bible, christianity and the catholic church. I haven't been called a christophobe yet though.
@Monkey:
It has everything to do with a large amount of Christians of a variety of sects having long ago reconciled that they simply don't believe that homosexuality is a problem.
Mostly because it being a problem does not make sense.
We may be among the less religious parts of the US, but again our religiosity is not low.
I chalk it up to us being hetero(heh)genous religiously for a long time up here.
Personal rather than social relations to religion developed (as opposed to the extremely social attitude toward religion in the South), people become more open to thinking on religion, evolving on religion. And if you think Catholics sit around waiting to hear what the Pope thinks before they come to their own conclusion, than well it wouldn't be the first time you knew nothing about a religion in this thread.
But of course maybe that was in our natural culture up here, after all religion can't really evolve over time! We must have always been flexible personal minded religious people up here.
Actually wait a minute, how the fuck do you even rationalize the existence of Protestants with your view on religion being a slider from extreme to athiest. With the extreme defined by sticking to doctrine.
Okay, well, even if these christian sects concluded this, it did not happen because the christian doctrine is in the form it is. The bible tells us clearly that homosexuality is a sin and according to Leviticus and Exodus a killing offense. The new testament doesn't shed any interesting light on this by saying something like ''men can love men and women can love women''. So how did these christian sects you speak of come to terms with this? Could it have something to do with the fact that we for the past 300 years have tried to find different declarations of human rights, that makes the monstrous behaviour of the bible impossible to square with law and modern intuitions of what it is like to live in a fair society?
Where did I argue that all religions progress into atheism as time progress? Of course, groups of more zealous and more religious sects can break out from the mainstream ( Salafi/Wahabbis being a notable candidate ).
Ironically, protestantism isn't a good case in point. The regions that used to be protestant has more or less empty churches today ( Sweden, Denmark, Norway, North Germany England ) whereas catholicism has managed to prevail to a much more remarkable degree, even within countries ( Germany being catholic in the south and protestant (( now mainly atheist/secular )) in the north ). So protestantism seems to be quite fertile ground for creating more atheistic societies. That is not to say that I think protestantism stands out as much better than catholicism ( nor is it evidence that it is protestantism itself that creates atheism ). I happen to think that their foundations remain more or less the same and that I don't care too much about their perspectives:
christians have to argue for the legitimacy of the bible or I won't engage in that discussion. Whether they belong to some minor sect or catholicism is less important.
Muslims will at least come with some ( bad ) argument for why the quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. And for that I will respect them a whole lot more on their theological honesty.
About that word? Secular?
It means freedom from religious rule. Which means I am allowed to believe whatever I want without being punished by the state. This is a right that entails everyone and religion must not rule the nation. However, it doesn't mean I am allowed to excercise whatever my faith entails and it doesn't mean I have to respect what everyone else believes at the level of conversation.
And then there's lots of people who aren't very religious if at all, but their nevertheless highly patriarchal societies either attack or hush hush up the gays.
Yeah, and this is actually completely irrelevant, since I am not defending people's right to go on a fagdrag. You however are defending religious doctirine that entails homophobia by saying that not everyone who subscribe to this doctrine is homophobic, because they don't follow the religion properly ( whoopdiefuckingdoo ). So that is how far you can get by pointing at other examples of human biggotry. I hope you are done with this now.
Funny thing about the religion in the US actually.
Here's church attendance by state.
Connecticut is actually pretty high for the Northeast! Meanwhile Montana and especially Nevada are really low! And though gray there I can assure you Alaska is much like Montana. And yet those three states are either dragging their feet (Nevada) or acting rather like China does on the issue (Montana, Alaska).
It's almost like how religious people are isn't the factor here. But like..both other social issues…plus HOW people are religious.
That's interesting and all.
Really do, really do.
What the fuck does that mean. Really do.
For someone who was namedropping mad books in the bible, you sure seem amazingly clueless about the history of the church.
Gnostic, Arian, Catholic, Orthodox, hundreds among hundreds of Protestant sects. Man the Mormons alone would make you go haywire like a robot who can't process shit.
You know, I could answer what ''really do'' means, but I would sound like an unbearable smartass, so I'm going to spare you that.
How are different christian churches the least relevant? They only differ from one another on different interpretational details and happen to exist in different cultural regions. Thus the garments look somewhat different. But my problem with christianity absorbs more or less every dominion of christianity and every one of the religious movements can be critcized on exactly the same criteria ( their foundation: the bible ).
Ah, what's that old adage about how the farthest people on extremes kind of go so far they pop out the other end? Or start to resemble one another?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I am an atheist fundamentalist who want nothing more than to just burn churches and rape nuns. After all, we scandinavian infidels do have a pretty nasty history of that don't we?
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
This is the most unattractive you've ever made your country sound lol.
Sweden is looking less like a progressive utopia than it does one of those really sheltered rich towns to the near immediate west of me that votes heavily democrat but still jumps a bit when a black person walks by and learns all their social issues from tumblr rather than irl.
I'm more of a chocolate, bruno marshy looking guy myself, but I absolutely do not jump when I see a black guy.
@Westwood:
Swarthy is an absolutely hilarious word though. Sounds like it's describing like a Spanish pirate or something.
It sounds so unbelievably humiliating and degrading as a word. You can hear the hatred in it by just listening to the way it's pronounced. In Swedish ''svartmuskig'' sounds even worse. It feels like a word straight from some 19th century anthropologist and yet it is rather routinely used on Flashback forums ( which I am to this day concerned houses more lunatics than every mental ward in this country ).
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