Religion - A Roadblock

Submitted by Mark D (United States), Feb 21, 2014 at 11:38

Thanks for the response. ...

I read Dr. Pipe's archives on this. Dr. Pipes respects Islam and I am merely using his words, "respecting the faith". Specifically he - who can be said to display enormous strength of character on this - have said

"I respect the faith of a billion people".

And he prefers to focus on the problematic parts of religion and not fighting the religion as a whole, something I grapple with, but I gravitate – at least for now - towards referring to religion as a whole.

As for my post, half of what I said was stating an observation. Perhaps the interpretation of the tone overshadows the meaning.

A few things -

"Respecting one's faith". It means respecting people's faith. "one" does not mean oneself alone.

But none of this means that we cannot or should not criticize any particular religion or even the concept of religion in general.

Never said we cannot or should not criticize religion.

Though I would not say to Islam something absurd like "Go chase yourself! Go climb a tree! Go fly a kite! Go jump in the lake!" I do say to Islam or, more correctly, to Muslims, "I respect your religion but I believe that there are some elements and aspects of your religion which are badly in need of reform."

George Bush, propelled by his Christian faith, made the contemptible decision to block federal funding of stem cell research. I wish someone had told Bush - with ferocity - to have him say those things ("Go chase yourself…) to his faith, so we would have averted a loss of 8 years of valuable scientific and medical progress. Here we see with painful clarity how respect of one's religion does a great disservice to society, and probably we'd be able to land on Jupiter today or have a cure for cancer if not for religion putting barriers throughout history. So, here I say whenever there is infringement, I say people should tell religion, with Islam as an example in the post and not directed to a Muslim individual, who may or may not be an Islamist, to go chase itself.

In a similar vein, I believe Dr. Pipes figuratively expresses the same thing on his blog but on Islam or Islamism only and it's intrusion. As an example, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/06/islamists-in-the-hospital-ward

And I believe many on this board ... I don't necessarily agree with all that they say, but they say to it, as a matter of observation ...

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