The Paris Attack Debate Thread

[Jaron]

i guess we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. i'm not sure i can prove my argument, and i don't think you can prove your argument.

I can make my prima facie case very easily.  The Koran does call for violence.  Muslims do a shitload of terrorism.

The Koran has been around for over 1500 years.  Yet Islamic terrorism is a very recent phenomenon.

I'm not sure the Byzantines or Sassanids or Arab Jews would agree.

It's not the same thing.

[Malthus]

i guess we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. i'm not sure i can prove my argument, and i don't think you can prove your argument.

I can make my prima facie case very easily.  The Koran does call for violence.  Muslims do a shitload of terrorism.

the Bible calls for violence, Christians do a shitload of violence.
Israel's more militant factions relies on their sacred texts to justify Israel's expulsion of the Palestinians.

Israel makes a tough case study for this sort of argument, on either side. Some of its (arguably) most religious citizens dislike the existence of the state because they view having a country called "Israel" as blasphemy; on the other hand, many instrumental in the state's violent origins were very religious - but most Zionists were atheists and socialists. The most violent 'terrorists' in its history were the Irgun and Stern Gang, who were not notably religious: their terrorism was ethnic and political. However, in modern times, many "settlers" are religious. Of course, there have been notable Jewish religious terrorists in Israel, but their targets are as often the state as Arabs - for example, Yigal Amir, who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister. 

[grumbler]

I like that people started calling them Daesh, sounds like the Danish word 'das' which means old fashion toilets (hole in the ground style).

Good.
Never liked how willing everyone is to call them Islamic state. Seems like a bit of an acceptance of them

  So, calling them Islamic State in their own language is somehow less of an "acceptance" than calling it that in English?

SMH

[Berkut]

He doesn't need to prove the causal connection - there is what's called a factual presumption (or the "talks like a duck and walks like a duck" principle).

All he needs to show is that Koran calls for violence and that those who commit violence are quoting Koran - this is sufficient in any court of law to create a presumption that there is a causal connection between the two. The burden of proof then shifts to the other side which claims that despite these facts, there is no connection between the two.

The problem with this is that you can make the same link with all religions.

This is the most frustrating of arguments.

It simply IS NOT TRUE.

Religious doctrines have actual content. They have directives, instructions, systems of thought, ideas, etc., etc.

They are not all the same - of COURSE they are not all the same.

Hence it is, on its face, simply NOT TRUE that you can just declare them all equal in that content. The idea is simply inane.

Different religions make different demands on their followers, and have different justifications for those demands. This results in differences in behavior of those followers. This is self evidently true.

Some religions, as they are understood and practiced today, are more accepting of violence than others. That is a direct result of their actual doctrines. No major religion is particularly consistent within the set of followers, so there is large variance between all of them, and individual adherents fall in some range of their tolerance for various behaviors.

But any reasonable person comparing the Koran to the New Testament, and concluding that they are equally tolerant of mayhem, murder, and violence is simply refusing to see what is right in front of them - they are not the same.

[Barrister]

I like that people started calling them Daesh, sounds like the Danish word 'das' which means old fashion toilets (hole in the ground style).

Good.
Never liked how willing everyone is to call them Islamic state. Seems like a bit of an acceptance of them

  So, calling them Islamic State in their own language is somehow less of an "acceptance" than calling it that in English?

SMH

Yes, apparently.

Daesh: This is a term the militant group hates. French President François Hollande has used it since the attacks Friday, and first used it in September 2014. It's an Arabic acronym for "al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham." It can sometimes be spelled DAIISH, Da'esh or Daech, a popular French version. The hacktivist group Anonymous and President Barack Obama have used the term since the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.

Thanks to Arabic wordplay, it could also be an insult. "Depending on how it is conjugated in Arabic, it can mean anything from 'to trample down and crush' to 'a bigot who imposes his view on others,'" Boston Globe writer Zeba Khan reported in October 2014. ISIS threatened "to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh, instead of referring to the group by its full name," the Associated Press wrote in September 2014.

http://www.ibtimes.com/isil-isis-islamic-state-daesh-whats-difference-2187131

[Syt]

I like that people started calling them Daesh, sounds like the Danish word 'das' which means old fashion toilets (hole in the ground style).

Good.
Never liked how willing everyone is to call them Islamic state. Seems like a bit of an acceptance of them

  So, calling them Islamic State in their own language is somehow less of an "acceptance" than calling it that in English?

SMH

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/14/9734894/daesh-isis-isil

A short guide to ISIS's many names

There are, broadly speaking, four things that people call the group: ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, and Daesh. This is largely ISIS's fault; a big reason the group has so many names is that it keeps changing it.

When the group's predecessor organization was created in 1999, it was called Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which means Unity and Jihad. In 2004, the group's founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, pledged an oath to al-Qaeda, changing his group's name to Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn — or, as it was called in English, al-Qaeda in Iraq.

After AQI took over huge swaths of Iraq in 2006, the organization declared itself to be a state in northern Iraq and started calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq. When it took a bunch of territory in Syria in 2013, it began calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham — ISIS.

Al-Sham is a difficult-to-translate Arabic term referring to a specific geographic area along the eastern Mediterranean that includes Syria. Some English speakers translate al-Sham as "the Levant," which refers to a broader region in the Middle East that generally overlaps with al-Sham. This is how you get ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), as the White House and others call it. Others still approximate al-Sham to Syria, which yields the same ISIS acronym.

The full name in Arabic is transliterated like this: al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham — which produces the acronym DAIISH (usually spelled Daesh in English). That sounds an awful lot like the Arabic word "dahes," which the Guardian translates as "one who sows discord." ISIS kind of hates this insulting connotation, and so banned the name "Daesh" in its territory.

But it doesn't use ISIS either. Crucially, the group now claims to be a caliphate — that is, the successor of the original seventh-century founding Islamic nation. As such, it dropped the geographic identifiers from its name, and simply calls itself "the Islamic State."

The case for calling it "Daesh"

A lot of news organizations use "Islamic State" or "the Islamic State" for a simple reason: It's what the group calls itself, and accuracy is important. But politicians and governments generally don't. They've got some pretty good reasons: Calling it the Islamic State helps ISIS sell its message, and helps insult Muslims to boot.

The name "Islamic State," as opposed to ISIS or Daesh, is at its heart a propaganda tool. By claiming to be the caliphate, ISIS is implying that it's the only state true Muslims should obey: Around the world, they should pledge loyalty to the one and only Islamic State. This message is part of how ISIS recruits and thus keeps fighting.

Hence why British and French authorities are moving to the more derogatory Daesh, which doesn't imply that the group is either a real government or an authentic representation of Islamic thought.

"Islamic State, ISIL, and ISIS [give] legitimacy to a terrorist organization that is not Islamic nor has it been recognised as a state," 120 British MPs wrote in a letter to Lord Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC.

It seems unlikely that anyone joins ISIS because of the words David Cameron or Barack Obama, let alone a TV news anchor, uses to describe the group.

But there's also an issue of insulting and stigmatizing Muslims. Using the name Daesh sends the message to French and British audiences that they should not equate ISIS with Islam. Given the large Muslim minorities in both countries, and their struggles with assimilation and intolerance, this is an important message. A group of British imams wrote a letter to Cameron last year asking him to call it the "un-Islamic state."

Cameron, during a BBC interview, called the name Islamic State "a perversion of the religion of Islam, and many Muslims listening to this programme will recoil every time they hear the words Islamic State."

The case for calling the group ISIS

While it's Cameron's job to combat ISIS propaganda in the UK, it's the BBC's job to accurately inform its audience about ISIS as an organization: what it believes, how strong it is, what it wants, and, yes, what it calls itself.

For non-Arabic-speaking audiences, Daesh is merely another unfamiliar foreign word. But "the Islamic State" helps convey the group's core ideology: It sees itself as an Islamic government, not merely another terrorist organization.

Understanding this is critically important to understanding how the group works. It's also important for understanding how it's being fought. Because ISIS is ideologically committed to governing and defending its territory, it needs to fight a conventional war rather than an insurgency. This point is not well understood; most people think of ISIS as something like the Viet Cong or the Iraqi insurgents of the mid-2000s.

At the same time, "ISIS" is perhaps more accurate than "Islamic State" because, despite the group's efforts to sow violence in other countries such as Yemen and Libya, its claim to statehood only really stands in Syria and Iraq.

As for the issue of whether the last word in ISIS's name should be translated as "al-Sham" or "the Levant" or "Syria," there's not really a single answer.

[Berkut]

Same with the non-religious. Everybody should be banned.
Actually that would solve the problems

No, we atheists are the good guys.  We don't kill in the name of religion, so that's much less offensive.  Imagine the confort of the dead knowing they were killed for rational things like ethnicity, language, land or water instead of their beliefs?

You think killing people for their ethnicity is rational?

Are you trying to hit all the dumbest argument ever in one day?

Pointing out that people sometimes kill for other reasons than religion is no meaningful response to pointing out that religion gets a lot of people killed.

So fucking what?

It's like someone saying "Hey, drunk drivers are a serious problem - people are killed and injured all the time by them! If only we could do something about that!" and your response is "ZOMG BUT PEOPLE DIE FROM PLANE CRASHES AND THEY DON'T FEEL ANY BETTER ABOUT IT!!!!ZOMG!!!!11111KKKKKK"

1. People getting killed in non-religious violence is bad as well. We should do something about that.
2. That has nothing really to do, however, with the fact that lots of people are killed as a result of religious violence, nor is it any kind of response to a discussion about that problem.
2a. I don't know why you brought up atheists at all. What does atheism have to do with ethnic violence, or greed over land, language, or water? Are you trying to argue that being atheist some how leads to that kind of violence? Could you please quote me the atheist doctrine that results in said violence, because last I checked "atheism" was simply the lack of belief in a deity, and I really don't see how that could possibly result in anyone doing much of anything in and of itself.

[Razgovory]

I like calling them ISIS.  It sounds like a James Bond villain or something.

[Malthus]

He doesn't need to prove the causal connection - there is what's called a factual presumption (or the "talks like a duck and walks like a duck" principle).

All he needs to show is that Koran calls for violence and that those who commit violence are quoting Koran - this is sufficient in any court of law to create a presumption that there is a causal connection between the two. The burden of proof then shifts to the other side which claims that despite these facts, there is no connection between the two.

The problem with this is that you can make the same link with all religions.

This is the most frustrating of arguments.

It simply IS NOT TRUE.

Religious doctrines have actual content. They have directives, instructions, systems of thought, ideas, etc., etc.

They are not all the same - of COURSE they are not all the same.

Hence it is, on its face, simply NOT TRUE that you can just declare them all equal in that content. The idea is simply inane.

Different religions make different demands on their followers, and have different justifications for those demands. This results in differences in behavior of those followers. This is self evidently true.

Some religions, as they are understood and practiced today, are more accepting of violence than others. That is a direct result of their actual doctrines. No major religion is particularly consistent within the set of followers, so there is large variance between all of them, and individual adherents fall in some range of their tolerance for various behaviors.

But any reasonable person comparing the Koran to the New Testament, and concluding that they are equally tolerant of mayhem, murder, and violence is simply refusing to see what is right in front of them - they are not the same.

However, the same reasonable person would also note that "religions, as they are understood and practiced today" are not the same as the contents of the New Testament and the Koran, respectively - that (for example) most forms of Christianity have put as much emphasis on the teachings found in the "Old Testament" as in the new (plus various philosophers, saints, and others); similarly, Muslims look to the oral traditions and sayings (Hadath) in addition to or as interpretation of the Koran.

Of course, each sect or group puts different emphasis on different aspects - so you get a very wide variation of practice within those groups called "Christian" and "Muslim" over time, from quietist Quakers through murderous Puritans, or from mystic Sufis through murderous Daesh. 

You could not predict that from simply reading the New Testament and the Koran. Which is why simply reading one or the other and concluding a straightforward causal connection between the violent bits in the Koran and today's violence isn't a good strategy. The more important thing is why the group committing today's violence chose to emphasize the violent bits, as opposed to the non-violent bits that also exist (and are chosen by other groups). 

[Admiral Yi]

Murderous Puritans?

[viper37]

The New Testament most definitely does not call for violence.  Exactly the opposite.

Depends on how you see it.  The Crucifixion of his son is ordered by God.  Some Christians feel compelled to crucify themselves every Easter day.  I'd call this violent.  People are pressured into doing it to be be a good christian, even if disavowed by the Pope.
Eradicating other factions of Christianity in the name of God is a very religious thing to do.  Let's kill 'em all, let God sort 'em all, and all that kind of things.
Bominb abortion clinics is a religious thing to do, killing murderers, dispensing God's justice and all.

[viper37]

Are you trying to hit all the dumbest argument ever in one day?

No, I was sarcastic.

Even if we abolished all religions, we would still slaughter ourselves for various reasons.

[Malthus]

Murderous Puritans?

English Civil War Hijack! 

The Pogues perhaps put it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-y2ox2HPnc

[Eddie Teach]

Murderous Puritans?

They murder the buzz.

[Razgovory]

Murderous Puritans?

George Washington's ancestors had to leave Britain because of angry Puritans.  They also invaded Maryland to stamp out "Poppery".