Quote Originally Posted by Poopadoop View Post
It's not that he's saying it's a 'bad' religion with some fucked up rules when it's adhered to passionately. I don't think anyone can dispute that (though I think we've made some good arguments about that being true of many religions).
It is true of many religions. But the question is, how easy is it to go from benign to miseryville within the constraints of the religion? If you want to lump all Abrahamic religions together and say they're all equally bad, well, I disagree, but they certainly are hard to distinguish on the spectrum when you have to zoom out enough to get Jainism within view. Can you at least grant Jainism is a better set of ideas than Islam?

It's the idea that everyone who belongs to that religion is by default dangerous until proven otherwise and shouldn't be allowed to emigrate here, and that if they are allowed, they'll breed like rabbits and take over and turn the UK into a theocracy. It's just such paranoid babble.
To be clear, I picked up on some of these vibes from Ong's posts as well. Just because I think you guys are forcing yourselves to be obtuse on whether or not Islam is a bad set of ideas doesn't mean I think immigrants should be turned away based on their religion, or whatever. Just like differences in the sexes, there's a huge overlap in the goodness of the adherents of different religions. There are tons of Muslim people I'd much rather have here than tons of non Muslim people.