Pepsi Upsets Religion Again

aren't they talking about an islamic news channel?

in the US, I mean, something to compete with CNN is what I heard.

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Piffka wrote:

Here, let me help you. I'm a nasty prejudiced person who is totally inconsiderate of the wonder that is Islam. Everything I have ever read about Islam is wrong; everything you have ever learned is right. There is no danger to women in Muslim countries and the state department is wrong to suggest it. All those people who say things like that... they're simply misguided or prejudiced, or both.

However, why don't you ask your Muslim friends what happens to Muslims who decide to leave the religion?

Piffka,

I think everyone has some prejudice. It does not mean you are a nasty person.

I can personally attest that every woman who went to Egypt that I know told me that it was not a good place for women to go by themselves. Not because of danger or anything but because of the different way in which they were treated. I did not consider those women to be nasty.

In Brazil for e.g. the way a woman is treated in São Paulo is vastly different from the way a woman is treated in Bahia.

Bahia is a northern state that tends to have people darker in skin and is a lot poorer than São Paulo (São Paulo has a street that houses 80-90% of Brazil's GNP).

That the cultural difference in the way women are treated exists is fact. São Paulo is more metropolitan than Bahia. It can be said that Bahia is not as advanced.

But Brazilians take it to a prejudicial level when they discriminate against Bahians (not saying that you have done this). An equivalent for the word "cheesy" is "Bahianada". An insult in São Paulo is to call someone "Bahiano"(from Bahia).

I think the people who do that take the cultural difference and turn it into a prejudice that actively discriminates. We all have prejudices of some sort but what we do with them makes a difference.

I really don't think anyone here was trying to say you are a nasty person, just that there is a fine line between recognition of a cultural deficiency and unhelpful generalizations.

The thing is, it might not be so much a religion thing. In the past Christiaity was very sexist (a bunch of men begat everyone for e.g.) but times have changed in the US dramatically. IMO it is due to money and education and it might not be Islam that is the root of the problems you mention but rather a general problem with education in the Arab world.

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I'll take some fire away from Piff here, and I'm not just saying this for the fun of debate: I believe that all of the monotheistic religions are outmoded and, when taken to their extremes, dangerous. I have qualms about spending time in any place that is governed by the precepts of these religions, and will take such governance into consideration when I consider going to a place, be it Pakistan or Utah. I am uncomfortable in my own country every time I hear from elected leaders about "God" this and "immoral" that. In much of the American heartland I feel quite frankly unwelcome, not because I fell that most people are looking askance at me but because I feel that some are. If it makes me a bigot, so be it, but organized religion is a source of ideas and frequently a tool of authoritarian control, and it will always be a consideration for me, whether I like it or not.

Don't get me wrong: I have no beef with people as individuals -- but hive-think scares the sh!t out of me.

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Patiodog wrote:

...be it Pakistan or Utah.

Well, Mormons may be not less observant and rigid than Muslims, but unlike the latter they are not violent en masse.

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A (patritular) religion must be differentiated from local or historically formed customs, though the relation of the both are complicated.
(Arithmetic is universal, but how to treat numbers can depend on local customs.)

Nowadays religions are in the front, but distorted forms of nationalism can cause the same problems.

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I think there's a VERY good reason America was founded on a separation of church and state. It's protected us from some of the reasons why I think it's good that the catholic church is NOT my country. (That's a prejudicial statement - see? I have my prejudices, as well)

I just asked nimh what happens to Muslims who try to leave their religion. He said I should ask my Muslim friends. But I thought about it, and I imagine that they are treated no differently from -say- certain religious sects in America who shun people who relinquish their religion. I *imagine* that's mostly what would happen - in the eyes of an orthodox muslim, you would be thought of as part of that "bad" world that isn't the religious world. You're tainted. In their way of thinking, they're acting logically. <shrugs>

Of course, that's all conjecture, and I'll have to ask someone.

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Anastasia wrote:

I *imagine* that's mostly what would happen - in the eyes of an orthodox muslim, you would be thought of as part of that "bad" world that isn't the religious world.

Hmm, this is a grim prospect. Islam divides world into two parts: Dar el-Islam (the proper Islamic world) and Dar el-Harb (literally, the world of sword, i.e., the world that is to be conquered by the Islamic sword and consequently Islamized). When such a belligerent concept constitutes essential basics of the religion, apostasy is tantamount to treason, with all the consequences that stem from this fact.

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steissd wrote:

Patiodog wrote:
...be it Pakistan or Utah.

Well, Mormons may be not less observant and rigid than Muslims, but unlike the latter they are not violent en masse.

No, they don't (well, not since the late 19th century, anyway), which is why I chose Utah as my second example. If I restricted myself only to examples where there was a threat of violence, I might have diluted the fierceness of my anti-religious sentiment.

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I don't have a problem with anti-religious sentiment per se, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story here. I don't see any distinction made between the different kinds of Islam as there are different kinds of Christianity (for example.) Do you really think religion is the only reason you are uncomfortable in the heartland, patiodog? Are there really no religious people where you do feel comfortable?

My main point (and the point others have been making as well) is that I get figdety when Islam, en masse, is identified the way you identify the hearland. There are equivalents of both Sacramento and, what, Waukesha in the Muslim world, and I would seek to correct the misconception if I saw them being lumped together.

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sozobe wrote:

I don't have a problem with anti-religious sentiment per se, but it doesn't seem to be the whole story here. I don't see any distinction made between the different kinds of Islam as there are different kinds of Christianity (for example.)

I'm not inclined to make huge distinctions for Christianity, either. I mean, I admire the work that certain churches do, but I don't really dig what's behind it. That book is full of some really freaky messages, things that if you truly took literally and led your life by, you'd be shunned by most societies.

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Do you really think religion is the only reason you are uncomfortable in the heartland, patiodog?

The "heartland" was perhaps an unfortunate example in this regard, for there are plenty of places there where I feel perfectly comfortable. I don't feel perpetually uncomfortable out there: half my people are from Missouri, so culturally I am not at all out of place except around the hard-core "God and country" folks.

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Are there really no religious people where you do feel comfortable?

There are plenty of religious people I feel comfortable around. That's not really the issue. On an individual, face-to-face level, people are generally assholes or they're not, regardless of their formal belief system. It's when I feel that the religion is used by a ruling class (here's my classism coming into it) to manipulate, to control, that I feel uncomfortable. (I'm having trouble articulating this, because it's something I usually don't bring up at risk of offending people I like perfectly well.)

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My main point (and the point others have been making as well) is that I get figdety when Islam, en masse, is identified the way you identify the hearland. There are equivalents of both Sacramento and, what, Waukesha in the Muslim world, and I would seek to correct the misconception if I saw them being lumped together.

But my impression was that this developed over a flap over not thinking it worthwhile to visit the more cosmopolitan places (I suppose this is what you mean by Sacto, which is pretty much an overgrown cowtown) because of their proximity to certain elements from the rural, backward areas (Waukesha? if I'm grasping the comparison correctly.) I agree with Piff that life is probably too short to go on making the distinctions; if I'm going somewhere to relax, I'm going somewhere I feel comfortable doing it. That doesn't just apply to religions I don't identify with: I don't want to go kick it in a Jamaican resort next to a tin-and-cardboard slum, either -- though I might go somewhere a little more low-key and make a hypocrite of myself anyway.

Dunno, maybe there's something in this mess of words somewhere. (And careful about playing city mouse/country mouse there, soz...)

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More simply: there are actuarial considerations to be made. What sort of unpleasantnesses might I encounter, what are the odds of them happening, and how much unpleasantness do I feel like putting up with? I don't think Piffka is out of line in saying that some (if not most) religions foster particular sorts of unpleasantness. That is not to say that anything like a majority of the people are likely to do anything nasty because of it, but it doesn't take that many people doing something nasty to screw things up. Human history can attest to that. Most of the people I meet are perfectly nice and harmless; I surmise from this that most people throughout the world today and throughout human history were also perfectly nice and harmless, as individuals; and yet, look at how nsaty most of human history is.

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Hmm, I wonder if my "hearland" typo means anything...

Yeah, this flap is kind of hard to trace -- I was really reacting more to the generalities that have been quoted by nimh and Craven and maybe anastasia too than the specific visiting thing. Such as

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I feel sorry for Muslims -- they are caught in a religion, where once captured, they cannot be free. Consider reading the works of Taslima Nasrin.

Some are, yeah, but not all by a long shot. So I'm trying to compare that to Christianity -- some Christians are "caught", too, but we know a lot that aren't.

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The following question is not entirely rhetorical; I've fallen out of touch in touch with world events in the last few years.

Granted, most people in the world in general and in predominantly Islamic countries don't stone anybody, or practice female circumcision (not, as far as I know, a traditionally Muslim practice, but it's been mentioned, so I'll include it here), or confine women to what is essentially house arrest, etc., etc. But how many of the countries in the world where such atrocities are taken are under the rule of Islamic governments? I live in a country where the popular voice supposedly rules, yet a new president hasn't been elected with the majority of the popular vote in fourteen years; I don't cling to the illusion that any government truly represents the character of most of its people -- but still, it at least looks like there might be some common thread here.

(Understanding, as I type this, that there are historical factors quite apart from religion at work in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Nigeria...)

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Sure, there are bad bad Islamic regimes out there. I said a while back that Salman Rushdie has had some doozies of essays condemning them, and calling on all Muslims to condemn them as well as for the west to condemn them. Condemn condemn condemn.

I think the only place that anyone got uppity was when this got away from specifics -- this country with this regime does bad things and I am uncomfortable with that -- and into generalities.

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I think patiodog was going slightly beyond that, though. Latin America had a bit of a problem with military dictatorships, a decade or two ago. It didn't somehow make Latin-Americans inherently totalitarian of nature, but it did mean something was rotten in the continent - something beyond the coincidental baddie regime here or there.

We do seem to see the same thing now in the Muslim world. Though most Muslim countries are a far cry from Afghanistan and most Muslims still reject fundamentalism, political Islam has made tremendous inroads, and its more militant adherents have made their presence felt as far afield as Bali. In short: they've got a problem. And one that seems connected with some very current trends of or within Islam as a religion.

Merely pointing out that this or that excess is regionally determined and an ahistoric anomaly in the overall track history of the religion, or that Christianity had such times too, does as little for confronting that problem as declaring Islam and all Muslims 'tainted' per se. There's the rub. Blanket generalisations don't contribute to insight, but perhaps we do have to acknowledge that, by now, 'generalities' are coming into play, that go beyond the individual evil of this or that state. Al-Qaeda, to name but one random radical fringe group, has had the wind in its sails from Sudan to Saudi-Arabia to Afghanistan to Indonesia this past decade - that's a general enough trend. The trick is to acknowledge that there might be something rotten in the state of Islam, as such, currently, without succumbing to determinist "Islam is by nature bad" simplism.

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Here is one of the essays I was referring to by Rushdie:

http://main.faithfreedom.org/Articles/rushdie/yes_its_about_islam.htm

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I take a 3-minute break from this thread (yes, we have a newspaper on the loo, in the category 'too much information'), and I find this news item. From one extreme to another?!

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Egypt gets its own Baywatch

Rtr - Cairo

The Egyptian producer Yousef Mansour wants to make an Arab version of Baywatch. [..]

The original American TV programme is known for its manifold showing of female and male beauty.

The Egyptian counterpart, called 'Action in Hurghada', will be about a team of Arab beach guards that rescues those drowning and solves crimes.

The actresses will wear bathing suits, which is exceptional in the conservative Islamic Egypt. Most of the times woman go into sea with many clothes on there."

Apparently the series is also intended to "give another image of the Middle East" - "There is more than war and murder here. And we don't really all tumble in the desert on a camel", so the producer.

... ... ...

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sozobe wrote:

http://main.faithfreedom.org/Articles/rushdie/yes_its_about_islam.htm

<nods>

pretty much.

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<ahem> for my part - I was reacting mostly to the word "fear" and statements like these:

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Geez, if you did something similar with an image of Allah (which of course, you couldn't, since that is another taboo), you'd have your body sliced into tiny pieces and left for the crows.

<shrugs> My interest was piqued. I mean ... yeah - how does someone get ideas like that? Do people really believe things like that?

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(sorry I'm late - I went to bed. <winks>)

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