Nah. You need to deconstruct the argument to see why it's shit (apart from being by Grayson, obviously).

The implied propositions are these:
1. All Muslims obey only the Quran.
2. All Muslims read the Quran the way the (non-Muslim, non-arabic speaking, non-educated in Islamic thought) Grayson reads it.
3. All Muslims act on everything this reading of the Quran says.

Without that it's merely stereotyping. Boring, prejudiced and moronic. That, by the way, is a critique of all stereotyping.

There is no doubt that the Quran can be read in such a way. There is no doubt that some Muslims do. There is equally no doubt that some do not. Grayson has not the faintest idea what the proportions are. If his argument was more than a crock of crap he would have.

Moreover, most Muslims - self-evidently - do not act on such a reading of the Quran, even if they do read it this way. It might make people feel cosy and nice if they spoke out against it but it's not their job. I think Baruch Goldstein and Mayer Kahane were racist murderers and I think Avigdor Lieberman is another racist but I'll be damned if I'll say it to some non-Jew's order.

You are left with a tiny fraction of Muslims who commit terrorist acts and a slightly larger fraction who support them. That ain't Islam in the eyes of any sensible observer. It is Islam in the eyes of the prejudiced idiot. This discussion hasn't moved on since I left it for Passover.

Last edited by Grossgrain Silk (2011-04-27 13:02:18)

Baruch Goldstein was indubitably a murderer, although it could be said that religious, rather than strictly racial animus, motivated his crime.

I never heard that Meir Kahane murdered anyone. Did he?

Is their brand of extreme Zionism, in fact, racist, in the strict sense? If all the Palestinian Arabs converted en masse to Judaism, would they then be totally welcomed by the Revisionist Zionists as brother Jews? That would seem to be the determinant here.

The REAL point of the link that I put up was to demonstrate that, where a text is ambiguous, maniacs will always opt for the interpretation that suits them. The fact of the matter is that most Muslims, in most states, do not urge forced conversion or to overthrow the laws of the states in which they choose to reside, even though those states are linked to an established religion which is other than Islam. And, yes, there are loony toons in all religions. Many notional Christians or Jews are no more concerned with the fine detail of their religions than most Muslims. This is because they don't care and because they are, anyway, too ignorant to engage in discussion about it. After all, most people are ignorant of everything except the things that concern them in their little daily routines of simple survival.

Another point arising: how clear is it that 'conversion' to Judaism is actually possible? Are Jews not just a religious order but also a race, deriving from certain tribes? Likewise, it is not possible to 'convert'to being an Anglo Saxon.

Last edited by Grossgrain Silk (2011-04-27 16:57:30)

Last edited by Maximilien de Robespierre (2011-04-28 13:00:42)

Max has covered most of the bases. I would add that conversion to Judaism was so common that I have heard it estimated that at a peak one out of seven citizens of the Roman Empire was Jewish. Liberal, Hellenized Judaism, as represented by Philo Judaeus, was destroyed by wholesale defections to Christianity and by the ascendancy of strict, rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Temple.

Conversions to Judaism are by no means uncommon. Case in point: the late Elizabeth Taylor.

I don't think conversion to the Roman Catholic Church is that difficult a procedure. You have to take a short course of instruction, and you may have to be conditionally re-baptized (if you are already baptized) before being received into the Church. At least such is my impression.

As to Marc's comments about literal interpretation of the Bible not being "current Xian doctrine," I would venture an educated guess that the majority of serious, practicing American Protestants these days would proclaim themselves to be strict, literalist Biblical fundamentalists.