A good post, stizzleomnibus. We disagree on a couple of points, but you presented our overall positions very well. I now see how my choice of terminology has blurred the discussion a bit - I'll get more to the issue below.
@Villain: I've watched that video before, and every time i can't help but think that Bill Maher is a big arrogant idiot who thinks that he holds the truth. Sure, i can gather a few mass destruction videos, quote some allegoric texts and find some extremists who will say ridiculous stuff, and make a point against anything too. If he were to be objective and analyze the issue thoroughly from all sides, present some sane people's opinions from all sides and then make his point, i would be more willing to watch his whole movie. As far as i'm concerned, he's just another fanatic who can't look past his ironic nose.
Please show me a single video of extremist atheists causing destruction on the scale Maher shows. If you fail to do so, you apparently can't "make a point against anything", now can you.
One more point i'd like to make (which obviously didn't pass through my cheese parabole -i guess atheists and paraboles are like water and oil, they just don't mix), is that i didn't see in that whole video (i haven't watched the movie, so i don't know about it), and i have never heard in any discussion with an atheist, anything about buddhism, taoism and all the other less known religions. They always make their examples from christianity, islam and judaism.
There are two obvious reasons for this:
1) Just like you said, they're
less known to us Westerners. When discussing global politics, you don't expect us to make our examples based on some tribal rules of some obscure island nation, do you?
2) Eastern religions are so different to us that comparing them to Christianity, Islam or Judaism is always difficult. First of all, they are often
atheist or
agnostic by nature, but an "atheist religion" sounds like an oxymoron to many of us. Instead of calling them religions, more than a few people today consider them nontheist philosophical systems, not that different from, say, Confucianism or even Platonism.
This is why tackling Eastern religions in this topic is pretty pointless. However, as you asked, and as a Buddhist (irreligious) friend of mine has recently taught me lots about modern Buddhism, I'm going to educate you a bit.
Last time i checked buddhism was still a religion, wasn't it? Since i'm not too familiar with it, would you please explain to me why it's an evil religion and what threat it poses to the world, like Bill Maher so aptly did about christianity and islam?
Apparently you didn't check too deep, otherwise you'd found out that the vast majority of modern Buddhists are actually irreligious or nontheist. As such, they pose no more threat to the world than, say, dandyists, or any other people with silly philosophies. Modern Buddhism is just as far removed from Western religiousness as European atheism is. Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" and one of the most vocal critics of all religions, practices Buddhist spiritualism - calling him religious would be stupid.
However, forms of extreme religious Buddhism (or rather smaller religious groups calling themselves Buddhists) still exist and their practitioners have caused great harm to many innocent people (especially in Sri Lanka). Some quickly searched links about religious Buddhist terrorism and violence:
http://terrorism.about.com/od/politicalislamterrorism/tp/Religious-terrorism.htm
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/asia/burma-bck5.htm
http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-2-13.htm
This extremist religious Buddhism should be treated just like any other religious extreme: it must not be tolerated. If this religious Buddhism was spreading as aggressively as, say, Islam, it would certainly threaten the world. Luckily, there's no such trend in sight; quite the contrary, modern Buddhism is spreading and traditional Buddhism is becoming less and less religious.
Modern Buddhism is a great example of the difference between faith and religion: you can fully believe and have faith in the Buddhist teachings, yet remain completely irreligious (meaning here, free from control of religious dogma and leaders). In the past I've used the terms of "organized religion" and "personal religion" to denote the difference, but a kind person pointed out to me that the former term is redundant as social organization is always part of a religion, while the latter term can be reduced to just "faith" for the sake of simplicity. Thus, when stizzleomnibus condemns the dark side of organized religion and promotes personal religion, I'm actually in agreement with him - we just use different terminology (and our scales of darkness are presumably slightly different).
The moment Christianity, Islam and Judaism (and the rest of their kind) become irreligious like modern Buddhism, religion is truly dead and mankind has been saved. That's the goal I'm aiming at.
When you say "religion must die" i take it that you mean all known religions, so you must be in the position to prove your point by explaining why each religion separately must die, otherwise you're an ignorant generalising fool who doesn't know what he's talking about.
And if I said "tyranny must die", you'd require me to explain separately why each and every tyrant and dictatorship on earth is evil, would you? And if a single dictatorship happened to be quite jolly, calling for the general death of tyranny would be wrong in your opinion?
No. This has very little to do with the topic. Am I intolerant if I don't tolerate intolerance? Am I a fascist if I demand that racist leaders are put to prison? Our society functions on the basis that threatening people and factions are isolated from the rest of the society.
Are you even sure you're not a religious extremist yourself?
Yes, I am 100% sure I'm not. For one, I'm absolutely not religious. And even at my most extreme, I'm far from the extremism we're discussing here (I'm not killing people, you know).
Just some food for thought.
Your dish is like feta - tastes bad and offers no nourishment (see, I can do it too).
But really, you demand objective analysis, yet offer no analysis or even a position of your own. You speak about generalising, then make extremely generalising statements about atheists (I'm far from a typical atheist, you know, my atheism lies more on an anti-religious and social than philosophical foundation). It really appears the only one who doesn't know what she's talking about here is you (which you already admitted in the case of Buddhism).
You may disagree with my choice of preferred action that should be taken to stop the spread of religious extremism, but to ignore that threat altogether is, indeed,
ignorance, and nothing else.
-Villain
EDIT: Salmis posted while I was typing, but he really summed the Buddhism part up well.
