At the end of this interview, Ryan Bell] asks non-believers to “put on pause” their disagreements with this young woman. She is a Muslim, very progressive. She has ideas about ‘getting back to the original Quran’ and that ‘cherry picking is okay’ (scare quotes). But those are the rare points in this interview that will make you wince. In the rest of it, she is talking about how to bring progressive values to Muslim countries. She has all the statistics against those governments like Sam Harris does but speaks with warmth of her traditions. She’s a musician, but much more, she is the president of Muslims for Progressive Values and has spoken at the UN. Really gives me hope for the future.
mckenzievmd’s sentiment about enjoying the holiday despite lack] of believe expresses where I think she is pointing. She is talking about applying universal values to the Quran and recognizing how they were applied back in the 7th century. She doesn’t say like that, but that’s what atheists have been doing all along. We’ve been saying there might be a few good things in the ancient scripture, so let’s keep those and let’s be sure to not promote the bad things. Anyway, hope you enjoy it.
Muslims who share this young woman’s interpretations of Islam are, I think, the best hope for a future in which the world lives in peace with Islam. She and others who speak out should be considered heroes of all. They are facing mortal danger by doing so. They have a severely up-hill battle, as the trajectory for Islam has been in recent times, and will be for the foreseeable future, an extraordinary force for establishing and spreading oppressive, in-humanistic, and imperialistic ideologies.
Islamic traditions that promote the enshrinement of the oppressive aspects of the hadith and sharia law are the enemy of freedom and tolerance for all people. We infidels along with most Muslims, I think, have not figured that out, yet.
I am posting this site reference: Redirecting... because it is informative and because I think that it is slightly more important than Mozart’s pissing and moaning about not being on a continuous endogenous high, and that this thread more richly deserves most recent billing in the category of Religion and Secularism.