re: #49 Mattand

That’s exactly what Bill Maher’s going to do on his show on Friday. Guaranteed.

How much you want to bet Sam “I’m not saying eradicate Muslims everywhere, BUT…” to make a surprise appearance?

Maher doesn’t use Islam as a cudgel to hit Republicans. Conservative religous nuts like Dreher absolutely love using Salfist wackos as some sort of indictment of strawman liberal PC buffoonery.

Maher has legitimate critiques, although he is sloppy about painting everybody in the Islamic world with a Salafist and Wahabist extremist brush.

Yes, medieval attitudes, nihilism and horrific human rights abuses are rampant in certain interpretive sects of Islam.

Yes, the fact that there is no overriding authority for Islam and the interpretation of Islamic Law and various sacred texts makes it easy for nuts and charlatans to create nihilistic murder cults.

Yes, you can find scientific polls of Muslims in Egypt that indicate many people believe some things that are utterly incompatible with our own values about religious freedom. (And guess what…they think our culture is just as fucked up, but for different reasons)

Yes, you can even make a case that democracy is incompatible with some brands of orthodox Sunni Islam (although you could have made a similar case regarding both Protestant and Catholic Christianity during the 30 Year War in Germany during the 1600’s) since as structured, it allows for no division between religion and civic life.

Different cultures have very different values. Some of those values may be things we find strange or even abhorrant, and often those things have little to do with religion. In any event, the overwheming majority of Muslims do not support this sort of thing and find it just as reprehensible as anybody else.

Maher needs to acknowledge that.