re: #46 Varek Raith

He might be crazy; he’s not crazy about Islam however. It’s inconvenient for our democracy that only our own religious demagogues are making sense and speaking candidly about the nature of Islam. The problem is we have this one word, “religion”, which everyone wants to think names a unified domain of doctrines, but “religion” is a word like “sports”; there are sports like badminton, and there are sports like Thai boxing, and they basically have nothing in common apart from breathing. We have to be honest about the actual doctrine of Islam, specifically about the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, and only our own religious lunatics, frankly, are incessantly honest about the liabilities of these ideas; and with people like Mayor Bloomberg saying that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam and Islam is a religion of peace, and that is delusional on its face, and I think it’s a destabilizing lie that we can’t keep telling ourselves.

Turns out context matters. How ‘bout that.