Some of us might have heard of the recent attacks in Glasgow Airport (see pictures here)



Recently, I came across a few articles bordering on concerns as to whether any religion should be questioned. The one of particular interest was one that was boldly titled: We must be allowed to criticise Islam by Will Cummins.  Here is a condensed form of the article:


       "The problem is that a virulent hatred of Muslims can no more be racism than
       a virulent hatred of Marxists or Tories. Nobody is a member of a race by choice.
       Such groups are protected from attack because it is unfair to malign human beings
       for something they cannot help. However, nobody is a member of a community of
       belief except by choice, which is why those who have decided to enter or remain
       within one are never protected. Were such choices not open to the severest censure,
       we could no longer call our country a democracy. . .

       All that divides a religion from a secular ideology is something whose existence -
       supernatural support - is disputed by adherents of the latter. To privilege supernatural
       belief-systems by law would be to impose the view of the faithful about this on everyone,
       the situation that prevailed in the Middle Ages. This time, it is Islam, not Christianity, that
       New Labour wants to impose on Christendom.

       A society in which one cannot revile a religion and its members is one in which there
       are limits to the human spirit. The Islamic world was intellectually and economically
       wrecked by its decision to put religion beyond the reach of invective, which is simply
       an extreme form of debate. By so doing, it put science and art beyond the reach of
       experiment, too. Now, at the behest of Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves
       on us, New Labour wants to import the same catastrophe into our own society."

     Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/11/do1102.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/11/ixhome.html


What do y'all think about this: should a democracy be allowed to criticize Islam or not?

If a country like Saudi Arabia is free to prohibit the building of churches, make the ownership of a bible a capital crime punishable by death; if a country like Iran can prosecute christians caught evangelizing and the Sultan of Sokoto can call on the muslim ummah to "counter" the growing "threat" of christian evangelism then WHY should christians or atheists be unable to criticize the most violent cult/religion in the world?

It's just about time that people begin to ask questions and challenge the ideologies that are already a global threat. I see no reason why Islam should not be questioned in terms of its tenets in relation to non-Muslims.

Each and any religion or creed should be freely and openly criticised, especially those world views that consider criticism to be blasphemy, the ultimate victimless 'crime'. Anyway, my latest tag line says it all:

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. (Mark twain)

use ur head, islam aint democractic,

We know Islam isn't democratic - and that is why the question is asking if a democracy should be allowed to criticize (query) Islam.

Muslims should ask themselves why it should seem fair to dessert their own Islamic countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc) and migrate to the democratic West in search of better living conditions? And when they get to the democratic countries of the West, they see it as their religious birthright to introduce the same elements that turned their own countries into the unbearable hell from which they migrated away from.

Islam should be criticized - as even Muslims know that they have always been criticizing the democracies of the West. The ideologies in Islam feeding the disturbing global trend of terrorism should very well be questioned.

if terrorism is the cancer, islam is the blood vessels that feed it.

davidylan:

if terrorism is the cancer, islam is the blood vessels that feed it.

Well said mate.

@nferyn
i agree with you.