I think we should respect all religions (people might not know their friend is devoted to muslim or Chrisitanity etc)

[Eagle367]

Fei-Hung said:

Used to work for PVE up and down the UK. The simple take here for a lot of which happens across religions is when we do assign something due to religion / race and when we don't. There is an inconsistency.

Black shooter - gang banger
Muslim shooter - Islamist
White shooter - mental health

Take another example: if a Catholic priest grooms kids, is it because he is a Catholic or because he is gay? Or is it because he is a pervert and should be treated as a criminal who happens to be Catholic?

Another example was when I was invited to a Home Office meeting. Someone made a statement that said there is a grooming issue with the Muslim Pakistani Kashmiri community in the north.

So I asked, is it happening because they are Muslim, Pakistani, Kashmiri or in the north or all the above?

At the same time, why was the fact they were part of a drug group being ignored? If you don't look at the source of the issue then you will never be able to get to the bottom of it and there will be never be justice for the victims.

Another example is the likes of ISIS and AlQaeeda. In the Muslim world they are known as Khawarjites. They are not considered Muslim as they are seen to be people who use religion to use violence for political and personal gains. They break serious rules and regulations within the religion. However, the only people who agree they are Muslim and empower them are the group's themselves, their supporters and far right extremists as well as the media and governments who do it for clicks, votes and contracts.

Every religion has made a great contribution to the world as we know it. Everything from hospitals, laws, core science and medicine to food, architecture and entertainment including video games.

We can either focus on the negative and sit here and argue all day or we can get along. You either want cohesion or you don't.

People arguing about forced marriage in Islam let's say, has nothing to do with the religion at all. That is cultural but people are so miseducated to cannot tell the difference or have been brainwashed to believing it is a religious issue.

I agree with you mostly there but some corrections. Daesh and Al Qaeda are wahabists, not khwarijites. They are still muslim but not good muslims, or good human beings and I hope they rot in hell. We as muslims had issues about people calling each other not Muslim and creating a lot of issues so scholars from all sects decided that to be Muslim you just have to believe in one God and the final messenger. Everything else is ancillary. No crime or sin you commit can remove that from you and only God can know since we humans cannot read minds.

But other than that yes, people confuse a lot of cultural problems with the religion. Islam requires consent from the people getting married. Forced marriages are against Islam. And yes people also ignore the material conditions that give rise to reactionary thinking.  And yes people also misunderstand the meaning of words like sharia and jihad.

I think the biggest problem with religions is how bad faith actors can use it to justify atrocities. That there is much malleability that you can do whatever you want and still pull off that aesthetic. Like the military in Myanmar is using Buddhism to genocide rohingyas, Modhi and RSS are using Hinduism to justify oppression, daesh and al qaeda use Islam to kill and murder people, Israel is using judaism to occupy Palestine and have an apartheid state and evangelicals use Christianity for all of their reactionary bs in the US. The reason Christians and Islam seem to have more problematic elements is because they are the biggest religions around. The more people follow something, the more likely there will be bas faith actors in that group trying to use the ideology towards unwanted events.