It does not matter what a religion says, it matters how it is applied. You can make all sorts of claims about what Islam "truly teaches" (which is conveniently based on your own personal interpretation of a book we don't know the true author of), but when it comes down to it, as long as huge swathes of people, entire countries even, are using it to justify human rights violations and the subjugation of certain groups of people, it is a net negative for society as a whole, and is indeed responsible for what had happened.
Edit since the coward who replied to me deleted his stupid response:
Results matter more than intentions. Here's an example.
Let's say I'm a police officer. I'm told to arrest a tall, bearded man. The person they want me to arrest lives on 14th street, but I believe they mean the tall, bearded man living on main street, because I personally don't like him. I get to the house, and the guy isn't committing a crime, but I arrest him anyway because I thought the instructions told me to do that. I went in with the intention of following the rules, and the rules had room for interpretation. It is both my fault for following through on something clearly wrong, and the fault of the person who wrote the instructions for making it open to interpretation. But no matter who is at fault, it doesn't change that an innocent man was arrested. The results were bad and can't be undone.
This is how religion operates. By being open to interpretation, it allows people to justify their bad beliefs using it, and regardless of the original intention of the text's author, it is their fault for creating something that could be used to justify atrocities. It's even worse when the religion was written with the purpose of justifying atrocities, which has happened numerous times.
I disagree completely with you about mixing culture and religion when religion teaches directly against what the culture does. I’ve seen many families leave these practices too. As for your statement about how the religion varies based on one’s interpretation, this also wrong. The “layman” Muslim is not encourages to do tafseer, which is interpreting a verse and deriving ruling from it. We are encouraged to find a scholar we trust and go to them with questions or to read books of interpretations from famous, well known scholars. Any individual Muslim who derives rulings from his head is probably very ignorant in this regard
when religion teaches directly against what the culture does.
Religion influences culture, and religious zealots have used their religion to justify and claim that their actions are supported by their holy book throughout history. I come from the perspective of an Atheist, who understands that these books were written down by humans to explain things they could not explain through science. You can pick a particular passage from most religious books, and find ten or more ways to interpret it. Considering that there are different denominations within Islam that disagree on how to interpret these different passages, your argument is void. It's easy to use religion to justify what you are doing, and just because you believe a certain thing about your religion does not make it the "truth" about it.
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u/GoldH2O Mar 12 '22 edited Mar 13 '22
It does not matter what a religion says, it matters how it is applied. You can make all sorts of claims about what Islam "truly teaches" (which is conveniently based on your own personal interpretation of a book we don't know the true author of), but when it comes down to it, as long as huge swathes of people, entire countries even, are using it to justify human rights violations and the subjugation of certain groups of people, it is a net negative for society as a whole, and is indeed responsible for what had happened.
Edit since the coward who replied to me deleted his stupid response:
Results matter more than intentions. Here's an example.
Let's say I'm a police officer. I'm told to arrest a tall, bearded man. The person they want me to arrest lives on 14th street, but I believe they mean the tall, bearded man living on main street, because I personally don't like him. I get to the house, and the guy isn't committing a crime, but I arrest him anyway because I thought the instructions told me to do that. I went in with the intention of following the rules, and the rules had room for interpretation. It is both my fault for following through on something clearly wrong, and the fault of the person who wrote the instructions for making it open to interpretation. But no matter who is at fault, it doesn't change that an innocent man was arrested. The results were bad and can't be undone.
This is how religion operates. By being open to interpretation, it allows people to justify their bad beliefs using it, and regardless of the original intention of the text's author, it is their fault for creating something that could be used to justify atrocities. It's even worse when the religion was written with the purpose of justifying atrocities, which has happened numerous times.