Originally Posted by SmallBowl

The crucial part here for me is "(you can be a muslim if you dont believe this literally)"

Even if it wasnt a majority that disagreed, I would find it important to differentiate between the people under the religion who did agree and whi didnt - especially when their views differ so radically. The sentence highlighted above makes a huge difference to how a muslim is influenced by the religion they follow.

Im not sure what exactly you meant by where you draw the line, but it sounds as if you are drawing the line at people who take the Qu'ran entirely literally, which seems like an extreme place to draw the line because you are sectionning off the majority of people who identify as Muslim. Personally I am of the view of, if someone identifies as Muslim they are a form of Muslim, even if their values and ideologies differ from all others following the religion.

I dont find it illogical because I can see the steps you took to get there, but as explained above I do think you are missing crucial points.

I do understand your point of view now, and the main difference, if I have understood correctly is that you draw the line of Muslim at fundamentalist. The big issue here is that, just like many Muslim speakers saying fundamentalist muslims are not true muslims it seems to me that your steps use the no true scottsman fallacy to section off a huge swathe of Islam - if you get what Im trying to say

Originally Posted by cowmeat

Well I think I phrased it a bit poorly, I did not mean you have to believe everything in quran literally, but that you have to believe that quran is the word of god, otherwise you cant be a muslim (that being the literal definition of a muslim).

So I don't think you have to be a fundamentalist to be a muslim, that misunderstanding was due to my poor phrasing. But I still think even if you don't believe everything the quran says literally, if the word of your god says that homosexuality is bad, it will have a negative impact on your behaviour. For the same reason, homophobia is more noticeable in christian communities than in secular ones. What the quran says, even if you dont accept everything literally, will influence you since you still believe its divine.

Thats what I meant. Sorry for that poor phrasing.

But all this comes back to the point, that this way I can still generalize a concept of islam that is not contradictory. It's based on the belief that quran is divine and thus what the quran says is highly influental. Not to be mistaken with fundamentalism.


Ps. Fixed that literally part of the previous post, read it again.

Originally Posted by SmallBowl

This is all true, but, in the case in point of Omar Mateen - it is safe to say most Muslim teachings, particularly in Western society would not inspire this act which is why I think in cases like this it is important to give the branch of Islam he is acting from. Would you agree with this?




Another thing, its come through the news today from the nightclub that "Omar Mateen has been in the nightclub at least a dozen times before so it is almost certain that he had other motives for what he did".