Ben Affleck vs. Bill Maher and Sam Harris on Radical Islam

[Oville]

Anyone who thinks that Harris talked about the muslim people as a whole is just pure stupid, that's just a bad excuse for you to feel good about believing in your religion. Sam Harris talks about the IDEAS that influence the people. Most muslims are good people, just like most people of any religion are good people, but the good people are the ones who doesn't take their own religious scriptures seriously. This is a fact and nothing that you can throw away by some immature comment like "you're saying everyone is this way".
The fact that these stupid comments on this thread got several "likes" is absurd and just depressing for anyone trying to be as intellectually honest as possible.

Our morality comes from our instinctual emotions in conflict with our intellect which is growing/evolving still, thus atheism growing big. Christianity has been through reformations which induced new leading interpretations of the scriptures. Where does these interpretations comes from and why? They come from our INTELLECT because the majority of the society started to realise that their way of following the scriptures made a bad immoral society. But instead of tossing the scriptures out of the way, they wanted to keep the faith on God and Jesus and therefor also kept the scriptures. Islam hasn't had a reformation in the same way but tons of people are still living good, being respectable people, because their intelligence is bigger than the scriptures itself. Unfortunately, a pretty big minority do believe in horrible ideas that are represented in the holy book of the Islam religion and the results speak for themselves.

We should all see ourselves as a collective god, WE are the ones who can change the world to the better. Some good ideas are radical, and radical ideas will always offend someone. But if all people lived their life in fair of offending someone, our society would never evolve.

I agree with everything that you said. However, the issue with what people like Sam Harris and Bill Maher say is that Islam is that the text for Islam is harder to reform than it would be for Christianity because there's more calls to violence and misogny in the Quaran than the stuff that Jesus said. What I feel Harris and Maher fail to realize is that Christianity isn't only rooted in the New Testament but the Old Testament as well. Books like Leviticus also call for stoning for disobeying God, disobeying parents, adultery, homosexuality etc. Even Jesus justifies Old Testament rhetoric like death for disobeying parents, a dress code for women, etc. However Christianity in a lot of areas has reformed. There's no reason why Islam couldn't either especially when Islam like the Bible has text that calls for peace and tolerance along with violent rhetoric. The reforms that took place in the Christian world were due to secular democracies being put into place which is something that needed in the Islamic world. I say all this as someone whose agnostic and hates the idea of religion. I just know that the arrogant "ya stupid for beliving in this shyt" rhetoric that these "New Atheist" be employing is not gonna do anything to have people reconsider their religious beliefs.