Well the reason why I imagine you to be non-religious is because thats a prerequisite for the argument I intended to (and did) give. A (Christian or Muslim) religious person would disagree with my starting premise that there is no truth about a religion out there in the world. And indeed, for a religious person, the question of whether some religion X is Y may very well be a theological question, where sufficient study or faith or practice reveals the truth. This is not the sort of discussion I was interested in having.

I can certainly agree that there may be some core components to a dogma concept such that we would cease to call it that concept without it. And I certainly don’t believe homophobia to be a core concept of the Islamic dogma. (Core concepts would be fairly limited here, like that there is only one God, and Mohammad is the prophet of that God).

The question of what something is, unless specified otherwise, always includes was and will be.

Hmm, I’m not sure that’s correct. But in any event, the way I read the OP’s question, with its reference to post 9/11 Islamophobic claims and the veracity of them seems to be very much a question of how Islam is currently and has been for the past 20 years. Questions of historical Islam and some hypothetical future Islam don’t seem to me to be what’s targeted here.

Sure, so the question presented here is one about “Islam.”

I’m not a religious person, and I imagine you are not either (considering you use this website, I imagine you are a materialist). So, as nonreligious people, I think we should have no issue saying that there is no fundamental “truth” as to what “Islam” is out there in the world. Rather, what the concept/religion of Islam is just what its followers generally believe it to be. Like most concepts, there probably aren’t many super hard-and-fast necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather there is a family resemblance of concepts that exist in the minds of its followers, with some ideas being more core (i.e. believed to be part of the concept by more people) and some more fringe.

So, answering the question of whether Islam is homophobic (rather than was or has been historically) is just a matter of determining what beliefs/values with respect to homosexuality its followers attribute to it. I imagine Mahmoud would attribute his homophobia to the religion.

As you suggest, it could very well be the case that the Muslims who are homophobic have come to those beliefs due to their material conditions of their place of birth rather than the prevailing religion in the region. But then, insofar as such homophobic people consider themselves Muslims, and attribute such beliefs to being a value of such Islam, then Islam becomes/is homophobic.

Your response to me seems more interested in the question of whether Islam “causes” people to be homophobic. But that’s a distinct question from whether Islam is homophobic.

Separately, if you want to argue that Islam is only homophobic if it “causes” people to be homophobic, then I don’t see why it has to be “the more probable cause” for a person’s homophobia in order to be homophobic. Surely there can be many different causes for why some particular person might be homophobic? If the material conditions of their place of birth is the driving cause for their homophobia, but a religion came in with the assist, (that is, it is not the “most probable cause”) I see no reason to say that such religion is not homophobic.

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Idk about those other issues, but on the union point, there’s a pretty big difference between what Biden and Trump have done with the NLRB.

Here’s a small post I made about it the other day https://hexbear.net/comment/5553162

You think she would try to run for a third term?

What is the Lebanese army doing? Is it just sitting this out while Hezbollah and Israel fight over southern Lebanon?

This problem is apologia for the 9000lb truck. Even an alert driver couldnt see that baby in a car designed to have worse sight lines than a Sherman tank.

Well thank you for the replies. Suffice it to say, I am flabbergasted.

:(

When I’m feeling ill (esp with trouble keeping food down) I usually gravitate toward acai bowls, with some fruit (esp bananas), oatmeal/granola, and some nut paste.

I find that I metabolize this very easily without upsetting my stomach. And it provides me both with an immediate hit of energy (due to the fruit), but also a slightly longer lasting effect (due to the nut paste - although to be sure, on balance, this I still a quickly metabolized meal).

Oh god oh fuck did anybody check to see if there is a full moon on Election Day?!?

Sorry I couldn’t quite hear that over the sound of my rocket engine as I head to a new planet. But as I was saying, nothing to fear from the centipede.

The size of the centipede is distorted by Mercator projection, it’s not that big, don’t worry.

What? The reason I ask is to try to get a better understanding of the principal backing up the stance you took. I was trying to understand if it was life-maximizing with no qualifiers (i.e. irrespective of whose life was risked), which is how it read to me in your other responses in the thread. But I wasn’t sure, since you also said like 99.99% of the time, the burglar wouldn’t attack you if you announced, which could mean there was a heavily qualified principal.

So, I asked the hypothetical to try to figure out what your underlying motivating principal is here, as it filters out the noise of the 99.99% example. It was in no way meant to “entice fascist sentiment.”

Me personally? No, I would lock my door and call the police. I would not go out and try to confront the burglar, but I wouldn’t also call out to them and say “oh btw I’m here and armed.”

I think you are confusing yourself by thinking of a typical burglary - I.e. a burglary where the burglar has done what they can to make sure people aren’t home (e.g. struck during work hours, saw the mail piling up and came when the person was on vacation, etc.)

But that’s not the situation being contemplated here. The OP specified a nighttime break in. This is the opposite of your standard burglar - they’ve struck when people are the MOST likely to be home.

Of this subset, what percentage have doing something bad to you in mind? Or more to the point, at what % are you morally obligated to not take actions against them? Let’s say 49% of the time does the nighttime breakin burglar actually intend you physical harm. Do you have to eat it at those numbers? (I’m asking genuinely, since you seem to have a strong moral intuition here. From your other post, you said you couldn’t put a value on human life, so the only other value I have here is the resident’s life. In the 49/51 example, since it’s more likely than not that there’s no harm intended, this maximizes the amount of lives).

This is what happens when you name your game after a grape.

Why use that image of edgeworth to make your point? That’s edgeworth standing on the right side of the courtroom, where he’s always wrong.

The whole point of the ace attorney games is if you are on the left, you are good and correct. If you are on the right, you are evil and wrong. And if you are in the center, you are either a hopelessly confused idiot, or evil.

I don’t think descriptivist is really operating on a normative level. It is not taking the position people/society ought not try to shape the language. It is simply recognizing the reality that the meaning of a word in language is (*insert specific branch here - but often it is something like “common usage”).

I wonder if the people commenting on these Internet forums would be slightly older than the target demo for SpongeBob.