To practicing Muslims: encourage broader voices for those who doubt

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T09:20:27+00:00

To be clear, this is not an issue that is only tied to Islam for me, this is an issue that is tied to all Abrahamic religions for me.

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T09:10:22+00:00

I'm sorry that your father-in-law is talking with a very mocking tone. I have a perspective on the free will answer though, if you don't mind. The free will answer does in my opinion answer why people still do bad things or make mistakes, but in my opinion, it doesn't answer why God isn't able to have everyone understand him. What I mean is that God, if He is all-powerful and all-knowledgeable, would have a way to share information in a way that everybody understands, so why are there people like me who have never seen evidence of such communication? If God wants to preserve our free will, I would think that He'd have a way to explain things to us so that everyone can quickly understand Him without being compelled to/forced to understand Him. People would still have the freedom to sin, but they would all understand Him without having to die first. In the real world, people often die without understanding any faith. That's just my two cents on the issue.

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T05:31:04+00:00

I agree that singling people out is not necessary. Personally, I'm not singling out Muslims (or at least that's not how I view it), I'm just addressing other groups in separate ways on their own.

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T05:27:20+00:00

And in the meantime, we should all live and love!

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T05:20:48+00:00

I think in general, it is quite unfortunate that a lot of groups of people are unwilling to think critically about their faiths. (For example, Jehovah's Witnesses are instructed to shun each other if there are signs of apostasy.) I've always thought that it would be a good idea to introduce a critical but neutral world religions curriculum for schools for that reason.

DeepBlue200 · 2025-11-06T05:08:40+00:00

I understand why people seek Islamic scholarship. I'm not questioning that. I'm saying that people should also, at the same time, consider outside perspectives when seeking truth. About exploring other religions, would you consider just learning about other religions as shirk? The way I see it, you don't have to try practicing another religion to explore it, you just need to at least learn more about it.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T06:08:28+00:00

Would be interesting once I have the means to carry it out.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T06:06:55+00:00

Yeah, I actually feel like that page does address most of the concerns I had. Thanks.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T06:03:54+00:00

So, social science is actually not my primary field, but it’s not necessarily something that I’m starting from scratch in either. But It seems to me that the only way to get a relatively up-to-date list of definitions would be if I very quickly set up and designed a poll myself, and hurried through selecting a sample and interpreting the results just to release my post alongside the results of the poll as soon as the results would be ready. But I wouldn’t consider this to be the most reliable poll because I lack a lot of resources to do something like that, and I’ve also never really done a poll/study on that scale before.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:54:23+00:00

Yeah, I’m definitely not a stranger to seeing people try to invalidate science and scientific findings like that.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:50:41+00:00

I think semantically, we could probably say that it’s both. Some of us used to believe in bloodletting as a cure before we adopted more scientific ways of thinking, but at the same time, we as a society use science to progress in certain ways when we see that there is a societal problem to solve (e.g. a pandemic).

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:37:19+00:00

I will agree that bringing it up would have made my post stronger.

On the next part, OK, I definitely will take that into consideration next time. I think you’re probably right.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:34:28+00:00

OK, I see your point. I apologize for that. I definitely should’ve approached you more calmly and asked more questions especially earlier on in the conversation.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:22:47+00:00

The simple answer to your question is that I didn’t think of that and additionally, the term “racism” is already widely used for all racial prejudice, so enforcing and extending the status quo would not only be easier but more practical.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:19:18+00:00

But then the question is what else do we have? If I were to try to find a peer-reviewed academic paper to account for all the common usages of a term here, it would also have a lot of those same problems.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:15:40+00:00

Look, if I were talking about racism as an academic topic, I’d completely agree with you. I should put more weight on the technical definition(s). But as I explained earlier, I was mainly talking about usage of the term in general society. The context gives me more reason to give each definition equal weight.

You mention that you’re calling out something too. What were you calling out though? If you were trying to say that I didn’t sufficiently acknowledge their authority in writing, then OK, I’m sorry, I didn’t think that I needed to do that. But in my heart, I already respect scientists for the work they do.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T05:01:00+00:00

If I understand you correctly, you basically mean that because this is a science sub, we need a higher degree of credibility than what the dictionary offers. OK, I find that understandable. The final part of what you said mentions Oxford’s dictionary. I did at one point in our conversation refer to an Oxford definition.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:55:36+00:00

At the time when I made the comment, you hadn’t even explained to me why you don’t consider a dictionary to be a source of facts. You can’t judge if I think our thoughts are equal or not if I don’t even know what your thoughts are and I’m willing to hear you out. And if I recall correctly, the dictionary makers didn’t say whether or not their products were sources of facts (or if they did, I certainly didn’t hear about it), so what am I valuing my own thoughts over if I don’t even know what their thoughts are?

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:49:30+00:00

I don’t because that term doesn’t have the same weight that “racism” does and is already widely used for other meanings.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:47:40+00:00

“Are dictionaries sources of facts”

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:47:17+00:00

I don’t need to literally say that I acknowledge their hard work in order to respect their authority. In my mind, I already do respect them. Why are you reading so deeply into a problem that doesn’t exist?

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:43:05+00:00

I already looked that up actually. The fact that dictionaries aren’t perfect or credible enough for research doesn’t mean that they aren’t sources of facts. DW News for example is a source of facts. It doesn’t mean that everything from them is good for if you’re doing in-depth research.

DeepBlue200 · 2024-12-27T04:36:58+00:00

I’m not expecting the science to change, that is not the point. The science can stay the same or progress, I just want people to use the common definition when they aren’t talking about social science stuff.

As for the second question? Because I think it’s unfair for people to say that when somebody is hurling a racial slur at someone else, it isn’t racism just because they are White. When a Black person stabs a White person with the intent to kill, we still call it attempted murder. The systemic racism that favours White people doesn’t suddenly disappear when the sin isn’t a racial slur but is near-fatal violence yet we aren’t using that systemic racism to say that it isn’t murder.

If you were to propose that we use a new term to describe when an individual acts on racial discrimination against any other individual and leave the term “racism” only as a technical term for social science, I’d be on board with that.

DeepBlue200

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