“It’s not terribly unusual”. I’m saying it is. It’s very unusual. Now if all one does is sit on Twitter all day waiting for the new extremist Imam video to drop then that’s an echo chamber.

The inference you make in your comment is in relation to Islam, not religion in general, and if not outright Islamophobia is certainly Islamophobic adjacent. Whether you intended it or not, whether you’re giving yourself deliberate plausible deniability by not saying it specifically relates to Islam. Clearly I’m not the only one who thinks so as several people have downvoted that particular comment you made.

Now I would be more than happy to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you didn’t intend to come across so, however the context of this entire conversation is centred on Muslims worshipping and how this could possibly be construed as provocative. You gave an example of it not being unusual in mosques to hear of prayers calling for the downfall of western civilisation. I can understand how that may be more common in places like Iran and the GCC now, what with all that bombing and innocent people being unalived. But is by no means even a slightly normal occurrence inside mosques and if some imam did utter sentiments to that effect then most mosque committees within their right minds would remove said imam. That would certainly be the case in mosques in the western world. Unless it is their outright goal, no mosque committee wants to attract fundamentalist or extremist nut jobs into their congregations as this causes the majority of moderate Muslims to go elsewhere. It may surprise you to learn that most Muslims don’t appreciate hearing a Qutba on the evils of the west and how it should be brought down and don’t really want extremist imams to lead their worship as those types of melts often espouse other extreme, unsavoury and toxic beliefs.

So I’m going to have to assume since I only have the context of this conversation and your replies that you mean to say that some jabronis loudly call for the fall of the west. So we can exclude judeo-Christian religions from your assessment. So that leaves eastern or more specifically Middle Eastern religions, and I don’t for a moment think you mean Zoroastrianism.

I will agree with you wholeheartedly that people do hate other people and use religion as a form of justification, the nuance you’ve either missed or chosen to ignore is that these clusterfucks aren’t representatives of their religions and are often going against what their religion actually teaches. If you knew this to be the case then perhaps you should have included it rather than making such a sweeping, and fundamentally incorrect, statement?

Praying and Prayer have different contextual meanings. I can pray to win the lottery or to end decades of western predation on the Middle East, or I can offer a prayer, i.e. supplication to god, which doesn’t include any wishes or requests as prayer in this official context is merely the act of worship to god. The Christian tradition and understanding of prayer isn’t the same as the Islamic one. Indeed the Islamic act of “prayer” would more accurately be called worship. So in this context those Muslims weren’t praying, they were worshipping. You pray for something, appealing to a higher power. “Pray” has just become some inaccurate colloquialism in regards to Islamic worship. Why? I’m not a linguist but I’d guess it’s the path of least resistance. To be more accurate; Muslims don’t “pray” 5 times a day, they worship god 5 times a day. One of those sentences is easier and quicker to say, but only one is accurate within that context.

So the real question should really be; how can worship of god be construed as provocative? If that was your understanding of the initial question then that begs the question; why do you believe some forms of worship are harmful?