Consider this video: http://clashdaily.com/2015/02/religion-peace-woman-stopped-street-pronounced-guilty-shot-head-wearing-red/
I see no reason to watch it all the way through, but my understanding is she is shot dead in the end. Look at all these emotionally uncooked, immature, relentlessly dogmatic pseudo-men with rifles. This is something like the peer pressure kids face in high school, except the penalty is death. For her part, this woman probably said “fuck all this black shit. I’m wearing something colorful.” She was warned, and now she is dead.
And for what? Red is apparently prohibitied in Islam. Here is some commentary: http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=showfatwa&Option=FatwaId&Id=83820
Note the tone. Everything seems to be black and white.
Everyone in my view should read at least a few Sura of the Koran. It doesn’t seem to matter where you pick it up, it will consist nearly entirely in telling you the rewards of heaven and the torments of hell; how it is right to be blessed by Allah, and horrible to be condemned by him.
To put it mildly, this kind of language does not breed nuance. You are being told, over and over and over and over, that your IMMORTAL soul’s future depends entirely on conformity to the Koran, as interpreted by men long dead, and men currently living, depending on men long dead.
And here is the point I wanted to make. As Steven Pinker, in the first useful writing of his of which I am aware, points out, violence is seemingly at an all time low globally. Many things factor in to this but one major influence he cites is the advent of the novel and short story. What these do is build empathy in people. They put you in other peoples heads and teach you to think about being in their shoes. They teach rapport, understanding. Moreover, the painting tradition of the West involves considerable amounts of portraiture, which also helps you SEE people.
Islam lacks all this. They read one book, by and large. Even Western educated Muslims seemingly crave and are fascinated by the cult-like ideological adherence demanded by the Koran, by its rejection of personal agency, by its rejection of human moral choice, by its reduction of every last aspect of human life to inalterable law. Like Communism, Islam rescues people from freedom, from free will, from confusion, from doubt.
Their refusal to allow individual pictures means something. NO ONE can be pictured. This is why pictures of their alleged Prophet are so infuriating for these moral children and savages.
Individuation is a process of trial and error. It consists in making choices and learning from them. It consists in learning to interact in harmonious and spontaneous ways with people who are different from us. It is not a straight line process, but if people are granted and use freedom, they eventually attain psychological maturity.
Nearly all the process needed for individuation are absent in strict Islam. People do not read novels (although of course in practice many do, I’m sure). They do not paint pictures. They do not make moral choices. All their choices are made for them, and enforced by the most fanatical–which is to say the LEAST individuated among them.
All the modern Western inventions which lead naturally to tolerance of difference, of diversity, via genuine empathy, are absent in Islam.
Islam is a cage, within which animal passions are allowed to rage with impunity through jihad. It is not pure ugliness–despite it all, many decent Muslims exist around the world, because Goodness is a natural impulse among us all. And it has had many moments of reform, such as through Sufism. But the orthodox kill the Sufis. They torture and torment them.
There is no love in their hearts. And if Love is the only commandment, then they are pure sinners in the only way that matters.