Of course this report from today’s New York Times demonstrates the righteous indignation of Muslims at all the French boots on the ground in the Middle East. Surely reports of the “prayer” and “religious ideology” are greatly exaggerated. After all, think of all the attacks on civilians that Lutherans commit after saying the Nicene Creed. (My emphasis in the report below.)
PARIS — The French police on Wednesday arrested a 21-year-old man described as a convert to Islam who they said had confessed to stabbing a French soldier on Saturday in a Paris suburb.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement that the man was arrested Wednesday morning in the Yvelines region, just west of Paris. The soldier, Pvt. Cédric Cordiez, 25, was stabbed in the neck with a short-bladed knife in La Défense, a shopping mall and underground transportation hub west of Paris. He was treated at a military hospital and released Monday.
Officials initially said that the stabbing seemed to echo an attack last week on a British soldier, who was hacked to death on a London street by two men the British authorities have identified as radicalized British Muslims. On Wednesday, the Paris public prosecutor, François Molins, said investigators believed that the suspect had indeed “acted in the name of his religious ideology,” given the character and timing of the attack, after the London killing, as well as a “prayer” he said shortly before it.
The man, whom Mr. Molins identified only as Alexandre D., confessed to the police officers who arrested him, Mr. Molins told reporters. He is believed to have targeted Private Cordiez, one of a small group of soldiers on an antiterrorism patrol, as a “representative of the state,” apparently intending to kill him, Mr. Molins said.
Mr. Valls urged caution and said, “I cannot talk about radical Islam.” Investigators want to know more about the suspect’s motivation, background and family environment, Mr. Valls said.
That penultimate sentence is a killer (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course). He can’t talk about radical Islam because it’s politically incorrect to do so.
And, by the way, I’ve just finished No god but God, Reza Aslan’s bestselling book about the history of Islam. It’s educational and well written, though I think he does do too much of a whitewash on Mohammed, trying to say that The Prophet was pretty much perfect (Aslan is an observant Muslim) but his teachings have been corrupted ever since. An example: of course Mohamed married a nine-year-old girl named Aisha (some people say she was six), but that’s okay because Mohamed didn’t deflower her until she reached puberty, “which is when every girl in Arabia without exception became eligible for marriage.” (p. 65).
But that aside, Aslan says this when summing up how the history of Islam played out in the 9/11 attacks (p. 248):
Despite the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent terrorist acts against Western targets throughout the world, despite the clash-of-civilizations mentality that has seized the globe and the clash-of-monotheisms reality underlying it, despite the blatant religious rhetoric resonanting through the halls of governments, there is one thing that cannot be overemphasized. What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander—an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.
As we know, most religiously inspired violence committed by Muslims is against other Muslims, and that includes killing women and gays.
sub
Unfortunately true. Just as so many of the European wars were between various Christian sects. By god, if you don’t worship the same god as I do, using the same rituals as I do, I have no choice but to save your eternal soul by separating it from your body. Has college football taken the place of fratricidal religious war in the US?
Or maybe NFL, with its famous quarterback crusader Tim Tebow.
He only played one season before everyone found out he was worthless.
Since Aslan has stated the Prohpet’s teachings have been corrupted, is he using the “No true Islam” fallacy?
Yes.
i’m tired of all of it!
we want to venture into outer space…are we going to take all of this crap with us to contaminate another civilization?
They would laugh themselves silly on hearing it.
The book really was elegant, but yeah, the guy isn’t really a scholar; he’s a anti-Israeli activitist and apologist for some of the worst extremism – coutier’s replier extraordinaire.
There is no point in applying our current moral standards on 6th century nomads. However, it is an issue when people try to follow those practices in 21st century.
But then, do Muslims have an option but to obey god’s command? Quran 33:21 clearly states:
“There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.”
This is the reason Muslims grow beards, wear pants with short legs, do not grow a mustache etc. They are imitating Muhammad.
So it is OK to molest children, rob property from your opponents, enslave & rape prisoners of war and kill people who criticize you.
Make sure you use the “Hey, I am just following the perfect example!” defense in court.
I think there’s a good reason to highlight the actions of ancient “prophets” or other holy men and see how they measure up to our current moral understanding. Is god the eternal source of truth and morality? If so, why did god’s earthly representatives behave so reprehensibly?
It’s another way of showing how incoherent and contradictory religion is.
Yes and if there is an excuse that “that’s what was accepted then”, then we have to ask why the criteria are not applied to other instances of their holy book or even how do they pick and choose which to follow and which not to follow.
You get to have a whole dodgy and shifty eyed conversation.
does that mean i get to mimic paul newman?
Anybody who feels compelled to excuse the marriage of an old man to a pre-pubescent girl, including his consummation of said marriage the moment she hit puberty, is somebody with a profoundly fucked-up sense of morality.
I’d be cool with him saying, “Hey, Muhammad was a pretty impressive / progressive / whatever person for his day. Sure, he was a flawed figure living in a time when things we consider unacceptable today were common and unremarkable, but do we really need to dwell on that? Here’s the stuff he said / did that was noble and noteworthy and ahead of its time, and that’s what I’d rather focus on.”
Of course, the problem with that approach is twofold. First, it admits that Muhammad was just zis guy, you know? and not the perfect divine messenger of the moon god. And, second…once you strip away all the really obnoxious shit clinging to Muhammad, there’s nothing much left but a dude riding off into the sunset on a flying horse — and even that’s just a ripoff of Bellerophon.
Indeed, is there anything of consequence in his (or Jesus’s) biography that isn’t a blatant ripoff of some earlier demigod’s official biography?
Cheers,
b&
Yeah even Tyrion Lannister didn’t force Sansa Stark to sleep with him! 🙂 Sorry, I couldn’t resist the Game of Thrones parallel.
The difference is that Jesus was real, the rest were reflections of his glory cast backwards and forwards in time. They were mere shadows of Christ and only shined because they reflected his glory.
After that, I need a shower.
My irony detector is not quite up to snuff today and I’m not quite sure how to read that comment, Jolo.
I call it a Poe
It is a joke.
Shouldn’t that be The Christ?
In Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke had his wise alien resemble a classic cartoon devil (red skin, little horns, barbed tail) & suggested that all the archetypes came about because of just such a Jungian resonance, with images of mankind’s first encounter with an intelligent alien species echoing back through time. Or something.
//Indeed, is there anything of consequence in his (or Jesus’s) biography that isn’t a blatant ripoff of some earlier demigod’s official biography?//
Also, do prophets really say anything that is completely original? There is a definite tendency to identify the words with the man. I think we are hard-wired to do just that as opposed to considering whether there is any wisdom (stuff we can use) in the words themselves.
How can they? People have known since they were chimps that stealing, murder and rape are not ok, and that life is better for everyone if the guy in charge isn’t an arsehole. It just isn’t news.
Sadly, many every generation seems to think that that all constitutes some amazing new revelation, and too many don’t actually believe it…but they’re in a small enough minority that civilization still manages to advance anyhow.
And we seem to be doing a decent enough slow-but-steady job at breeding out the cretinism, so there may just be hope for us, yet.
b&
I don’t think that is the case. There are, and always have been, people that think that a strong leader is a leader that isn’t afraid to make the tough calls. Like when to steal, when to murder and when to be an asshole. As long as the strong leader is perceived by these people to hold their same values, then that leader is a hero.
>>profoundly fucked-up sense of morality
It’s in the same vein as Divine Command Theory of morality, or the “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal” theory of law.
In my happy post-christian days, I have frequently come across bits and pieces of argument to the effect that the jesus story is just a retelling and/or conflation of the Hercules/Osiris/whatever myth. Can someone recommend a good book that points out in a more or less systematic fashion the parallels between biblical stories and earlier Greek or Near Eastern myths? I know about Deucalion and Noah, etc., but might be able to use a fuller compendium. Thanks in advance.
I can recommend no better starting point than Justin Martyr. Yes, that Martyr — the second-century Christian saint, the original Christian apologist.
Read his First Apology (available in English translation from many Web sites near you) and do a quick scan for “Sons of Jupiter.”
Martyr’s thesis was that evil soothsaying daemons knew Jesus was coming and so made up similar stories such that people would dismiss Jesus as just another such story when he finally made his appearance. But, at the same time he put forth this theory, which was his, he also cites many of said non-Jesus stories that the daemons fabricated before Jesus.
I’ll leave it for the gentle reader to decide how much parallelism there was, and in which direction the causal arrow actually pointed….
Cheers,
b&
Well, I’ll be, uh, darned (or is that “danged”?). I poked around a bit outside the bible–read the apocrypha, half of the OT pseudepigrapha, and 3/4 of Josephus–but the post-NT writings bored me to tears, and I never read Justin. I guess I’ll have to put him on the list. I did, of course, hear lots about the “fact” that the gods, miracles, and teachings of other religions were but satanic copies of the One True Religion™ (à la Jolo, just above). Thanks, Ben.
Knitting is darned. Silly wabbits are danged. All not-true ____ (insert religion of speaker) are damned. The new sheriff is a nigger, dagnabbit.
Hope that clears things up.
b&
I learned all this stuff from being Classically educated so I can’t help but recommend reading up on the eastern mystery cults (Christianity was but one of many different mystery cults in antiquity), especially the Cult of Isis and the Cult of Osiris (popular among soldiers who picked up a lot of these religions as they traveled around – it ended up being banned at Rome because it demanded castration and, well Romans you know – they like the family).
I don’t have any specific book recommendations but I’m sure you can google up something on those eastern mystery cults especially as they relate to Rome.
So the prophet Muhammad (please be onto him) was the seventh century Roman Polanski.
+1
“Deflower” is such an innocuous term for rape.
Yeah, that was a pretty obvious tip-off that Aslan wasn’t too upset with it. Makes it sound like the nine-year-old-girl was a nineteen-year-old blushing bride with heaving bosoms on her wedding night begging her handsome twenty-something prince to be gentle as he ravishes her and she finally knows love for the very first time.
Except, of course, in this story, it’s a nine-year-old girl and a man old enough to collect Social Security who perhaps even has great-great-grandchildren her age….
b&
Interesting that Valls gives a similar tepid response as was given in the UK. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Monday: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578503613890263762.html
In this article, Ali remarked on these sanguine responses saying, she doesn’t “….blame Western leaders. They are doing their best to keep the lid on what could become a meltdown of trust between majority populations and Muslim minority communities.”
I still think these leaders can do better. They can provide a clearly nuanced response and differentiate between equating all Muslims with terrorism while still acknowledging the link between Islam and terror (something Ali says is necessary in her article). Doing otherwise, is patronizing.
Once again religion proves itself as an excuse to justify criminal behavior.
If ONE person has been promoting such religious “ideology” the rest of the society would have taken steps to keep him from doing harm.
As it is, religion is a free-card to do horrible things to innocent people.
And society has to respect this because?
Probably because in a “religious democracy”, the god that grabs the power, either by getting most votes or by a coup, must be respected.
Regardless the cost for the rest.
If there was such a thing as a curse, religion would be the biggest.
> And society has to respect this because?
Because you have littered countless “freedom of religion” clauses all over western constitutions and human rights laws without a limited definition what a religion precisely is.
Now you suddenly have a fascism that claims that it is a religion (and ironically still calls itself “Submission”) and exploits your naive legal loophole and youre impotent to do anything about it without rewriting your whole legal operating system from scratch.
In the US at least, the First Amendment demands that the government tolerate all religions equally.
But that same Amendment grants citizens the right to disrespect religious beliefs should they so choose.
Too often, “tolerate,” “courtesy,” and “respect” are conflated. Universal tolerance is the key to peace; an initial assumption of universally-deserved courtesy promotes the flourishing of the exchange of goods, services, and ideas; but civilization is only advanced when respect is granted and withheld based on merit.
I’ll tolerate practically anybody who’s not being violent or unduly disruptive. I’ll be courteous until somebody demonstrates excessive boorishness. But you’re going to have to earn my respect if you want it.
It doesn’t take much to earn a basic level of respect; just following basic social etiquette will do the trick. My highest respect I only grant to those who’ve got something truly significant to show for their contributions to society or to me and mine.
Cheers,
b&
Well, that you are free to think whatever you feel for, is a positive feature.
But accepting the idea that anyone not agreeing with you must die is something different.
When fiction is valued as serious truth, and followed, that’s when it’s getting out of hand. That’s when society should just say “stop”.
Unfortunately, the promise of a certain number of virgins to sexually reap as one feels for, makes killers out of muslims.
And the idea that god wants NO pregnancy to be cut short, regardless, makes killers out of christians. (Where did they take that from?)
The acceptance of these ridiculous ideas is mistaken and should be terminated ASAP.
In Mali, which may be relevent to the attack on a French soldier, the fight is not a fight within Islam. It’s global jihadists trying to turn Mali into a Muslim state. The “West” shouldn’t stand by and let that happen.
What’s happening in Syria, on the other hand, seems to be largely a battle of Sunni against Shia Islam. This is perhaps a problem for Islam itself to resolve, as Aslan suggests, though UN involvement may prove important to negotiating an end to this civil war.
The statement by French Interior Minister Valls seems too terse to fully interpret. It could mean, as you suggest, that he’s being politically correct, but ironically in saying he can’t talk about radical Islam, he has already brought up radical Islam. It’s conceivable (and maybe the original context in French could sort this out) that he meant it’s too soon to know for sure and publicly commit to the statemnt that the attacker was motivated by radical Islam (no matter how likely that seems). He could simply mean that he can’t publicly make claims that might in some way compromise the investigation, indictment, or trial.
Here is some further text from the article that suggests Valls is fully aware of the problem of radical Islam, which supports that idea that he was just exercising prudent legal caution prior to completion of the investigation:
“What’s happening in Syria, on the other hand, seems to be largely a battle of Sunni against Shia Islam.”
It started out as part of the Arabian Spring. And while terrorists are increasingly involved I don’t think anyone in media has described it as “largely a battle of Sunni against Shia Islam”. (But I may have missed that.)
I don’t think anyone in the media has described it that way. But lots of facts point that way, including which Syrians support Assad, the involvement of Hezbollah, the areas where rebels take refuge, the people the government attacks and the people the government defends, the people the rebels attack, the involvement of Iran, the involvement of Saudi Arabia and other local regimes etc. It all pretty cleanly divides between Shia and Sunni.
I found this as one example: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alon-benmeir/syria-the-battleground-be_b_1418270.html
If my memory serves me right, this started out as a bunch of kids demonstrating for democracy, who got beaten, tortured, shot by the security forces. That the Assad regime was secular means that the Christians have decided to sit it out and the tribal nature of things means that Assad’s strongest backers are Alawites, although they include the business classes. What it has now become with Iran, Hezbollah, the Russians and Chinese, Israel, the Gulf monarchies involved is a recipe for disaster. This is one circumstance where a well-placed drone fired missile might have led to the negotiating table.
Syria. Beheadings, with chain saws, throwing prisoners off roof tops to baying crowds, burying people alive as they plead for mercy, shooting, hacking, …, all accompnaied by “Allahu Akbar!” Classy religion.
Come on, Ron. That’s not religion, that’s colonialism and western hegemony.
I guess I must be Islamophobic.
Are these three posts meant to be commenting on my post? Because I can’t see any relationship between these posts and my post.
I can only speak for my comment, which is directed at the oft-repeated suggestion that these sort of conflicts are the fault of western democracies and aren’t motivated by religion.
Mine was just a facetious opportunistic comment on the nonsense of what’s going on in Syria, with Allah acting on both sides.
Not true, Jerry; sorry. It pains me to tell you, upfront, that I think you’d better check your facts on this count.
Jeff Johnson above is right to be careful, but one can go further, based on massive evidence.
The current French Interior secretary has, exceptionally, a perfectly clear record of plain speaking and tough action on the subject of Islamist radicalism.
Exhibit A: http://www.alterinfo.net/notes/La-violence-de-l-Islam-radical-doit-etre-combattue-en-Tunisie-Manuel-Valls_b5550239.html
“I draw a line between Islam and Islamism. … But the violence that is exerted in the name of radical Islam is a reality, and we must fight against it. … There is an Islamist fascism on the rise everywhere, and this obscurantism must … evidently be condemned…”
Exhibit B: http://www.bfmtv.com/politique/manuel-valls-lislam-doit-combattre-mal-ronge-467238.html
“There is this anti-semitism which has emerged in our working-class suburbs… This hate originally came from the far right, but for several years now it has become an element of the identity of radical Salafist groups that are trying to take control of those working-class suburbs hit by the economic depression and precarity.”
Exhibit C: http://www.france24.com/en/20130130-france-deport-radical-imams-islam-valls
“Many radical foreign-born preachers will be deported in the coming days,” Valls told reporters, adding that it was important to draw a clear distinction between mainstream Muslims and extremists.
“I am not mistaking this radical Islam for French Islam, but a certain religious environment exists, there are groups that identify themselves as Salafists,” the interior minister said.
“They are attempting to co-opt organisations, school practices, basically, to brainwash a certain number of families,” he added.
Valls warned: “We will expel all these imams, all these foreign-born preachers who target women, make remarks contrary to our values and refer to the need to fight against France.”
Etcetera etcetera etcetera.
Valls is the most outspoken and decisive politician on the Left that France ever had, possibly since Georges Clemenceau. Given his background (he is the son of modest Catalan refugees and opted actively for French citizenship), he harbours none of the usual bleeding-heart liberal’s illusions about immigration. If he has, quite uncharacteristically for once, refused to be drawn out in the case of the attack on Private Cordiez, it is most probably because the case was being investigated at the time, and it would have been ill-befitting an Interior secretary to pass specific judgment at that stage (an unfortunate and often scandalous habit of previous Interior secretaries in high-visibility cases). Given Mr. Valls’ record, ‘political correctness’ cannot be imputed.
+1
“an unwary yet complicit casualty”
Unwary yet complicit? And casualty to boot. How does that work? Does he have in mind a blame-the-victim kind of scenario, or he was just reaching for profundity by juxtaposing random contradictory words together?
“Anybody who feels compelled to excuse the marriage of an old man to a pre-pubescent girl, including his consummation of said marriage the moment she hit puberty, is somebody with a profoundly fucked-up sense of morality.”
But what if their sense of morality is rooted in evolutionary ethics? They want to pair up girls with older men because they believe those older men have more germ line mutations. And as we all know – – – heterozygosity is always goooooooood! Under evolutionary ethics, the winner in the most moral race (the guy who gets to wear the prophet hat), is the one who can make up the best just so story.
I’m not aware of anybody who ever seriously posits such horrific bastardizations of morality except for creationists intentionally misinterpreting Darwinism for their own nefarious propaganda.
If your post was sarcasm, try harder. If you were being serious, you’re not going to have any luck here lying for Jesus to evolutionists about our own positions.
b&
You think I’m a creationist, and you think you can tell that from what I wrote? You really do need to “sharpen your claws”, as you said in a post yesterday. And if you think I’m kidding I’m not – you can make up anything you want in evolutionary ethics. And if you doubt that then you are very ignorant about the history of evolutionary ethics, because there are plenty of examples of “horrific bastaradizations” as you style it (it’s just that you, as you admitted, are not aware of them). For example, here’s a little bedtime reading assignment for you: Die Rasse als Wertprinzip Zur Erneuerung der Ethik, Fritz lenz, 1917. And there are lots more where that came from. It’s never been translated into English as far as I know (except for my translation), but that should not be a problem for someone who appears to be as smart as you. Like I said, read it before you go to bed, and sweet dreams.
Knock off the nastiness, especially you, Barry. I won’t have this arrogance and snark on my website.
Oh, Ceiling Cat! Nazi cleanup needed on aisle five.
(For those who don’t know, Fritz Lenz was one of Hitler’s leading eugenicists and the man who give the “scientific” justification to the Nuremberg Laws.)
And, Barry, fuck off. Equating Darwinism with Nazism whilst protesting “I’m just reminding you of the facts” is a bog-standard opening move from a Liar-for-Jesus. Even if you’re sincerely not a Christian — something I rather doubt you’ll be able to convince anybody here of at this point — you’ve already so powerfully torpedoed your credibility here by opening with that gambit that you might as well leave now before Jerry kicks you out.
Cheers,
b&
I need a Ben Goren cleanup, too. You simply can’t use profanity the way you did–you can make all your points without saying “fuck off”. That’s a clear violation of the rules.
Sorry…I tend to see red when the Nazis come out like this…I’ll do my best to reign it in in the future.
b&
Sorry, but you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. Those germ-line mutations will be deleterious but recessive, so there’s no advantage to older men to mate with younger women as opposed to younger men mating with younger women.
That’s not the point he’s trying to make.
The point he’s trying to make is that EVILoutionists not only have no moral grounding, Darwin was a proto-Nazin and anybody who worships him is therefore logically compelled to throw Jews in gas chambers.
b&
I know I shouldn’t respond, but that really makes no sense. The point is that the girl was very young, not that the man was very old. According to your theory, the old man should reproduce with a healthy, fertile woman, not a prepubescent girl. Try harder. You’re failing as a troll on many levels at once.
There is no evolutionary advantage to killing girls in childbirth because they aren’t physically mature enough to bear a baby. This has nothing to do with evolutionary advantage, and everything to do with evil old men wanting power over the most helpless and vulnerable people in the community.
Hi Jerry:
Thanks for the post, and the explanation as to why the attack described has nothing to do with religion.
But, it kind of makes me wonder–what would an attack on another human being look like if it were based on religion? Since this attack had nothing to do with religion, I guess a religiously-based attack would have to look quite different, wouldn’t it?
Mark Joseph… I think your irony sensor needs a tune-up.
I’m not so sure about that ;-).
Gbjames, I’m pretty sure it’s your sarcasm censor which has malfunctioned.
On the Internet it can be difficult to tell whose machine is malfunctioning at times.
Yes, my first post was intended as ironic humor. But, in gbjames’ (whose posts I really appreciate) defense, I probably could have been a bit wittier had I taken a bit more time.
When I saw your post, I actually thought, “poor dear missed the point” and it wasn’t until gbjames posted that I wondered if you were being ironic. 🙂 I think your irony just had a lot of twists, and like gbjames I was lost in all the twists! 😀
Your last sentence was a clear giveaway. No worries!
The trouble may be that this is such a prolific site, one tends to read as rapidly as possible (and you still can’t keep up!). Subtlety then is easily missed.
And so now I’m a Nazi because I cited a German paper on evolutionary ethics that was relevant to a discussion? Dr. Coyne, you don’t have to ban me – I quit.
You see this so often – someone wanting to “cite” ideas from a HUNDRED YEARS AGO as if they somehow qualify as the latest word on the subject, and as though knowledge, understanding and methodology for acquiring both hasn’t got a wee bit more sophisticated since then. These people never seem to ask themselves WHY they have to go so far back in time to find the “ammunition” they are looking for. If they think this stuff is still relevant, would they be happy to be treated with the medical techniques of 100 years ago?
I’m cool with old citations when they stand the test of time. I’ll frequently cite Epicurus (~300 BCE) as proof that there aren’t any good gods, and Justin Martyr (~200 CE) as evidence that Jesus was a wholesale fabrication.
My problem was with Barry trying to paint Hitler’s eugenicist as a leading authority on the evolutionary roots of human morality. Might as well declare Mein Kampf the definitive text on secular humanism and be done with it.
b&
Am I the only one here, at least among those of us who have read the Chronicles of Narnia, who is amused at the irony that Reza Aslan is a Muslim?
No.
Azlan’s book is pretty good. You should read Tom Holland’s: In the Shadow of the Sword. He got a ton of heat over it because he dared to suggest that Islam had manmade beginnings. In fact, Channel 4 in Britain were about to show a documentary about the book, but it was pulled after complaints from the Muslim community. I’m not sure if Channel 4 have since decide to show it. But it does show the reluctance of some Muslims to even consider another interpretation of the beginnings of their religion
The program was shown, it was the *repeat* which was pulled.
The book is much better than the TV program, of course. The main point is that much modern scholarship suggests that islam as we now know it may have been invented after the arab conquest, mostly in mesopotamia and persia, not before it.
political correctness reigns supreme!
I fail to see how the suicidal terrorism of radical Islamists against innocent, non-Muslim citizens living in non-Muslim countries reduces to an “internal conflict between Muslims”. Were the Sept. 11 Sunni hijackers intent on killing the 1 or 2 Shia Muslims in the World Trade Center Towers?
I guess I should read a library copy of Aslan’s book to comprehend this nuanced and perverse argument.
Finally, for all those secularists who are interested in studying the cognitive dissonance of Sophisticated Theology(TM), we need only place Reza Aslan and Andrew Sullivan in the MRI and then publish the conclusions.