This is all quite true - BUT what are you going to do about it?

If you are outnumbered, you can't hope to win a war by opening up a battle
front against an entire population - you need to focus on/ambush (?) one
small group at a time.  
Keeping the fluffy bunny Muslims/Nazis/Catholics etc  out of any conflict is
probably more useful in the long term - you leave an at least somewhat
familiar place for some extremists to retreat to, and ease the transition to
rationality for those few amongst the population who are capable of it.

Galvanising an entire population of  bunnies against you is unlikely to help
- because in the long run, unlike rationalists,  the bunnies of this world
breed like, well, rabbits.

Cheers
Paul King


-----Original Message-----
From: [address removed] [mailto:[address removed]] On
Behalf Of Daniel Neville
Sent: Friday, 14 May 2010 9:41 p.m.
To: [address removed]
Subject: Re: [chchskeptics] draw muhammad day

On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 01:01 -0400, Isaac Freeman wrote:
> What I meant was that "more extreme" is not the same thing as
> "more Muslim".  For the vast majority of Muslims, sending a
> death threat to a newspaper editor doesn't make someone a
> better Muslim, any more than sending a death threat to staff
> at an abortion clinic makes someone a better Christian in the
> eyes of most Christians.  In both cases, there's a small radical
> clique who do think this, and we don't help by buying into it.

In both cases, the "moderates" are reliably slow to condemn
such murderous activities, if at all. Quite often, the murderous
actions are halfway excused as actions performed by people who
"are doing something they really believe in" and aren't nearly
as vigorously condemned as relatively minor offences caused by
people whose fault is perceived as lack of piety.

This is what I call the Fluffy-bunny Neo-Nazi syndrome. Imagine
a bunch of new-age, caring and freedom-loving new-Nazis who uphold
Adolf Hitler as the messiah and Mein Kampf as the inerrant word of
God. Most are moderates and choose not to exterminate Jews as the
Book requires. Instead, they leave the decision to exterminate lots
of Jews as a personal matter between God and those people who wish 
to do what they really believe in (God's word that the Jews must
suffer in a way that is beyond imagination). Whenever loads of
Jews die as a result of someone taking Mein Kampf seriously, the
moderates argue that not every Fluffy is busy operating the death
chambers and it's unjust to tar all Fluffies with the same brush.

The extremists are the ones who logically follow the Book upheld by
the moderates and extremists alike. The moderates choose to either
ignore or not personally uphold some dubious passages, but they
refuse to distinguish themselves from the extremists by saying what
and what is not to be taken seriously in the Book.
> 
-- 
Daniel Neville, [address removed]




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