So, according to a new survey by the British think tank Policy Exchange, 37% of British Muslims aged 16-24 want to live under Sharia law.
In case you’re not familiar with Sharia, it’s a system of laws that many people, myself included, feel are incompatible with democracy, because it does not allow for the equality of women, and non-Muslims.
It’s interesting is that while British Muslims are becoming more fundamentalist, they are also experiencing rising levels of hostility from non-Muslim Brits.
What occurred to me after hearing that was that you can’t subscribe to the most extreme and exclusive versions of your faith and not expect people to believe that you also seek to change the society you live in to conform to your own religious values, which they do not share.
And then I remembered that that exact same thought occurred to me a couple of nights ago, when the evangelical Christians in Andrea Pelosi’s documentary Friends of God were complaining that non-evangelical Americans are mistrustful of them.
5 comments:
Mistrustful might be a bit of an understatement.
And this whole attitude, as you so aptly described it, ("you also seek to change the society you live in to conform to your own religious values, which they do not share") is antithetical to democracy.
I consider myself a progressive, so I get upset with myself when I think "Why don't they just go back to the theocracy they came from?".
It makes me sound like all those hicks in Pennsyltuckey I couldn't wait to get away from. Am I turning to The Dark Side?
I guess if you think you're right, you want everyone to think the way you do.
I think that.
What I love is how they try to jam their "values" down my throat, and when I object, I'm somehow forcing my values on them.
Megan: Another thing that struck me was how the evangelicals were quick to condemn anyone, including other Christians, if their values did not align with theirs, and yet they hold aloft this idea that the founders of this country were Christians, and yet they do not judge the Christianity of the founders. If they did, they would find a few things that didn't quite align with their ideals, I'm sure.
Randy: I think there's a difference between wanting the immigrants to go back to where they came from because you're irritated that the grocery clerk can't speak English very well, and wanting them to go back because they seek to change your country to conform to their more restrictive religious values.
WonderT: Yes, but the difference is that I AM right.
JohnnyY: Well, I think you've hit upon the crux of it exactly. My goal is that we have as open and free a society as possible while still keeping the peace. That's my ideal. They want the government to restrict people's actions to reflect their own religious morals. So it's not just a contest of values. I think our side really IS right, because we seek to preserve the ideas upon which this country was founded.
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