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Comment by jimmyk | Hacker News Reader

quite a diverse bunch really

In comparison to who?

strict grammarians, for instance, who would only have considered using "whom" in your sentence.

Compared to the GP's "Jewish men..." notion, as though that were a useful group descriptor when it comes to behaviors. So, I suppose... compared to the often monolithic notions of Judaism that I so often encounter on and offline.

as though that were a useful group descriptor when it comes to behaviors.

I found it to be useful. In combination with some other comments, it gave me a particular idea about what the article was about.

Christianity, where the definition effectively prohibits someone from being both an atheist and a christian.

To be fair, I'm not sure that Islam is too enthusiastic about atheists proclaiming for it either... to put it mildly.

"There is no god but God" does seem to offer some wiggle room for atheists, but maybe that's an inadvertent loophole.

It might, but I think the current climate in much of the Islamic world, while not the crazed image many have, is actually pretty brutal to people within the religion who are seen as blasphemous. From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like, the process of proclaiming your faith pretty much involves accepting the existence of god, prophets, the "punishment of the grave," that kind of thing. My impression is that if you're seen to have lied about that, you're lucky just to be outcast.

tl;dr It really doesn't pay to be seen as an "apostate" in Islam, at least in most places at this time.

> From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like

In general when you're talking about a group of a billion people you should avoid generalisations, especially if you also need to say that you don't know what you're talking about.

What did he say that was wrong? He didn't say all parts of the Islamic world are brutal to apostates, he just said much of the Islamic world is. And that's absolutely the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Apostasy_in_...

Dan, I'm sorry that you've taken my attempts at diplomacy as a declaration of ignorance. However diverse a billion people may be, that diversity is limited when a requirement of the claimed identity is to recite the shahada with conviction. If you can explain how that can be done, "I declare that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah; and I declare that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah...." without belief in god and a divine prophet of that god, you're going to have to walk me through it.

As to the view on apostasy: https://islamqa.info/en/20327

Sure. As a non-theist, I was just goofing around with the concept of "there is no got but God" being logically equivalent to the proposition:

(∀ god) (god == God)

which is trivially satisfied if there are no gods. Over-dry humor, I know.

That's a good one. In other words, if you state "I declare there is no deity worthy of worship but Allah", you leave it entirely possible that Allah itself doesn't exist. The follow up that "Mohammed is his messenger" is not a contradiction either.

Which definition is that, exactly?

So the claim then is that there is greater diversity in thought about whether or not a deity exists among an ethnic group than among a group for which membership is contingent on thinking a deity exists? I don't think that conveys very much information, except that there is not perfect uniformity among ethnic Jews on the issue.

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