2. Okay, but this is not relevant to the story in question (see point 4).
3. Okay, but this is not relevant to the story in question. (see point 4)
4. I'm willing to cede this and the previous 3 with regard to the parent. The question then becomes, do you believe in religious freedom enough to take the risk, or would you rather remove this threat and lose the religious freedom? The hypocrisy of subverting the constitution in order to protect the constitution is untenable. If you are truly concerned about this, it seems you should be explicitly campaigning for an amendment to the constitution to more strictly define the "acceptable" religions. If you're too ashamed to explicitly get behind that, it shouldn't be hidden by unwritten policies of arbitrary harassment of certain religions.
5. I'm embarrassed someone on Hacker News would except that video as "legitimate interpretation". The fundamental factual errors about the Qur'an and Islam would be comical if it wasn't juxtaposed by the sadness of meeting someone that actually believed that without independent research. (Nearly?) every factual statement made to support the opinions presented is factually incorrect:
(a) "The Qur'an is not full of symbolism or vague analogies-- implicitly stating that the New/Old Testament are "full" of symbolism and vague analogies and not meant to be taken literally- a self-serving, unsupportable implication.
(b) It is mostly direct commands-- false, by far, by any interpretation of "mostly"
(c) The Qur'an contains contradictory statements-- he seems to be confused about abrogated verses- actually, any statements of early Islam that were abrogated later were removed from the Qur'aan before its final compilation as a book.
(d) The Qur'an ITSELF provides a way to know what to with the "contradictions"-- ??? this simply does not exist
(e) "It's explained in the Qur'aan.... "-- Again, this does not exist. It's simply a bald-faced fabrication.
(f) The peaceful tolerant passages were "written" earlier in Muhammad's career-- again, false. The earlier passages did not deal with either peace or war, they dealt mostly with self-rectification. The later verses, after the establishment of a monolithic Islamic community with communal dealings with the outside world, added to that verses with guidance regarding both peace and war.
(g) "those passages have been abrogated..."-- see point c- if that were so, they would have been removed entirely during compilation
(h) "There is no picking and choosing" -- finally an accurate statement
That brings me to 2:54, and I'm too bored to continue answering nonsense that any 10 year old Muslim sunday schooler could have responded to.
6. See 5.
7. See 6 and 4.
Yeah, I just pulled a http://xkcd.com/386/ But you know what, it was cathartic after reading some of the embarrassing comments on this piece. I just picked the most ridiculous one and went to town.