Good morning all. I have no update yet on Martin’s condition. Now for your morning dose of Steven D:

A video posted on Facebook was sent to me in an email. The person who sent it asked me my thoughts about it. Here’s the link to it as I am not putting it up here: Link. The video shows a man who says he is a former Muslim, the son of an Imam with a degree in religious studies, and now a Masters candidate in the field of “Terrorism Studies.”

You can go view it if you like, it’s not very long. The basic message is that ISIL stands for all of Islam, i.e., all Muslims are evil terrorists because the basic tenets of the faith require them to kill or convert infidels, and ISIL is doing just that. I was asked to watch the video and give my thoughts regarding it, and thanks to high doses of prednisone (which can bring out the compulsive need to write in me), I decided “what the hell,” and did just that.

So, without further ado, here’s my comments on the vid:

I have seen similar videos like that one before. They generally feature a former Muslim, man or woman, condemning all Muslims based on their special knowledge of the Muslim faith. It’s a guilt by association argument at its core, though they do their best to try to say it is not.

I wonder if you would judge all Christians by the actions of White Christian Nationalist Groups such as the Order, whose members committed crimes including murder?

Or the Westboro Baptist Church, which protests the funerals of everyone and anyone, including our dead soldiers, merely to spread their message of hate against homosexuals?

Or judge all Christians by the ones in Uganda that, with support from American fundamentalists, passed a law that made homosexuality a capital offense and made it a crime to support gay people (fortunately the Ugandan court declared it unconstitutional for which we can be thankful)?

Would you judge Christians by Eric Rudolph, the person who bombed the 1996 Olympics, and an abortion clinic and a lesbian bar? He was a devoted believer, too. He said so at his sentencing hearing.

Would you judge all Christians by the Serbian and Croat members of the Orthodox Church who killed tens of thousands of Muslim Bosnians and raped and murdered thousands of Bosnian Muslim women?

We had a Christian in our own country who massacred members of a Sikh community thinking that, because they wore turbans, so they must be Muslims. Should we judge all Christians by him?

Or what about the Christian kids in high schools that bully and beat up Muslim kids, gay kids and non-religious kids? That happened at high schools here where I live, but also around the country. Should we judge all Christians by them?

What about the Christians that defended slavery prior to the civil war, based on Biblical law?

Should we judge Christians by the pedophile priests of the Catholic Church or the Mormon Fundamentalists who have old patriarchs marrying girls as young as 12 and 13?

It is not intellectually honest or ethical to judge any single religion by those groups or fringe elements that practice or promote violence in any way. All religions have had a history of “believers” who preach hate and defended their wars and their killing sprees in the name of their version of God.

Personally, I think we have done more damage intervening in the Middle East with our military. You know who gave instruction and advice and helped train Osama Bin Laden? The CIA, when we were funding the Muslim jihadists to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan.

We also supported dictatorial regimes in the Middle East that repressed their people, such as the Shah of Iran and Mubarak in Egypt, leading many of them to turn to extremists such as Atyatollah Khomenei, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.

We even sent arms into Syria for those who opposed the Syrian dictator, Assad, and many of those same arms are now in the hands of ISIS or ISIL or whatever the hell they call themselves. Look how well that turned out.

I don’t defend Muslims who kill people in the name of their faith. But I don’t defend Christians for the atrocities they committed, either. Or Hindus who have participated in massacres. Organized religion, like many social institutions (governments, corporations, political parties, etc.), has much to answer for regarding crimes against other human beings committed in its name.

But I refuse to condemn all people who claim to follow a particular faith based on the actions of a few.

If we go down that route, everyone with associations with any category of people, however loosely defined, ends up being condemned for the bad acts of others who claim membership in that “group.” For example, should all husbands be tarred with the brush of those men who beat their wives, simply because they too, are married? Of course not.

I guess I do my best to take people as I find them and judge them by what they do, not by what someone who doesn’t know them tells me they are like because they are part of a religion, or an ethnicity, or follow the precepts of a particular ideology, or just work for some company which has harmed people.

I may not always succeed, but that’s what I strive for. It is too easy for all of us as human beings to take the easy shortcut of labeling and stereotyping other people. In reality, every person is different, has a unique set of experiences in life, and judging them by one thing in their life is usually a mistake.

It may surprise you, but one of my friends out here is a Tea Party guy. However, I’ve gotten to know him, and while we recognize our political differences, we respect that the two of us like each other and are essentially good people. I have deeply conservative friends from Law School I still maintain touch with. Two of them stood up for me when I married [redacted]. One was my best man.

So this has rambled on too long. Sorry for that. But you asked for my thoughts on this video and I gave them to you.

So what do you think of my reaction?