> Maguire, an outspoken and high-profile investor who is close to Elon Musk, wrote on X in July that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”
Balbale complained to other senior partners at the firm, who declined to take action against Maguire, arguing he was just exercising his right to free speech, the people said. She left soon after, feeling her position was untenable.
If the same quote replaced 'Islamist' with another faith, would it have also been brushed off as "right to free speech"?
Christians will always denigrate other faiths by stating all of the faithful adhere to a literal reading of those faith's religious texts, and claiming to adhere to a literal reading of their own religious texts while simultaneously denying all contradictions, appeals to violence, hate, and despotism found within.
> exploitation of female captives and booty distribution
Oh dear! That's quite concerning.
It certainly would be a pretty terrible thing if someone capable of exploiting female captives and "distributing booty" acquired a position of power in the USA.
I mean, the Bible has God himself lying to Adam. God says do not eat this fruit - because if you eat it you'll die immediately. And later of course Adam eats the fruit, and of course he doesn't die, because actually God was lying about that.
The general position of Christians seems to be that God lying is OK, however lying to them is a sin. But, Christians lie all the time, so, seems like actually the rule is "Lie but pretend it's a sin if anybody else does it" which is consistent with God and their own behaviour and indeed consistent with lying about Mamdani...
> The Quran contains passages along these lines along with other things like the exploitation of female captives and booty distribution from the spoils of war (including female captives).
Let's please not get started about sexism in major religions. The New Testament is rife with sexism, as even a cursory Google search would have revealed to you. Here's just one example:
Ephesians 5:22–24: "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church... Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands".
Unless you are willing to scrutinize other religions as you would Islam, then you are being intellectually lazy at best, a bigot at worst.
A) Ephesians is not found in the Old Testament; it is a letter written by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. It addresses themes of grace, unity, and the church's role in God's plan, which are not specifically covered in the Old Testament.
B) The section you reference outlines the biblical perspective on the roles within marriage. The concept of submission is presented as a voluntary act, reflecting the relationship between Christ and the church. the biblical view encourages understanding it as a partnership where both spouses honor and respect each other’s roles. This section serves as a foundation for discussions on marriage, emphasizing both the responsibilities and the spiritual significance of the marital relationship.
As with many things in the bible, they are symbolic, and not to be taken literally. This is also why we have hundreds, if not thousands of flavors of Christianity - they all interpret the bible differently because many of the translations and interpretations differed wildly from scholar to scholar.
A) I'm well aware Ephesians is not found in the Old Testament; that's why I chose it. These verses are specific to Christianity, just as anything from the Quran would be specific to Islam.
B) "The concept of submission is presented as a voluntary act" What is written in any faith's texts is imposed on its followers, whether it was intended to be voluntary or not. We can only speculate how many millions of women were instructed to submit to their husbands as if he was God himself. This indoctrination starts as soon as children are old enough to attend church and continues as long as they go to church. There are obviously progressive leaders in any faith, but that tends to be the exception, rather than the rule.
"the biblical view encourages understanding it as a partnership where both spouses honor and respect each other’s roles" The dominant view among Christians in America today is "complementarianism", which sounds a lot like what you're saying. It's designed to appear at first glance as equality, but really means that women are restricted to domestic grunt work while men control all the levers of power: All roles of authority in the church, in business, and of course still telling what their wives and children to do at home.
The fact that you even say "honor and respect *each other's roles" strongly suggests you believe that a woman's role is to be, in essence, subjugated to her husband, limited to giving birth, raising children, and taking care of all the husband's emotional and logistical needs. Correct me if I'm wrong!
"As with many things in the bible, they are symbolic, and not to be taken literally... translations and interpretations differed wildly from scholar to scholar."
This is a fine perspective to have. But OP was happy to demonize all of Islam based on a few quotes with seemingly no account of their historical or religious context. Virtually any religion can be
>As with many things in the bible, they are symbolic, and not to be taken literally. This is also why we have hundreds, if not thousands of flavors of Christianity - they all interpret the bible differently because many of the translations and interpretations differed wildly from scholar to scholar.
Including many who don't have this perspective on scripture.
I probably agree with you on more things religious than not. Having said that, I was correcting OP, who strongly suggested that Islam was uniquely misogynist by quoting a couple passages from the Quran.
What I think is really interesting is that the some of the strongest currents in Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all converging on the subjugation of women, especially the control of their bodies and their sexuality.
> We can also do this with Islam too, a religion founded by a slaver war monger who had sex slaves, and whose teachings say women are a sexual reward.
A helpful reminder to you that Christianity was founded by a man who never married, never had children, and lived poor his whole life. Something literally no one within Christianity espouses today. It is ignorant to assume that Muslims all aspire to live like Mohammad when virtually no Christians aspire to live like Christ.
Islams founder's take differs quite a bit from Christianity's founder's take. We should be able to point that out without being called racist/bigot/receiving down votes. One had sex slaves, one did not marry and instead treated the world as his children.
Virtually every Christian I know aspires to be as Christ like as they can. You may not see that in their actions, but in their beliefs they definitely aspire to that. Are you saying Muslims don't hold their prophet in high regard? The prophet is just symbolic?
Christians believe you should wait until marriage for sex. So they very much preach item 2 you list.
Most Christians I know follow item 3 and literally espouse it. That you should not be greedy. You should not take advantage of others. You should live life for a moral purpose, for entry to heaven, not material gain.
Christianity teaches that you can't be Jesus, that is the point of the religion. You can't be a god. You can only be the best flawed human you can, and that is good enough, and you are forgiven for those flaws, IF you TRY to be better than your base nature. It teaches that Christs life was that of a god, and yet he still took time to take care of/see the lowest among us. Not that his life was one we can do, but definitely one we should aspire to. Does Islam not teach you should aspire to be like their prophet? That his morality should be an inspiration?
The west is freely accepting of calling out Christianity, Mormonism, Scientology. But we can't examine/be critical of Islam. That is not OK. I've known way more Muslims than Scientologists. It is not a foreign/abstract religion, but a real religion present in our communities. There is a lot in Islam that needs to be called out and processed by the Muslim faithful. Tom Cruise can be called out on his faith. Mitt Romney had his faith called out a ton and that was OK. Catholics get called out all the time for being Catholic. We can call out other religions too without it suddenly being racist/bigoted. No, it's calling out if a religion has some crappy beliefs/justifications and saying 'I'm not sure about a person who believes these things as a core part of their identity'.
All that said I would love to see Mamdani as mayor of New York. His religion/acts done under it shouldn't define him, just like with Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney. We're all people making our way, not caricatures defined externally.
> Virtually every Christian I know aspires to be as Christ like as they can. You may not see that in their actions, but in their beliefs they definitely aspire to that.
This is a nonsense statement. It's trivially obvious how to be "Christ like": Live poor, help the disenfranchised, feed the hungry, heal the wounded, don't marry, don't have kids, and preach the gospel, if only to a small number of people.
If the Christians you know don't live like that, then they are not being "Christ like." To say they are while they do the opposite -- work to get rich, get married and have big families, confine their spiritual work to Sunday mornings, occasionally giving to charity (or only to their own church) -- is to believe that words have no meaning at all.
I'm sure the people you think of as "Christ like" are by and large perfectly wonderful human beings. But this whole discussion was sparked by a powerful man at Sequoia making reductive statements about all of Islam based on a few quotations from the Quran. At some point we have to admit that the way people practice religion does not necessarily follow what's written in their texts. And to suggest, as others have in this very thread, that because Mohammad married had multiple wives means that all of his followers want to as well, is as ignorant as assuming that all Christians want to live like Christ actually lived.
The Quran is held by Muslims as 'the perfect word of God'. It is treated much differently than the Christian bible which gets somewhat loosely translated into many languages.
As the perfect word of God, quotations from it ARE THE PERFECT WORD OF GOD. How is talking about what someone believes is the exact and perfect words of God off limits/racist/bigoted? How is saying that 'Gods perfect representative on earth' having sex slaves makes me call the beliefs of followers of Islam in to question racist/bigoted? I want to know if someone is OK with sexual slavery. A religion that talks about when it gives out sex slaves/sex as a reward to good men makes me have questions about how someone who believes that sees women. Believe me, I struggle with it. The founders of my country were awful men who raped female slaves themselves. I struggle with how do I incorporate 'good parts' of their ideology when they were vile human beings. But I think it is important to challenge that, to ask that question, especially of myself and my nation. I can't imagine if that was my founding religious leader.
Asking 'what about Thomas Jefferson raping his understage slave' isn't being racist. It's legit 'how do you reconcile these things'. It's hugely informative.
Islam is a much more mainstream American religion than Scientology. There are only maybe 50,000 Scientologists in the US. There are around 3.5 million Muslims. I should be able to talk about Islam with at least the same criticality.
Please understand my culture is to challenge religions/religious people/politicians/admired figures, not just Muslims. Muslims, because they believe the Quran is the perfect word of God, are in a tough spot when their perfect word of God says things like lying or sexual slavery are OK. Just like Americans when their 'freedom fighter' founders also had literal sex slaves. But that does not mean we should not challenge. I get it's really hard for Muslims because they can't challenge 'the perfect word of God' but that doesn't make it bigoted/racist to say 'this person's religion says it is the perfect word of god that they can lie about this how do I know they are telling the truth'.
In the US, we reformed, we did away with slavery. We condemn the actions of our founders. Islam being the perfect word of God with it's perfect messenger on earth can't really condemn nor phase these things out. So how public political figures reconcile these things is very valid to bring up.
> The Quran is held by Muslims as 'the perfect word of God'. It is treated much differently than the Christian bible which gets somewhat loosely translated into many languages.
Biblical literalism isn't exactly common, too, and people who self-identify as Christian use it to justify things like killing gay people, corporal punishment, not allowing divorce except in certain cases, denying scientific consensus on things like biology or climate change, unconditionally back the actions of the Israeli government based on eschatological theories, etc.
I think there’s an argument that mainstream Christianity is less stringent than mainstream Islam on this but it’s very much a question of degree and appears to be moving backwards. We just had a rather heated national debate over what exactly Charlie Kirk meant by using a very similar phrase (“God's perfect law”) in a negative context so it’s very hard for me to see this as a Muslim problem rather than a problem common to all fundamentalist religious traditions.
Yes exactly! Thank you! We just had a national debate on Christianity so we could understand the takes that certain people were coming from (which were in fact horrible positions, so it's very important that they defined their position). Certain segments of Christianity have views that to me make them unelectable. And that is super important to know/understand. But I don't get to understand/we don't get to challenge a Muslim person's belief like that because it is somehow racist to ask.
I'm not claiming it's a Muslim problem. I talk about Christians, Scientologists, Mormons, heck even Americans and understanding how to reconcile our founding as a nation versus our beliefs now. I do understand how awkward it is because their religion literally says it is the perfect word of God. I understand that makes it complex for them. But that doesn't mean we don't need to understand. I don't know what it means to be a follower of Islam. But I do know what their perfect word of God says, and some of it is really bad stuff (just like the pre-Jesus Christian old testament stuff, yikes). I do know some horrible things about their founder, and I think it's reasonable to ask what those horrible things mean to a follower, just like calling out that my nation of freedom was founded on racism and slavery by men who raped their underage slaves. There is a taint to both, but I don't get to ask how a Muslim reconciles that taint, while I can challenge American taint. I don't know how to operate without being able to challenge, and get responses, and understand. Just like we had a Christian debate, or we debate what the founding of our nation means we should encourage the discussion and deeper understanding.
I just want the debate you yourself reference that we just had on Christianity. It's fair to want to understand, but for some reason we don't get to ask/challenge Muslims like we do the Christians, Scientologists, etc. Even though as you point out the discussion can be very eye opening.
Until we can have these discussions, people are going to have questions about followers of a religion that says the perfect word of God is that you can lie to people of other religions. People are going to question a religion that teaches sex, sex slaves, the inability of the being you desire in heaven to say no being rewards for men.
> Certain segments of Christianity have views that to me make them unelectable. And that is super important to know/understand. But I don't get to understand/we don't get to challenge a Muslim person's belief like that because it is somehow racist to ask.
I don't see anyone saying it's unfair to talk about the beliefs a specific Muslim candidate has expressed but Maguire wasn't talking about anything Mamdani has said. He made a sweeping claim about an entire culture, saying they considered it a virtue to lie when that is in fact broadly condemned. He almost certainly based that belief on propaganda about the concept of taqiyya which has been swirling around right-wing circles for the last couple of decades. That concept refers to a narrow exception allowing Muslims to conceal or disavow their religious beliefs when they fear for their safety. The term is derived from a root meaning of caution or fear, and dates back to when Islam was a minority religion whose followers had real examples of recantations forced under torture. Christians active in right-wing politics have claimed that it is both broadly practiced and interpreted to allow lying to spread Islam itself despite limited evidence and strident disagreement by actual scholars – there's a good summary here with a lot of links:
This is about as fair as finding a Seven Mountains Dominionist preacher who says that Christians need to control all aspects of society, claiming that they speak for all Christians, and then claiming that belief is secretly shared by a Christian political candidate who has never voiced supported for that sect and must override all of their stated views or past actions.
I'm an atheist now so I don't have a god in this fight but I've known enough people of each of the Abrahamic religions that I wouldn't make a general criticism of any individual except based on things they personally said or did.
> Because we can't ask Muslims politicians about their religion or their positions/interpretations, we depend on others than the actual individual we know about to try and explain, which ends up worse and potentially misinformed.
Who specifically is saying that we can’t ask them? You’ve made that claim repeatedly but I don’t see anyone saying it’s inappropriate to ask a candidate what they believe on topics relevant to their office. The condemnation is about sweeping assertions about large heterogeneous groups.
Are you really claiming that Christianity and Judiasm have no problematic passages about slavery, women, and war? Where is your handwringing about all the Christian politicians - shouldn't there be a UN resolution denouncing the problematic passages of the Bible? Or are you being willfully ignorant so you can continue to be Islamophobic?
Edit: First address the wrong in question. And a phobia is an irrational fear. What’s the sentence for apostasy or blasphemy in this faith? It’s death. That’s a very valid, rational fear.
That's not a whataboutism. OP brought up the topic that saying these things about Islam is as valid as saying these things about other religions. You're trying to make the point that Islam is uniquely bad ("Except you can't [replace Islam in that quote with another religion].") in the ways that Maguire said. It is therefore on topic for someone to then point out passages from other holy texts which suggest that those religions might be similarly bad.
It is whataboutism if the reply was a reply to my post about the UN resolution denouncing the sexual slavery and exploitation of minors in the Quran. Which seems to be the case as the argument was specific to the UN resolution statement that I made in my comment. Not the OP’s argument.
> We need to have an honest discussion for those arguing in favor of this faith about their positions on these very discriminatory segments of their core texts
and then ignored that most politicians in the US are not Muslim. So again I'm asking you - do you actually believe what you wrote (for all religions), or are you singling out Mamdani and his religion because you're a bigot? I'm having your "honest discussion."
Edit: your original response was just the first sentence, and the edit added that you're scared of Muslims. Not sure that's the flex you think it is.
If you want an "honest discussion" then be honest about your reasons for being scared of Islam and not the other religions which dominate US politics. Pointing out your hypocrisy in singling out Muslims isn't "whataboutism" - it's the honest debate you're looking for.
Oh, so an "emotional appeal"? That's also a logical fallacy btw.
This is about your personal fears of a candidate's religion and not his actions. Otherwise (if this were actually about your fear of indoctrination and dogma) you'd be spouting this same rhetoric for all politicians who believe in Abrahamic religions. Again, hypocrisy. Or did I miss where you said Christianity should be singled out and denounced by the UN?
If the same quote replaced 'Islamist' with another faith, would it have also been brushed off as "right to free speech"?