Is Islam Violent? The Viral Debate

Bill Maher, on his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, recently created a firestorm when he called Islam a violent religion in a heated debate with actor Ben Affleck. You can see the ten minute clip above and you can also see Maher discuss his views with Charlie Rose in a  five minute clip below.

Newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times have weighed in the debate.  Reza Aslan, the author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,”  writing for the New York Times, suggests that both sides in the debate misunderstand religion.

“On one hand, people of faith are far too eager to distance themselves from extremists in their community, often denying that religious violence has any religious motivation whatsoever….On the other, critics of religion tend to exhibit an inability to understand religion outside of its absolutist connotations. They scour holy texts for bits of savagery and point to extreme examples of religious bigotry, of which there are too many, to generalize about the causes of oppression throughout the world.”

Chris Stedman, writing for the Religious News Service, notes that Maher  did not include any Muslims on his Real Time panel and believes  “that minority perspectives and pluralists in all communities tend to get drowned out or overlooked.”

Nicholas Kristof was on the Real Time panel when the debate happened.  He wrote about it in a New York Times article called The Diversity of Islam in which he suggests.

Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him. The Dalai Lama today is an extraordinary humanitarian, but the fifth Dalai Lama in 1660 ordered children massacred “like eggs smashed against rocks.”

Here are some of the interesting articles about the debate.

• New York Times: Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion
• Washington Post: Ben Affleck and Bill Maher are both wrong about Islamic Fundamentalism
• Religion News Service: What was missing from the Ben Affleck and Bill Maher Islam debate
• Deseret News: Is it Fair to Judge a Religion by their Extremists?
• New York Times: The Diversity of Islam