A phobic person is someone suffering from IRRATIONAL or uncontrollable dread.
True. The suffix '-phobe' has kind of been hijacked in recent years for political purposes. It's seemingly used today to refer to anyone who doesn't like something the speaker likes and wants to enshrine as immune from criticism.
It's just another one of the lazy pseudo-intellectual cudgels that less thoughtful people use to bash opponents in the head. Words that can be invoked with almost magical effect to dismiss rhetorical opponents, taking the place of thought or argument.
I don’t choose to regard my own apprehensiveness about Muslim violence as groundless or illusionary or IRRATIONAL.
I'll say quite frankly that I don't like Islam. (I'll probably be flamed for saying that by many of the same atheists who freely insist that they can't stand Christianity.) Islam seems to me to combine all the least attractive features of all the other religions, in one package.
The thing is that there are lots of different kinds of Muslims and Muslim theology out there. I don't find all of them nasty or objectionable, only some of them.
The variety of Islam that I like the least is the highly legalistic Salafist version that's currently on the rise in most of the Muslim world. This form of religiosity imagines Islam as a divinely-revealed social order, a system of divine law applicable to the entire human race. It's the duty of Muslims to spread it and to subject the rest of humanity to what they believe is God's will. Since that social order is divinely revealed it is unchangeable for all time, subject to continuing interpretation but impossible to repeal. And unfortunately, the fundamentals of that social order represent the mores of crude desert tribesmen from the 7th century.
Many Muslims today are hugely alienated. They are ruled by brutal secular tyrants (Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria and Qaddafi in Libya are examples) and secular law has become thoroughly discredited. And big-picture, the whole Muslim world, what they like to believe is the world's foremost civilization, fell prey for centuries to European colonialism, to rule by godless barbarian kuffars, which again discredited the idea of secular this-worldly leadership in the people's eyes.
Man's law is perceived to have failed. So millions of Muslims are ready for
reform. And 'reform' in that context means going back to the
fundamentals of their religion, to strict adherence to God's law and God's will. Only then will the hand of god again intervene in history on their behalf, as it so clearly (to them) did in the 7th century when Islam swept miraculously from the Atlantic to India in the space of little more than a single generation.
I believe that the varieties of Islam that can most easily assimilate into diverse and secular Western societies are varieties of Islam that imagine Islam as a personal religion, not as a divinely mandated social order. I've met Muslim Sufis who were among the most spiritually beautiful and pure people that I've ever met. They impressed me a great deal. Their religosity was a deep and private thing to them, not a matter of outward observance for the entire community.
And that's the way that Islam needs to fit into a diverse society where most people don't share their religion or their ways.
In their own way, these remarks are applicable to Christianity too, and to all religions. If they are going to succeed in our modern secular world, religions need to be personal and private matters of individual conscience. Of course Christianity has been undergoing these slow and sometimes turbulent transformations for centuries. It hasn't been easy. And Islam has just embarked on them. In Islam's case, it isn't obvious what the ultimate result will finally be.
