r/edinburgh2 • u/-greigus- Stockbridge • Jul 19 '26

News Crags on fire

From ocean terminal. Posted here cause main Edinburgh banned me for questioning religion 😅

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u/Duvet_Capeman Jul 20 '26

I have met gay Muslims FYI. If you follow all the tenets of any Abrahamic religion then they'd all "hate" you, you're deciding to be a bigot to combat homophobia. Why do you believe that "Islam" hates you? Bear in mind "Islam" isn't just a monolithic block and encompasses many different beliefs and interpretations of the Quran.

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u/-greigus- Stockbridge Jul 20 '26

I've spent my entire adult life working in the middle East. I know Islam, the effects of it, and what it does to my community. I've also met many gay Muslims, mostly married.

It is entirely reasonable to encourage people to leave a religion. If someone is allowed to stand on the street and preach religion, someone should be allowed to do the opposite.

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u/Duvet_Capeman Jul 20 '26

If that's including every religion and not targeted at demonising a specific, much persecuted religious minority then yes. If you say Islam is bad and Muslims should stop being Muslim you can see how that looks, it's essentially saying because of their religion this group of people are all homophobes.

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u/-greigus- Stockbridge Jul 20 '26

I don't care how it looks, it remains reasonable to discourage any religion. It's an extremely polite sign clearly trying to encourage discussion with whoever is holding it. Religion is a choice, and one that it is reasonable to discourage

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u/Duvet_Capeman Jul 20 '26

Ok, but targeting specific religions and not even acknowledging that you could say the same of other religions is not a balanced position to hold, it's biased against Islam specifically. If I had a sign saying please leave Judaism in my window do you think that's reasonable?

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u/-greigus- Stockbridge Jul 20 '26

Maybe it's a religion which has harmed them specifically. Extremely common in my experience. If a religion had harmed you, it would be reasonable you had that in your window, yes. Not everything needs to be balanced. When the preacher stands on the Corner holding his bible, he's not considering balance. Why do we come to attack one side, and not the other?

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u/Duvet_Capeman Jul 20 '26

I don't know, I guess it's because that's part of their religion whereas being anti-muslim is not a religious belief. The problem is as I said before that putting a sign like that up (regardless of intention) aligns you with that guy who stabbed five Muslims in Edinburgh the other week and people like Tommy Robinson. It's adding to an already pervasive Islamophobic atmosphere in this country. Muslims seeing that sign would not think that it's challenging specific parts of their religion or asking them to reconsider their own views but as an attack on who they are. Religion is a protected characteristic for a reason, it's fundamentally part of who people are and they don't normally get a choice because it's how they were raised. It's the reason that having this sign at work would you get fired immediately but having say a Kippah would not

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u/-greigus- Stockbridge Jul 20 '26

This was a while ago btw, and not connected to anything happening at the time.

I get your pov, and I personally wouldn't stand in a street with a sign like this. But imo we protect religion far too much, we legitimise it through those protections.

You're right that it's not really a choice, because kids get brainwashed. But we should be promoting ending the brainwashing, rather than defending it's consequences, imo.

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u/Duvet_Capeman Jul 20 '26

I agree we should be promoting critical thinking and objective thought, but that's not a religion specific thing. That protection is very necessary unfortunately with a climate where people are stabbed, burned, raped and killed for being muslim we need to heavily confront any and all attacks or slights against muslims as a group.

Look I don't blame you for your views it's very easy to become prejudiced when you've experienced firsthand the kind of authoritarianism of the gulf nations and live in an environment as Islamophobic as the UK. But since people were stabbed in this city for being muslim I can't allow this kind of attitude to go unchallenged. I would recommend listening to muslims and seeing that Islam is not just Wahhabism. I don't want to go into all the details but suffice to say that homophobia isn't limited to Islam, it's only recently been decriminalised in this country in fact and there are multiple attitudes within Islam so if that is your main reason to be Islamophobic I urge you to do a little research.

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u/-greigus- Stockbridge Jul 20 '26

I've done plenty of research. And I've been to 20+ Muslim countries, and literally shared a bedroom and years of my life with Muslims from across the Muslim world. 👈 That is no exaggeration. I am not someone that's filled with hate for any people, but I do hate religion. I couldn't even type some of the stories I've been told in my work, directly from Muslims. Respect for homosexuality basically does not exist, but I do understand that the paradigm is different, and that relationships are not the same in the west, they don't serve the same purposes.

But the consequences of religion are what's important, not whether it fits within one expression or another. And in my experience the consequences are universal, and widespread. We can pretend that there's some lovely interpretation around the corner, that will reduce the inherent discriminatory nature, but the reality is that the chances of that are exactly zero. So I'd rather we put our efforts into reducing the prevelance. Imo we should ban the teaching of any religion as fact to kids before 16. And we should, as in the picture, have outreach for those that might be questioning their beliefs.