How do you determine what is culture and what is religion?

It seems a common language (Arabic when reciting prayers), common food preparation technique (halal slaughter) is religous, not cultural. I assume because these instructions were given by the Koran?

So why are womens rights suddenly cultural? The way women should act and how men should treat them also come from the Koran?

So I was looking for a nice example but in fact I stumbled upon what I believe is incontrovertible proof of my point. From Human Rights Watch...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/01/19/...r-lebanons-law

About "It seems a common language (Arabic when reciting prayers)" I would not call that a common language anymore than Catholics had Latin as a common language when services were conducted in Latin ( mostly dying out since the second Vatican council).
Nor would I describe English Catholics as having a common culture with French Catholics although there is little geographic separation?
Anybody like to comment.

I would argue against it even being a language at all (to them). Most Muslims recite Arabic by rote. They have no idea what it means and couldn't even ask for the bill in a restaurant in Arabic. To them, Arabic is simply a way to pray in a prescribed manner and has nothing to do with their culture at all

The Bible says some crazy stuff too, and women's rights in Christian countries weren't always up to the standards that they are today. I wouldn't go too far down the road of blaming the religion per se, but rather how the people interpret the religion, and that starts going into more cultural factors. Altho yes, the culture and religion does factor onto each other and gets intertwined.

Have in mind that women in the top of those countries are more likely to go to the police...i.e. the more equality a country has the more reports...

Women's rights too a nose dive in the Roman Empire when Christianity took over. The Enlightenment was the biggest step in women's rights/secularism/atheism. Correlation /= causation. Just because women enjoy more rights in countries that happen to be Christian, don't think it's Christianity that gets the credit.

That's correct, in many ME countries, women don't report the rape because they will be punished
...but still women's safty and rights are much more guaranteed in EU than in the ME. That's obvious to most people.

Christianity went thru the dark ages and only after it was reformed did alot of the rights people enjoy now come to be. Islam is in desperate need of reforming, too many people take it too literally now and in the wrong ways. Read this if you haven't already, very well written:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-....html?ir=India

Nope. Protestantism is what gave rise to Christian fundamentalism. Look up Calvinism in apartheid South Africa for a start.

"To be clear on the topic: any refugee guilty of rape, sexual violence during the tragic event in Köln should be punished and sent back to his country. We are talking here about potentially thousands suspects in Germany among 1million refugees (that's 0.1% of those who came in during 2015)."

No, we are talking about "potentially Thousands suspect in Cologne - NOT Germany" out of the estimated 1 Million, that has arrived in 2015.

The population of Germany is ca. 80 million people, who received ca. 1 Million refugees, so 1 refugee per 80 citizen.
Cologne has ca. 1 Million citizens, and assuming refugees are distributed evenly all over Germany, 1 refugee per 80 citizens, would mean, Cologne has received ca. 12.500 refugees. Out of these 12.500 refugees, ca. 1000 (According to eye witnesses) were present at Domplatte and molested ca. 550 women according to latest numbers. 1000 out of 12.500 is closer to 8% than the 0.1% you suggested. 8% is 80 times more than 0.1%
Keep in mind, the same happened in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Bielefeld, and Berlin too.

The media only writes about the most chocking cases. How was the Situation in Flensburg, Kassel, Nürnburg, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Bremen, München ? Probably quite similar, but Köln made it to the madia first.

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- Gillian Duffy when Gordon Brown visited her

Other than doing your best to appear like an Internet authority on religious history and culture (yeah, we have Wikipedia and Google too) while engaging in pointless semantics and purposefully trying to change the context of the discussion, what is your opinion on on the actual thread topic?

Your main sources are saying "obviously" and "clearly" an awful lot which I'm sure you learned at the University of the Daily Mail Comments Section. But seriously, I'd invite you to refrain from ad hominem and argue the point, not the person. You have said that Islam is a major, or even the cause of the actions of the migrants. I pointed to Lebanon where women have roughly the same experience whether they're Christian or Muslim, even with their respective religions allowed to set the rules. That's because its regional and has nothing to do with religion.

Now you comment. (That's how this works I think)

Bavarian mayor buses refugees to Merkel.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35316913

"Jungle" camp at Calais being partially demolished.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35316419

And Turkey's sending refugees back to Syria.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35135810

I don't get it. Which bits would inhave missed by browsing BBC news?

This has been made even in my country when we received Armenian refugees more than 100 of years ago. The press made public the conditions they agreed to respect, basically it was a pledge that they will be loyal and will respect the laws of the new country. Result? One of the most respected ethnic&cultural group (who also preserved their culture) from back home, until today.
What Germany did is beyond stupidity....

Is there a presumption here that the rapes committed in those countries were committed by the native ethnicities of those countries?

But yes, rape is not unique to any culture.

I think it is different from other religions in its multiple aspects:
-It is a religion
-It is a social order
-It is a legal system
-It is a community
-It is a personal identity
-It is a political movement
-It is a revolutionary movement

What we find is that these are not all mutually inclusive. A person may pick up one or more of these as their motivation, without the others, and still consider themselves Muslim. So one Muslim's action can be vastly different from another. Yet one can't really say the other is not muslim, nor is not practising Islam.

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exceptio probat regulam

No, Islam is none of those things, necessarily.

Not necessarily, but in how it is practiced, they are. Do we need to iterate through examples? And it does fit in the definition of a culture as well.