And yet Muslim Americans are significantly more accepting and open to homosexuality than evangelical and Mormon Americans, so this is obviously not a hard rule by any means.
The same can be said of the medieval Islamic legal system as well. As has been pointed out on these boards many times, pre-modern Islamic societies were in many cases more tolerant of “aberrant” behaviors such as homosexuality and religious diversity than contemporary Christian ones were. (And as iiandyiiii notes, that is true for some modern Muslim subcultures as well.)
Which pretty much demolishes your essentializing attempt to claim that Islam is intrinsically more repressive and fundamentalist than other religions because of some vague broad-brushery about its “interpretive tradition”. :dubious:
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
But comparatively, in Islam, the scripture plays a very strong role, the interpretive tradition plays a weak one. In Judaism that’s reversed.
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More vague generalization that doesn’t really mean anything. All religious interpretive traditions are about the scripture. You can’t separate out the scripture from the interpretive tradition.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
Try reading this article: What ISIS Really Wants. It lays out in detail how every bizarre form of torture and execution and every call for terrorist attacks from ISIS has a clear basis in the Koran, which ISIS leaders drive home constantly.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.
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:dubious: :dubious: All that says is that a bunch of Islamic-extremist fundamentalists have an extremist fundamentalist interpretation of Muslim scripture.
Likewise, Christian-extremist fundamentalists have an extremist fundamentalist interpretation of Christian scripture, and Jewish-extremist fundamentalists have an extremist fundamentalist interpretation of Jewish scripture, and so on. It doesn’t explain jack-shit about why in the modern world, extremist fundamentalist interpretations are so much more prevalent and influential in Islam than in other religions, when in the past it’s often been the other way around.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
If we want to understand why thousands of youths from western countries have run off to join the Islamic state, but there’s no similar movement of young Jewish people to a similar Jewish terrorist group
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There certainly isn’t anywhere near as big a similar movement in Jewish fundamentalist extremism, but it’s silly to try to claim that no such movement exists at all:
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
(or a Christian or Buddhist or Shinto or …),
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Again, Christian and Buddhist terror groups aren’t anywhere near as widespread and active as Muslim ones, but they do exist and they do recruit. (About Shintoism I have no idea.)
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
we have to start by studying and understanding the ways in which Islam is different from other religions.
[/QUOTE]
Sure, but we have to be well-informed and scrupulous about identifying genuine and specific differences between the particular forms of modern Islam that produce high levels of oppression and violence, and the particular forms of other religions (as well as other, less widespread forms of Islam) that do not.
Indiscriminate generalizations trying to reduce these genuine and specific differences to simplistic naive pronouncements, such as “Islam is different because it contains specific laws” or “Islam is different because it places more emphasis on scripture than interpretation”, are basically lazy bullshit.
It certainly is the case that some religious groups in some places are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. For example, in America, Jews are among the most tolerant.
However, I would argue that this has little or nothing to do with the particular scriptures and interpretive guides contained in the religion, and almost everything to do with historic influences on the groups in question.
Take Jews as an example: there is nothing whatsoever in Judaism as a religion to indicate that it would be liberal on matters of homosexuality. The scriptures and the Talmud are unanimous - certain male homosexual acts are prohibited (there is a lot of quibbling, because female homosexual acts are not expressly prohibited in scripture; also, it is not agreed whether homosexuality, or only homosexual sex acts are prohibited - but all sources agree that the last is, at least, prohibited).
So how do we get from ‘it is prohibited’ to ‘it ought to be accepted by society’? Simple: modern-day Jews in America are, on average, liberal on social matters and simply dismiss those aspects of their ancestral religion that they believe are outdated relics of a past society. Certainly Jews exist who cling to the scriptures and Talmud on all matters, but they are in the minority. The rest choose a ‘modern’ reading of the scriptures and commentaries, in which they separate out those aspects of the religion they believe have spiritual and moral worth, from those that they feel do not.
The real issue is: why did Jews, on average, choose to become so liberal? A complex question, in which such things as education levels, availability and choice of economic opportunities etc. all play a part.
There is no reason to assume the same process cannot occur in other religious groups, and considerable evidence that it does. Hence the fact that, In America, Muslims are on average middlingly liberal on matters of homosexuality - less liberal than (say) Jews, but more liberal than (say) evangelical Christians. A mere analysis of the scriptural basis of evangelical Christianity versus Islam versus Judaism would not enable you to predict that result.
Well then, it sounds like you and I and everyone else in this thread are in agreement that there are forms of modern Islam that produce high levels of oppression and violence, and that these forms dominate a regrettably large part of the Arab world currently. You’ve been clear about what explanations for this you don’t accept. What genuine and specific differences do you believe account for it?
Well, like any other massive sociocultural phenomenon it’s incredibly complex. But I’d say that one of the most important factors is the specifically political entanglement of the puritanical Wahhabi “fundamentalist” movement with the militant expansionist House of Saud in the 19th and early 20th century. Reactionary “purification” movements are most damaging and tyrannical when they’re allied with political power, as we see, for example, in English Puritanism in the English civil wars, and earlier in the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th-century Catholic Church.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Sauds’ adversary Turkey, the direct heir of the Ottoman Empire, embraced modernism and reformation with a secular law code (and still has the strongest commitment to liberal civil secularism in the modern Middle East, what with wanting to join the EU and all). Modernism found a lot of adherents in Islam in the early 20th century, though there were also many Muslims who viewed it with deep suspicion as part of the ideology of European colonizers.
Europe and North America had turned to civil secularism and nationalist/democratic ideals in the 18th and 19th centuries partly as an alternative to the trauma of religious wars and holy empires (though by no means without opposition, as the formation of the Holy Alliance illustrates). The non-European colonies of the European powers, which is what much of the Muslim world was during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, weren’t considered similarly entitled to self-determination and national identity. So it’s not surprising that many Muslims (like many Hindus in the RSS in India) rejected imitation of colonial civil secularism in favor of embracing a national/religious identity.
Why is religious theocratic opposition to liberal civil secularism now just a social movement under (mostly) civil-secularist governments in most nations of Europe and the Americas, Japan, India, etc., but the dominant political force in much of the Islamic world? The above couple paragraphs start to scratch the surface of the answer: I can go on expanding on it if you want, though I wish some of the SDMB subject matter experts like Tamerlane would weigh in with more authoritative explanations. But the chief point is that this phenomenon doesn’t follow directly or inevitably from scriptural support for theocracy in the Qur’an, any more than, say, the pro-monarchy pro-ethnic-cleansing Jewish terror group “Revolt” follows directly or inevitably from scriptural support for monarchy or ethnic cleansing in the Old Testament.
Nope.
Bravely rebutted.
You mean besides the codified killing of gay people and the never ending mass attacks around the world by said religion?
Unlike Islam, the Christian religion does not have a progenitor who killed gay people or suggested they be killed. In fact, the Christian prophet didn’t bother to write a single word down. There is no codified legal system you can point to today based on the words or actions of the Christian prophet. The exact opposite is true of Islam. It’s not just a religion it’s a codified way of life complete with laws that are used today by Muslim countries. It is those laws that Muslims look to for guidance. It’s further justified by the progenitor of the religion who committed the acts he himself codified. It is those laws that punish gay people up to and including death. This is not in dispute. The Bible is not the rule of law nor will it ever be in Western countries. Sharia law IS the rule of law for Muslims.
a subset of
FTFY.
As long as you continue to hold the nonsense position that it is “the religion” that is carrying out these attacks, you are demonstrating the same sort of silliness that Trump espouses, (along with aligning yourself with such stalwarts of Democracy and rational thinking as the John Birch Society).
We have been over this many times. While one faction among Muslims has been promoting extreme violence, the violence that has occurred over the last few years has many more sources than Islam, and the desire to ignore every other situation in order to simplistically blame Islam for all the problems is both ignorant and counter-productive.
More ignorance, refuted multiple times on this board.
There is not one “Sharia,” there are multiple versions of interpreted Sharia throughout history and throughout the world. And the laws that the various forms of Sharia have promulgated have not all been the repressive laws that you want them to have been.
Only a minority of “Muslim” nations even rely on Sharia for the majority of their laws. The notion that “Islam” is using “Sharia” to enslave or oppress as many people as possible is nothing but a paranoid fantasy.
When did Mohammad’s words become a subset? Need some cites.
Don’t be disingenuous, it’s unbecoming.
You’re continued insistence that since all Muslims aren’t actively shooting up the world it isn’t the religion driving the Islamic terrorism is so gob-smacked stupid it’s beyond reason.
Lets look at your cite and choose the countries that are Members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation where sharia plays no role in the judicial system
Benin- Islamic jihadists destroy Church and training center
Burkina Faso- Burkina Faso attack: At least 29 dead, scores freed after hotel siege
Cameroon - Cameroon: War Against Boko Haram - Muslim Leaders Put Community On Alert
Chad- Triple Suicide Bombings in Chad
Côte d’Ivoire - Then on March 13, gunmen opened fire at several hotels in the seaside resort of Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, killing 18 people and injuring 33. Like the attacks in Mali and Burkina Faso, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has reportedly claimed responsibility.
Mali- Heavily armed gunmen on Friday fired indiscriminately at guests at a hotel hosting diplomats and others in Mali’s capital,
This is not a complete list from your cite. I’m just too tired to list them all. You can’t be bothered to research your own cites.
These are a tiny tiny tiny sample of the chaos inflicted on the world in the name of Islam, not by people who happen to be Muslims, but in the name of Islam.
Well no shit.
So it isn’t Islam doing awful things after all, but people doing awful things in Islam’s name.
Glad you’ve come around.
Yah that statement doesn’t look like a cite.
You can’t have a prophet who murdered people and not expect his followers to emulate him.
Moses put a lot of people to death…and Jews don’t emulate that.
um what?
Odd thing, they stopped doing it thousands of years ago.
So we’re back to 2016 and a never ending parade of Islamic terrorist attacks. You’re logic is flawed if you suggest a group of people HAVE to emulate their prophet. Clearly Muslims ARE emulating Mohammad.