Does Islam drive homophobic violence?

One would hypothesize that willingness to commit suicidal violence would correlate with two elements one would expect to find in scriptures:

  1. Calls to kill others for the faith; and

  2. Rewards in the afterlife for dying in the cause of religion.

Looking at the three major monotheistic religions, I’d say that they match up as follows:

Judaism: contains multiple calls to kill in the name of religion in the scriptures (albeit often given different connotations in the Talmud, etc.). The Jewish afterlife is, however, not well developed - rudimentary compared with the other two.

Thus, prediction: Jews will be willing to kill, but no as willing to die, in the name of religion.

Christianity: scriptures are essentially pacifist (though depends on what is emphasized: still contains references to more-militant OT, minus the ameliorating effect of the Talmud. Very well-developed notion of the afterlife, martyrdom highly emphasized.

Prediction: Christians will be pacifists willing to commit suicide readily in the name of religion.

Islam: contains exhortations to kill in the name of religion and a well-developed afterlife.

Prediction: Muslims will be willing to both kill and die in the name of religion.

The problem, though, is that historical analysis shows that these predictions are not necessarily borne out.

For example, one of the earliest examples of a group willing to commit impressive suicidal violence in the name of religion is - Jewish. The Sicarii and Zealots were infamous (among Romans) for their willingness to use terrorist assassination tactics, and famously, a group of Zealots committed mass suicide rather than surrender at Masada. The willingness to kill could have been predicted, but not the willingness to die.

Christians may have been pacifist martyrs at one point, but the historical record of Christian pacifism over the centuries has been spotty, to put it mildly.

In Islam, there is precedent for groups willing to use suicidal violence - the so-called “Assassins”, or more properly, Ismailis. Thing is, they were considered highly unusual among Muslims (their most common victims being non-Ismaili Muslims), leading to a lot of legends concerning them: most prominently, their nickname. The term “assassin” is thought to be an insult, based on “hashishin” or eaters of the drug hashish: the notion is that they would have to be drugged up to commit their outrages.

In short, within Islam suicidal terrorism is not unknown; however, it is historically the province of dissident sects considered highly weird by the mainstream within Islam (as an aside, the Ismailis still exist today, and are now considered quite moderate). The groups they mostly resemble, historically, are the Sicarrii and Zealots of antiquity - who were Jewish.

Therefore, based on historical precedents, it would appear difficult or impossible to predict the form violence will take, from the scriptures alone, as our predictions would not be borne out in reality.

What about God, as a figure of veneration in the Bible? He seems to do some not-so-nice stuff.

Of course, since the Biblical God is the same figure as the Islamic Allah – created Adam and Eve, sent the flood to Noah, spoke to Abraham – this counts against Islam as much as against Christianity. Judaism, too.

(And look at all the people Moses put to death for worshipping the golden calf.)

:rolleyes:

Let me get this straight (ha):

“Christians” in the US and other western countries spend decades railing against LGBTQ rights, and then when those rights are made law in spite of these “Christians” best efforts, we’re supposed to give them credit?

The fact that the more tolerant countries are Christian-majority has little to do with their acceptance of LGBTQ rights, and a great deal to do with the efforts of people who fought tirelessly against conservative Christian ideology.

Give us a fucking break, please.

It would be much more accurate to say that Same Sex Marriage is only legal in places with a very high proportion of secular and non-religious people. Despite the “Christian” nature of the U.S., religion, itself, has rather little to do with the way that laws are shaped, here–and most of the blow back against LGBTQ rights are fostered by religious polemics. The reason for your perception, (not particularly accurate), is that countries identified as Christian majority tend to be moving toward a post-religious society. It is not only Africa; Christian Latin America has little movement on SSM, as well. The countries that have legalized it have been Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, and Argentina–at least three of which have long and strong anti-clerical movements dating back over a century.

The dogma of the religion is based on it’s progenitor. So, whatever his followers were supposed to do centers on him just as the dogma of Islam centers on Mohammad. Same god, different messengers.

Are their opinions less sincere or genuine because it’s a comment section?

A large number of Arab Muslims leave comments talking about their desire for gays to be killed, and we’re supposed to just dismiss it with a hand-wave as, “Oh, it was a comment section?”

You’re using SSM laws as a test for violence against gays. The level of violence between gays in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim nations would be the correct metric for a thread on the subject.

Your explanation as to why Christian nations are more likely to have SSM while ignoring the Muslim nations who jail and kill people just for BEING gay is noted.

Your refusal to acknowledge that different cultures, (regardless of religion at any given time), have different attitudes toward homosexuality along with your persistent moving of goalposts is also noted.

Uh huh. the goal post in this thread is homophobic violence in regards to Islam. Your contribution was to suggest SSM in Christian countries is a non-metric. You’re making excuses as to why SSM laws do better in Christian nations in the face of all the laws in Muslim nations that make homosexuality illegal.

No, you’re supposed to use a little goddamn sense.

Arguing that Mateen was somehow right wing based on stereotypes of conservatives is foolish.

I don’t see how you can reconcile that hypothesis with the fact that throughout history perpetrators of all these kinds of violence have appealed to their very different faiths to justify it. And many such perpetrators haven’t used any faith justification at all.

Trying to explain modern terrorist movements as “inspired” by innate characteristics of the religions of their perpetrators is just a modern pop-psychology version of homeopathy’s “law of similars” or “sympathetic magic”. It’s based on looking at a particular radical-extremist ideology and selectively constructing the “true” interpretation of a much broader religious identity by cherrypicking features of it that can be made to match up with that particuar ideology.

This is the same sort of reasoning that explained anarchist dynamite conspiracies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as natural consequences of the innate “rascality” and “treachery” and “cowardice” of Jews due to their obstinate “repudiation” of Christ’s grace, etc. etc. etc ad nauseam.

Your inability to see that those societies that share the worst attitudes toward gays tend to strongly share a religion is noted.

In America, those religions are Mormons and evangelical Christians.

Whoa there. Religion is meaningless. Religion is responsible for nothing. It’s all something something else, but NEVER religion!

We’re just talking about statistical correlations.

Did you say Mormons and evangelicals have “the worst” attitude in America towards gays?

Piffle. The current legality of SSM is a marker demonstrating the path of criminalization to legalization to acceptance of homosexuality in a society. Even if you want to go back and drag up the individual laws in each country, you are going to find the same correspondence of secularity to increasing acceptance, with Christian nations displaying harsh laws just as Muslim countries do, when the Christian nations are less secular.

Piffle. Uganda, for example, instituted its death penalty under the direct influence of Christians and backed it off to life in prison only under the threat of sanctions from other secular nations. In addition, many of the harsher laws currently on the books were legacy laws from European colonialism.

To the extent that you have any point worth making, it is not that the harsher countries are Islamic, (you may pretend that Uganda does not exist, of course), but that they are the countries that have recently been subjected to propagandizing from Salafism exported by Saudi Arabia rather than being an expression of home-grown or long-standing Islamic tradition.