Well I suppose that depends on whether you believe the archangel Gabriel really had a chat with him in the cave. I, for one, have my doubts :).
You can only post this on the assumption that it is only possible for Mohammad EITHER to have been maniacally violent OR to have never harmed a single innocent person.
This is, again, why you’re not getting anywhere in this thread–because the deployment of obvious fallacies like that continues to indicate you’re not actually engaging in reasoned, truth-seeking discussion.
I don’t. But I do find the oral tradition in Islam and that there are people who can recite the whole Koran aloud to be impressive. Also, I like the call to prayer sound. I actually like the sound of it and I think it is neat, interesting, beautiful even, and gives a structure a calming effect to the daily pattern of life.
Actually, if he is just a man and not “gods chosen prophet” then it is completely fine for him to have a mixture of good and bad qualities. But I don’t think that is how Muslims view him or his place in history.
That’s an odd line to take. Lots of “gods chosen” folks fuck up hard-core in the Bible. You’re familiar with king David? Anointed, speaks to God, has loyal soldiers killed to cover up his adulterous liaisons with their wives…
Ironically your notion of how a prophet should be an unblemished model of human perfection is very… Islamic, historically.
You are missing the point.
You are the one who claims that it is “the book” that causes Islam to be “bad” (in your opinion) today. Yet you have provided no explanation why the “bad” Islam of the 21st century has only arisen in the 21st century without showing itself for the previous 1400 years. The issue is not that there have been some good Muslims over the last 1400 years. The issue is that the vast majority of Muslims in the last 1400 years have not behaved any differently than other peoples in that time. You have no explanation for that and have resolutely run way and avoided dealing with the issue.
And you can choose to not respond to me, (since you have no argument), but that will not prevent me from pointing out your persistent errors.
You also abuse the language by calling me an apologist for Islam. I am neither an apologist in the legitimate sense nor an apologist in the way that the word has been abused in the last few years. I have not promoted Muslim belief and I have condemned the Wahhabist faction that has promoted this recent radical movement in Islam that leads to the matters that bother you. However, in the spirit of The Straight Dope, I choose to deal with facts so that I do not use poor logic based on ignorance to promote my beliefs.
And, once again, you are moving the goalposts. Your OP asked whether it was religion or culture that caused Muslim violence with no reference to any scripture. However, you are now cherry picking specific verses, (verses with parallels in the Jewish and Christian bible), to talk about a limited number of evil things committed by a limited number of people. You then go on to act as though there is something substantially different between the Qur’an and the Bible that makes Muslims substantially different from Christians and Jews. The Christians and Jews ignoring the similar commands in the Bible are simply omitted from your discussion while you fixate, (based on this thread, perseverate), on the evils of the Qur’an–an issue not even mentioned in your OP.
If you wanted to simply rant about your problems with the Qur’an, I could still move this thread to The BBQ Pit where rants are encouraged. If you wanted to debate, you should go learn enough about the Qur’an (and the Bible), and Muslim (and Chrisitian and Jewish) history to defend whatever hypothesis you actually wanted to defend instead of this small rant based in ignorance.
Actually that’s exactly how he presented himself. That’s why there’s the Koran, and then there’s hadiths. The Koran is (purportedly) all 100% verbatim god’s own truth from the mouth of an angel, with Muhammad merely repeating it. And that, of course, is untouchable for faithful Muslims.
The hadiths however, which is to say the very large collection of stories about what Muhammad did as well as quotes and teachings and parables from him, are very much debatable (and debated) including their very authenticity. As for Muhammad, he was kind of iffy/uncomfortable about people recording that stuff (… according to some hadiths :p) and allowed that he could make mistakes.
If I understand the theology correctly (I’m sure Ibn Warraq will correct me if I’m wrong) he is deemed infallible only where it pertains to reciting god’s actual message accurately and truthfully - else Allah would have chosen another prophet and/or smote his ass ; but in other matters (of law, of state etc…) he was just this guy who, smart and inspired as he might have been, could conceivably fuck up and needed to be advised by his companions, and sometimes he even listened to his advisors :). I believe the Koran itself portrays him as making actual errors of judgement a few times and Allah chastises him for it.
Obviously many Muslims today appear to have a different notion, but hey.
robert163: I sure hope you got a good deal
Not a Muslim, except in the most literal sense ( , one who submits, from the familiar semitic root meaning peace and wholeness). But there’s a lot of stupid happening in this thread. What’s the point of opposing beheadings if you insist on using such brainless arguments?
- “religions are defined entirely by their primary canonical scripture.”
This one has been a fountainhead of stupid. Because
A. That goes against the lived experience of every religious person since they started writing shit down and calling it scripture. Islam isn’t the Qur’an, Christianity isn’t the gospels or any form of the NT, Judaism isn’t the torah, prophets and hagiographa.
It’s what the practicing population make of it, how ancient commands and values are mediated through the interpretive filter of history. The only people who disagree are you, ISIS, and some weirdos on Mt. Gerizim who sacrifice goats on their version of Passover.
B. This myth doesn’t advance your argument. Because the Qur’an is a text with mostly peace and social justice oriented language, and a handful of war-related passages in some of the medinan suras. Much like Jewish and Christian scripture is littered with the same. Prophetic text addresses real people at critical points in history - violence is a part of the reality believers inhabit, and a text devoid of means of addressing it would be an irrelevant one.
Which brings me to
- “there is such a thing as a static, essentialized ‘religion’ to debate about.”
Much like the above, this myth is a way to identify a target for you to aim rather meager intellectual weapons at. The reality that every religion is a moving target would complicate your task considerably. If myth one is that a single book can be your target, myth 2 is that there is a static target at all.
Islam develops. Its history spans 14 centuries and much of the globe. Its people have been Arabs, Persians, turks, berbers, and many African peoples. Its political divisions have been monarchies, Republics, theocracies, democracies and every hybrid in between. Its cultures have been places where tolerance and the arts flourished, even as neighboring societies painted themselves blue and sacrificed their enemies in the forests of northern Europe. And they have been places of minority subjugation, to varying degrees. They’ve had religious war, and secular war, and religious peace, and pragmatic peace. They’ve produced religious scholarship and diversity from Sola scriptura literalism (a rare, weird breed), to 7th century fundamentalism and its nostalgic modern counterpart, to evolutionary legalism to medieval rationalism to many forms of mysticism. There has been syncretism with just about every neighbor Islamic society has shared.
If in all that you find some cross sections worthy of attack, congratulations. That’s what happens when you zoom in selectively on one part of a global civilization.
And America the beautiful has the subhumanity of blacks, the reality of slavery and the disposession of indigenous peoples written into its DNA. You can find it all explicit or oblique in the Constitution, our Qur’an. If it were still 1776, this country would be quite the Satan. Luckily we don’t use the snapshot of a civilization provided by its foundational text to determine its essential character…
- “21st century norms are a useful filter for judging ancient religious texts and figures.”
If religion has a useful purpose it is exposing a civilization to paradigm shifts that set it on a new trajectory. Prebiblical semitic cultures were heavy on warfare, sex ritual, pagan sacrifice with some ritual murder in there, and an absolutely top down authoritarian political structure. Biblical religion shook things up considerably.
Pre-Christian Jerusalem suffered from a considerable overemphasis on ritual at the expense of ethics, and class hierarchies. Jesus shook some things up, and Pauline antinomianism shook up some more.
Preislamic Arabia, as presented in its excellent poetry and surviving documentary history, was a place of Darwinian cruelty, braggadocio and disunity. Ignaz golziher has some good essays on the wild west-like nature of the hijaz then (to put it mildly). Muhammad shook things up.
You don’t have to believe in any of the prophets or ascribe divinity to any of the texts I named. I’m not Christian or, as I said, Muslim. But they changed the course of history, and history is ongoing. To focus on t=0 instead of on the trajectory since then is to entirely miss the point.
Total that’s violent acts by 25 Christian Americans in the past 32 years. I’m betting we can make a longer list of violent acts perpetrated by Muslims if we go only as far back as New Years.
By American Muslims? I doubt it.
If you want to go international, you would of course have to include murders committed by Christians internationally. I have not tallied up, but I have a gut feeling that when only counting murders that were *justified *with religion, you would find more of those committed by Muslims. (As long as you look only at very recent history.) However, if you look at *all *murders, Christians do not come across as more peaceful than Muslims do. The only real difference is that they are somewhat less inclined to say “God told me to do it.”
In the U.S.? I’d be…surprised.
Oh, look. It’s yet another thread about how Islam is the Worstest Religion Ever as determined by people who don’t know a damp thing about Islam.
That’s a lot of cultures you’re not aware of, then. The Celts, for instance. Ancient Egypt. The Scythians. Nubia.
OK, I can see that it bothers you that people talk about the violence committed in the name of Islam.
But, and I’m just throwing this out, some people are bothered by the actual violence. Remember way back in, 2015, when 147 students were gunned down in Tunisia? or 38 people gunned down in a hotel? or the 22 killed in a Tunisian Museum? Or the 132 students slaughtered in Peshawar. Or the 200+ people killed by Boko Haram (honestly I’m too tired to add them up). The train incident in France would have been ugly had it not been thwarted with 270 rounds and a captive audience. I could literally go on for page upon page listing the events. That’s just in the last year.
20,000+ people dead in 2015 alone.
The threads you don’t like will go away when the violence goes away.
Here’s hoping you’re happy in the coming years.
You must be very tired. It’s around 13,000.
That’s really what you’ve taken away from all these discussions? I mean, really?
People who’s lives don’t count aren’t actually counted, round numbers, shrugs and guesses.
Are we a Christian nation? Well, yeah, mostly. Presbyterians who haven’t the slightest idea what a “presbyter” is, Methodists with no clue just what John Wesley was on about, Catholics who are affectionately tolerant of their church. So, yeah, pretty much. Christians.
So, this Christian nation, what is our bodycount for lives squandered, innocent people who not only* didn’t* do anything to us probably *couldn’t *if they wanted to. Iraq, somewhere north of one hundred thousand? Way north, a little north, who knows? Round numbers, shrugs and guesses.
Muslim fanatics take their religious views way too seriously, at grim cost. They are wrong, they are actively evil even if they don’t believe it. Are we any less guilty because we are not fanatics? Is less passionate evil less evil?
Dunno about the intertubes in Iran right now, but would anyone be surprised if there’s an argument right now about the inherent violence of Christians? Or is it the depravity and license of Western culture?
What can you think about a culture that worships a loving Father who let his only begotten son be tortured to death? A son who begged mercy with dying words, asking why he had been forsaken? Its right there in their Bible, what else can you expect from people like that, except ruthless violence? Certainly you can’t trust them…