yes but we’re specifically discussing religion and not all things human.
most advanced technologically. But again, we’re talking about religion unless you’re crediting Mohammad’s dogma with those advances. I think it would be more accurate to credit Christianity with directly holding back advances during this time period.
There was a profound change in the level of violence in Christianity before and after the reformation of Martin Luther. Even the sect it branched off of (Catholicism) was forced to change with it.
I don’t see how this addresses the consistent views of Islam regarding blasphemy and apostasy. These are directly linked to the religion and how it’s been promoted from day one by Mohammad. They bring with it a violent level of intolerance. There are clear philosophical differences among the various religions and in the case of Islam I don’t see a mechanism that is capable of changing that.
I think it was far easier for Luther to filter out the bullshit because the Bible was not dictated by it’s namesake. If you look at the actual teachings of Jesus it was pretty much the golden rule repeated in different forms. His lifestyle was that of forgiveness and help and self sacrifice.
It’s a philosophically different scenario with Mohammad. He was a warrior who was given the direct word of God. The Quran and his lifestyle are both peaceful and violent. It’s hard to deal with absolutes with conflicting messages. There is an offer of a peaceful society but the message is absolute and with that message is some pretty dark stuff.
To say that radical Muslims are not true Muslims because others choose to ignore the dark side of it then I think that’s a false argument. The radicals are following the words and actions of Mohammad and until that part of the religion can be exorcised out it will not change. And there is the catch-22. How do you convince people willing to kill themselves in order to carry out the words set down by God and enforced by Mohammad?
Yep. 40 abortion clinic attacks in the past 26 years. That is a lot. And how many Islamist terrorist attacks have there been in the past 26 years? If you look at this probably not all inclusive list on Wiki you have to go all the way back to December 29, 2015 to count up 40 of them.
Declaring “Christians do it too!” and dragging out the fact that 40 abortion clinics have been attacked over the past twenty-six years and a few killers identify as Christian as somehow equivalent to the number of Islamist terrorists attacks that happen yearly is the same sort of disingenuousness that crops up in threads about the gender of people who murder: there are always a handful who point at the massively dwarfed number of female murderers to suggest that men and women are both (and always hints at equally) likely to take lives.
So the part where I said “Christians do it too isn’t the point” means nothing?
Being reductive and saying that these attacks happen because of Islam rather than looking at more complex matters is a dangerous attitude. The people who are killing in the name of Christianity are not representative of Christianity. The people who are killing in the name of Islam are not representative of Islam. Many people look for reasons to commit acts of violence. Right now groups like ISIS are giving a lot of would be killers an excuse to go kill and say they are doing it for Allah.
Religion is one of those human things. You can generalize to other cultural values. Tolerance, in general, rises and falls according to circumstances, usually economic. (Everything is economic!)
Most advanced culturally, for certain periods. Most literate, most creative, most mannered, etc.
Christianity was a major antagonist, to be sure, but didn’t have that much influence on Islamic civilization in its heartlands, Spain and the Middle East. Certainly, Christianity stymied the expansion of Islam into Europe (Charles Martel, etc.)
Agreed. This goes to denying any argument that Islam is unique in any fashion. All religions, as all human establishments, rise and fall in terms of moral sophistication.
Then you haven’t been paying attention. There are lots of ways to change this, and, in fact, in some Islamic-majority nations, it has been changed. You are putting way too much emphasis on one particular area where, yes, reform would be welcomed. You’re very wrong in imagining that Islam cannot reform itself, by putting greater or lesser emphases in specific verses in holy texts.
Other religions have done this, setting aside articles of their law that once were considered absolutely foundational and unchanged. Christianity is (reluctantly) coming to an accommodation with homosexuality. If current trends continue (may they!) then, 100 years from now, the anti-gay stance of Christianity will seem absurd and somewhat embarrassing.
All religions change with time. Why you imagine Islam, alone, is immune from change is a total mystery to everyone else participating in this thread.
Again, many Christians believed (and quite a few believe to this day) that the Bible was directly narrated, word-by-word, by God. You attempt to ascribe a uniqueness to Islam that simply does not pertain. Others have pointed out to you many Koranic verses that support love, peace, friendship, honor, kindness, charity, and so on. Islam can certainly take to emphasizing those verses.
I don’t believe that “radical Muslims are not true Muslims,” and I don’t believe anyone has argued that here. They are bad Muslims, and are held to be bad by a great many of their own faith.
People can be persuaded to behave in a civilized fashion by the sermons of civilized Imams. Radicalism can become unfashionable, and violence can be renounced, without any loss of faith. This is actually happening, and that’s the other thing you seem to have zero conscious awareness of. The majority of Muslims are, in fact, quite moderate, and not radical at all.
You can have your own faith, but stop trying to imagine your own reality. The facts contradict too much of what you are claiming.
Exactly so. There are variants and gradations and sects and sub-sects and denominations. Some are violent and radical, and others aren’t, and this changes, over time, with all the world’s faiths.
No one here is denying that the proportions, right now, are not favorable to Islam: they have more radicals per capita. But that is always subject to change. It has an historical cause, not a theological one.
There have even been violent radical Buddhists, as absurd as that sounds.
The closest attempt at this would be Turkey with it’s attempt to regulate Imams directly.
I think Islam stands out because it’s the 21st century and there is no trend in sight. The level of violence associated with it is far above that of any other religion in this time period. It should have evolved by now and it hasn’t.
True some Christians consider the Bible the word of God and believe in things like Noah’s Ark. But it was never claimed to be the word of God by Jesus nor did he create it. That’s the argument I’ve been making as to the level of difficulty involved. Mohammad created the Quran and his claim is that it is the word of God. He backs up it up by exercising those words personally. Jesus did not manifest any of the violence attributed to the Bible. Instead of killing people he’s attributed with healing people and going to his death quietly as a sacrifice. Islam is philosophical different than other religions in this respect and it’s logical to see this as the driving force behind those who emulate Mohammad’s life.
Again, it’s the 21st century. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of years to see this persuasion take place.
The facts support my position that Islam has not reformed and there is no simple mechanism to make this happen. You cannot have close to half a billion people believe the religion is above the value of human life in matters of apostasy and blasphemy and expect change in the foreseeable future. We see the worldwide calls for violence over books, movies and cartoons. This same mindset is the foundation for violence currently attributed to the religion. Islam has not made the leap that other religions have made.
It’s easy for people to want to live in peace and ignore Mohammad’s violent side out of pure convenience. but there is a clear and direct connection to hard core believers who emulate him. They are not making up his life or words. He was not a peaceful person in the same vein as someone like Buddha and that has to be ignored by the hardcore believer. If you look at the lists of terrorist groups based on religion it is overwhelmingly an Islamic list.
You can have your own faith that all religions are philosophically the same but they’re not. They’re all different in definable ways or they wouldn’t exist as different beliefs systems in the first place. It doesn’t matter if some Muslims ignore the violence that Mohammad promoted. It’s nice that they do this. But it ignores the mechanism in place for those who don’t. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re ignoring Mohammad’s violent side and pretending the violence will go away if Muslims would just get together and sings kumbaya. It has been, and will continue to be, a bloodbath between the hard core believers of the different sects.
You and others see these discussions as condemnations of people who are Muslim and not as a discussion of the elements within the religion that MUST change in order to affect change in hard core believers.
No, the closest to it would be those moderate Islamic-majority countries where the religion is practiced with peaceful moderation. You don’t need state regulation of a religion for it to be a good neighbor. Social pressure can be enough.
It certainly is evolving, and, at least in some regions, in the right (more moderate) direction. There are several Islamic-majority nations where you or I would be able to live in peace, and there are many Islamic communities in the U.S. that are perfectly peaceful and right good neighbors. You have a fantasy that they’re all (or majority) radical, and that isn’t true. For all that you’ve stated that a majority are violent, you’ve never been able to point to more than a minority who hold an unpleasant belief.
Sure, there is a visible trend: In an era of multiple cultural disruptions, one ultra conservative sect has been employed by a number of members of the religion to use it as a point round which to rally people to resist the externally imposed cultural changes. This is the same sort of event that occurred when the KKK, reacting against perceived disruptions in the “American Way” explicitly referred to themselves as “Christian Knights” and their hate literature was directed against Catholics and Jews while their “religious” tracts explicitly promoted the Fundamentalist reaction to Modernism in religion. Protestants were launching murderous attacks, (literal, not figurative), against Catholics in North America in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries while Catholic dominated governments imposed persecutions on Protestants.
What Christian “evolution” are we supposed to be seeing, here? The reduction in persecution, (that only occurred in the U.S in the 1960s, with some vestiges still around), occurred through secularization, not religious evolution.
Meanwhile, Islam achieved greater tolerance, even during the conquest of North Africa in the seventh century and with the development of the learning center at Cordoba in the ninth and tenth centuries. In later times, that tolerance for foreign beliefs, (that was never a feature of Christianity until secularism arose in the eighteenth century to insist that religious strife needed to stop), was rolled back.
Posting that Islam has not “evolved” with a subtext that Christianity has, is historically inaccurate. It provides a false basis on which to support an arguement that has no underpinnings.
Your “evolved” statement is meaningless. It is not as though Christianity “evolved” to be more peaceful. In fact, Christianity was much more peaceful, in many ways, prior to the Reformation, (if you did not happen to be an Albigensian). With the Reformation, Christianity became more violent, with that violence continuing from the 16th century (when the Reformation occurred), through the 20th century, (when much of Europe abandoned religion) and secularism pushed aside many of the armed conflicts in the U.S.
This might be a nice hypothesis, but it is contradicted by the historical facts. A good scientist or historian, when confronted with evidence that refutes a hypothesis should put it awa y and look for other reasons to explain an phenomenon.
Not really. Since it has not happened in any other religion or culture in history, what is the point of complaining that it has not happened in Islam.
Piffle.
You continue to rely on polls of what people say they support while ignoring the fact that for hundreds of years, there was no such support for those beliefs as actually demonstrated in the laws of most Muslim countries–and even today, such laws are only propagated in a couple of Muslim countries, even those countries in which a majority answer poll questions in that manner. Whatever numbers say in the polls, very few are actually acting to support those beliefs in law
I have no belief that all religions are “the same.” I do, however, recognize that broad-based claims against 1.6 billion people based on an unproved hypothesis, (for which there is ample evidence that it fails), when there are ample reasons, (both related to a single sect and tied to cultural, political, and economic conditions having nothing to do with religion are nonsense.
And we have already seen that Muslims can and do move away from the most medieval beliefs when external pressures do not push them toward Salafist clerics who agitate for the most extreme Fundamentalism. Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan were either moderate or moving toward moderate cultures. Then the U.S. interfered in Iran, allowing the Shah to impose restrictions on Islam that provoked a reaction, allowing Khomeini to bring his extremist faction to power. Lebanon tore itself apart in civil war and Syria occupied it, allowing Fundamentalists (who hated Assad as well as Israelis and Christians) to make Salafism the point around which their people could rally. Afghanistan was (surprisingly to our early 21st century vision), an almost liberal country until the Soviet Union conquered it and Reagan and Bush decided to arm the most Fundamentalist Mujahideen to the exclusion of other groups, so that when the Soviets were defeated, those fighters could become the Taliban and impose a version of Islam on the country that was hated by the majority. Then, there was the Muslim minority in the Phillipines that has been suppressed for four hundred years, Indonesia, where, under the guise of fighting “communism,” Islam was restricted and persecuted. On the other side, Muslim immigrants to France and the U.S. have assimilated quite quickly, (when not being discriminated against).
I linked a PEW study that showed 400 million Muslims approved of harsh laws regarding apostasy and blasphemy. That is not a tiny minority. That’s a lot of people.
We’ve said it before, here it is again: That still doesn’t say anything unique about Islam, even if it’s true. The God of the Old Testament (and other Old Testament figures) were far more violent than anything Muhammed ever did in the Quran, and the fact that there were many times in history in which the Islamic world was more open and peaceful than the Christian world shows that Islam is just another religion – there’s nothing especially violent nor especially peaceful about it. It’s just as easy to interpret the Quran “peacefully” as it is to interpret the Bible peacefully, and just as easy to interpret it violently as it is to interpret the Bible violently. That there appears to be a statistical discrepancy in how many interpret each in a violent or peaceful manner is a coincidence of history and of the present – it was different at times in the past, and probably will be in the future. Now isn’t special. The interpretation of the peaceful and patriotic American Muslims of Dearborn, MI is just as valid and “true” as the interpretation of ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda. The best way to achieve any sort of victory in the struggle against extremists is to do everything we can to make sure non-violent Muslims, even if they might have some harsh beliefs, don’t see us as the enemy of the entire religion, but rather the friend of all peaceful people throughout the world, of which there are far more of all religions than there are extremists.
That is simply not true. And you know it’s not true. There are profound philosophical differences between Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad. We could bang through all the other religions but these 3 have singular founders with observable lifestyles. The Christian founder is a life of healing people and self sacrifice. The Muslim founder is one of extreme punishment for the followers who disagree and those beliefs have carried over for centuries.
We’re talking about the 21st century. Now is special. It represents the present and what has evolved (or not evolved) over the centuries within the various religions. There is zero chance of fixing that until those beliefs are removed from the religion. Not ignored, removed. There has to be a reformation.
There is no clear indication of any mechanism affecting Islam’s predisposition to generate terrorist groups. The best anyone has proposed is that because every Muslim isn’t a complete lunatic that it’s not the religion driving it when clearly it is the religion driving it. And you cannot dismiss the beliefs of 400 million Muslims who think human life is subject to crimes of criticism of their religion. This belief system combined with Mohammad’s words and deeds enforcing these beliefs is the driving force behind the overwhelmingly large number of Islamic terrorist groups.
In fact, if Jesus is God, then Jesus is far more disgustingly violent than Muhammed. Your argument falls apart if Jesus is God, or if God is a major figure in Christianity.
Was the disgusting cruelty and violence of Jesus/God the driver for the incredible violence of the Christian world for hundreds of years before modern history?
Good luck with whatever mythology you’re trying to sell. I truly don’t give a fuck. It’s supposed to be the same God. When you get done with that you can make a list of the people killed by Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad and we’ll have a conversation about what it would look like for core followers to follow their example.
In other words, WWBD vs WWMD. That’s where the problem lies.
I make no claims on God since there seems to be an appalling lack of personal appearances. I’m just pointing out the philosophical differences of the people claiming to represent a religion. You seem to want to argue about religion. Truly not interested. I’m pointing out the differences within the people who started religion(s) as the basis for the behavior of it’s most ardent followers.
What it comes down to is this. You are ignoring the level of influence the lifestyle of a prophet has on his/her followers. I say it matters and has to be dealt with on that level before change will occur.