Come on - this is common knowledge.
bolding mine
Where did you get this quote? I can’t find it in the bible.
I can find Isaiah 45:23
Or Romans 14:11
You used your bible quote to support your statement
Unless you can provide a cite for your bible quote, I can only suggest that you misrepresented the Christian bible to support your argument that Islam is not more inherently totalitarian than Christianity.
The Koran requires submission to the laws of Allah for everyone. Christianity today, in large part, thanks to the modern availability of the bible to the masses believes that salvation is a personal choice to make and cannot be imposed.
The quotes I presented and which I think you improperly paraphrased ,in no way can suggest a mandate to impose the Christian religion or its belief on others by force or otherwise.
Kimstu? I know you can hear me.
Sorry Dutch, I haven’t been on the boards this afternoon. I certainly wasn’t ignoring you on purpose.
Philippians 2:10–11. There are also several other NT passages that are frequently used by Christians to support the claim that Christianity is the only true faith and the only route to salvation, e.g., John 14:6 (“Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the Father, but by me”).
There’s a big difference between believing that your religion is the ‘one true faith’, and believing that you therefore must foist it upon the rest of the world by the sword.
Modern Christianity believes that individuals must come to God, not that God must be forced on them. The closest you get to that kind of thinking are the proselytizing sects that simply go around doing mission work and giving out bibles and knocking on doors.
When offended, Christians are commanded to turn the other cheek. They are told to judge not, lest they be judged. They are told to be humble, to not covet things they don’t own, and to treat all people with love and kindness.
Can you say the same about Islam?
You can pluck random quotes from the OT to come up with a very harsh form of Christianity. You can twist the message of Jesus to the same ends.
The Koran grabs you by the collar and tells you, in no uncertain terms, straight from God via Gabriel and Mohammed, to beat your wife. No wriggle room.
You are not appreciating the nature to the Koran and the centrality of it and Mohammed to Islam. The Koran is the miracle of Islam. There is no Paul to lay fundamentals, no Pope or Church to mediate God’s Will. There is just the unalterable word of God in the original Arabic and a giant body of explication, which although they may differ in aspects cannot stray far from the fundamentals.
Until such times as fundamentalists seize control of the USA by popular uprising trading Bible quotes is simply irrelevant.
Bluntly speaking - no-one, apart from nutters, take the Bible as the Word of God guide to living and law. We don’t shun menstruating women, we don’t avoid eating shell-fish or cling to any of the thousands of tips we could glean from it. Yet you can still be a good Christian by following Christ’s example.
The Koran, to all Muslims, is such a guide and the life of Mohammed is the exemplar. The Koran contains no contradictions because the edict that comes latest in the life of the Prophet trumps all and is interpreted in the light of his life. Mohammed is no Jesus and Mohammed’s life took a clear trajectory. Nice and conciliatory when weak, swords and intolerance when in power.
I’m sorry if it offends people’s liberal sensitivities but it is a dangerous mistake not to fear a religion and the followers of such dogmatic intolerance as Islam when it has no strong liberal tradition. Not when its foundation has so little elbow room for our values.
That 40% of UK Muslims want Sharia Law in their areas just goes to show what a thin end of a nasty wedge concessions to Islamic intolerance could be.
The more I read about Islam the more I am convinced that the supposedly ‘backward and violent’ OBL interpretation is not a lot closer to the truth than our liberal fantasy that somehow a ‘moderate’ version is waiting to burst free. One that ignores the clear Islamic injunctions on how to live your life and what thickness of rod you are allowed to beat your wives with.
Islamic is a universalist ‘one-true-religion’ that seeks to bring te whole world under Sharia Law. Thankfully in the UK the Islamic minority lacks political power and has a ‘moderate’ face. But still, 40% want to live under Sharia Law. I’m not at all comforted by that.
I don’t beleive we have a war of civilisations but I do believe we have to stand up for secular, rationalist values against fundamentalists of all stripes.
The battleground now is freedom of speech and resisting mob attempts to impose Islamic restrictions on such freedom onto non-Muslims.
Not to this Merkin it wasn’t. I’m genuinely surprised.
I’m afraid we don’t have any handy amendments protecting us from this sort of thing. Under the latest crackpot schemes private entities can ‘run’ state schools. Needless to say it is religious entities that are stepping in and they are allowed to teach creationism.
So in essence we have a small but increasing number of state funded religious independent schools filling student heads with bronze age nonsense.
Well that reference including the whole statement actually says
My response to you is based on your initial response to tagos
Your response
I agreed with tagos. The key word in his statement was “totalitarian” which is something to fear for the rest of us given the expansionism which is also inherent in the muslim ideology.
Certainly Christianity is inherently expansionist, but you have not proven it is inherently totalitarian. Non-coercive expansionism of any religion or philosophy or political view is nothing to fear is it?
Yoyr citation is taken from one of the more beautiful chapters in the writings of Paul.
I’m not reading anything that sounds like jihad.
The point that tagos made is extremely important given how Islam is affecting our generally cherished humanistic philosophy and what the future holds for the rest of us non-muslims. Most of our progress in implementing that philosophy has arisen from our Christian heritage and gone beyond where we have legalized abortion, and made great strides in equal rights for women and made major advances in equal rights for homosexuals. We are wary of the fundamentalist Christian political movement, but we are fairly confident that we have the means to control it with political efforts. The trends are established within western societies. We must not project that degree of confidence when we are increasingly faced with a growing Muslim population within our western societies and increasing dependance on Muslim controlled oil reserves.
That is my point. We can not use our experience with Christianity as a reference for a response to Islam.
The trouble is that the difference between “twisting” and “correctly interpreting” tends to be pretty subjective.
On this core point, as I said, we’re definitely in agreement.
Not in this case - no. The Koran, as i keep trying to tell you, does not require subjective interpretation. It states outright. It’s those who try and find a meaning consonant with secular values that have to twist the message and ignore the weight of the hadiths and history.
To get a Jesus that was okay with crap you have to do a lot of work. It can be done but with the Koran you don’t have to.
I just feel you aren’t able to shake your false equivalence of the role and nature of the two books in the two religions and so underestimating the gulf between Islam and the West in terms of values and possiblilities for compromise.
Being able to point out bad things in the Bible is an irrelevance in this particular thread. The Bible simply does not have the same centrality in our lives and is not a miracle in itself. It is not the uncorrupted word of God telling us how to live. It is to every Muslim.
Can you not see how much of a difference that makes, particularly when God is telling Muslims to live lives by values antithetical to the West? With the Bible the life and message of Jesus mediates the bronze age savagery of the OT.
With the Koran the life of the Prophet reinforces it. There is no redemption of the stark messages
It also, to be fair, says lots of good things about charity.
For many fundamentalist Christians, and other groups such as the Amish, it absolutely is.
You’re quite right, as I’ve been saying all along, that the numbers and influence of people who feel that way about the Qur’an are much greater than those of people who feel that way about the Bible.
But I think you can’t adequately explain that difference just by pointing to internal differences within the texts. It’s got much more to do with the historical contingencies of the development of the modern world over the past several centuries.
Again, we are not in disagreement that radical, reactionary Islamism is quantitatively much more of a problem in the modern world than radical, reactionary Christianism. I just don’t think it’s sufficient (or at all useful) to focus on finding internalist, essentialist explanations for the differences between the modern forms of these two faiths.
Then you have to explain why Judaism, which does not recognize any scriptural authority whatsoever in “the life and message of Jesus” but instead sticks to what you call “the bronze age savagery of the OT”, nonetheless has also successfully adapted to secular modernity. The internalist essentialist explanations that you’ve been emphasizing obviously aren’t adequate to account for this.
(You also seem to be arguing simultaneously for the importance and unimportance of the New Testament in the adaptation of Christianity to secular modernity. That is, first you seem to be saying that Christianity has successfully modernized because the Bible is not so central and authoritative for Christians. Then you seem to be saying that Christianity has successfully modernized because the “kinder, gentler” message of Jesus is central and authoritative for Christians. Both of these claims can be simultaneously true to some extent, of course, but I’m having difficulty figuring out how you’re balancing them.)
I’m saying that the message of Jesus mitigates attempts to impose a savage biblica lifestyle and that unlike the koran it is not prescriptive to any except fringe christians. Basically the Bible has wriggle room in which western values and a secular society can thrive. The Koran does not.
As for development of Jewish culture. Again I’d say, without much knowledge, the torah and the Law are not so ‘in-your-face do it this way or else’ as prescriptive as the Koran and so is not a roadblock to developing the western values we think valuable. The Torah communicates law through stories and so intrinsically is open to interpretation. The Koran says ‘beat your wife if … Just don’t use a rod wider than your thumb.’
I don’t know what historical influence on the devlopment of it must have been but i’d imagine diaspora and persecution helped foster liberal approaches as did the international aspect of Christianity. Particularly as the latter won the End-of-Empire Rome lucky dip.
And since then the boot has been largely on the Xtian foot in the interaction of it and Islam, further entrenching the latter’s defensive responses.
The bottom line for me is that I can’t read the Koran or find a view of Islam that I find anything but abhorrent as a secular liberal. I see no extant or historical examples that are in any way inspiring. I see minorities in my own country wanting sharia law and I see countries like malaysia and canada compromising on this.
And when I read about Jihad, the role of women etc I see that to get anything like the anglican ‘more tea vicar?’ christianity you have to practically rewrite the Koran (which is valid only in the original arabic and so cannnot be retranslated for new times.) There is simply no significant Islamic tradition of adjusting God’s message for the times and none in sight.
And when it comes to things like the role of women there is no basis at all for any western friendly interpretation beyond what size of sheet they can hide behind.
To equate the Bible and the Koran is a false equivalence and in doing so you foster the dangerous illusion that all Islam needs to become happy-clappy is a bit of development and democracy.
Maybe in 100 years, but not in the current world and not while it is the ideology of the oppressed. Oppressed by the rulers we install and support, oppressed by our foreign policy, under seige by our values and oppressed by the unblanced terms of trade of the world economic system.
There is no ‘moderate’ Islam to negotiate with. For all intents and purposes it is an uncompromising radical ideology. If we are to co-exist we have to deal with it as is, not how we fantasise it might become.
And I don’t mean ‘deal with’ in the neo-con ‘all your oil belong to us’, invasion and subversion way. It has to be honest dialogue and for me that begins with us defending our core values such as freedom of speech and secular law and (In the UK, I wish), keeping religion out of education.
The thing is, as I said, that whether a text has “wriggle room” depends on how you interpret it. The question of how “interpretable” a text can be is itself an interpretation.
I don’t want to get too far off into this hijack, but ISTM it’s just silly to say that the Biblical laws of the Old Testament are not “prescriptive”. Shoot, the Book of Deuteronomy specifies how you’re supposed to stone people to death for worshipping other gods, and cut off a woman’s hand if she grabs her husband’s private parts to pull him away from a brawler who’s beating him up. “Do it this way or else”? Absolutely.
Obviously, the reason Judaism no longer imposes such laws is not because such laws don’t exist in its sacred texts, but for some other reason, a reason dependent on the historical development of the religion rather than just on its scriptural content.
Fine by me. You are just as entitled to your own opinion on “what Islam really means” or “what the true nature of Islam is” as anybody else. But you can’t expect that you’ll automatically convince anybody else that your interpretation is somehow especially authoritative or objective.
As I said, you’re totally entitled to your opinion. But it’s absurd to claim that it’s somehow objectively impossible for anybody else to have a different opinion. Consider, for example, the views of the Muslim feminist scholar Asma Barlas who wrote a whole book “to recover the scriptural basis of sexual equality in Islam and thus, hopefully, to provide a compelling argument about why Islam is not a patriarchy and why Muslim women and men can struggle for equality from within an Islamic framework”:
If you want to argue that she and other Muslim feminists who interpret the Qur’an as supporting gender equality are misreading the Qur’an, go right ahead. But that’s their interpretation, and they are as entitled to it as you are to yours.
As I keep saying, this seems to me to be a much more fundamental point than all the quibbling over questions of scriptural essentialism, and on this point we’re in complete agreement.
I guess we by and large agree, except over how interpretable the Koran is. It is not open to interpretation. The meaning is clear and only the original arabic has canonical value. It cannot be translated. There are no foreign language ‘Korans’. They are classed as interpretations.
Judaism is also specific to Jews. Islam, like Christianity is universal. Islam going a militant step further and being the only true version. It is an interesting question as to how it developed more liberal wriggle room.
Yesterday in the UK schools reached an understanding that state-funded faith schools should teach other faiths as well as their own. Only the Islamic ones expressed a reservation. Islam is true so it shouldn’t have to suggest in any way that other faiths have equal value.
There’s no dealing with this sort of attitude, which is why we shouldn’t be funding faith schools, or even permitting them. It’s not the job of the state to help parents brainwash their kids with nonsense. Let them do that on their time and dime.
Anyways - nice debating with you.
Thanks, you too!
tagos, what about the various hadiths, which have attained some stature similar to the Koran in some people’s minds? What if the Koran has changed, if only slightly, over time?
I’m not the expert here, but I’ve been told it has.
I’m no expert but from my reading I understand that the book was closed several hundred years ago on reinterpreting Islam.
itjihad - reinterpreting Islam
Therefore Islam and Sharia Law, as derived from the Koran and hadiths in four broadly similar schools, is the Islam we’re going to be dealing with in the forseeable future.
Critical Koranic scholarship will get a Muslim a bullet in the head so I doubt we’re going to see changes any time soon.
Whatever the origins and development of canonical Islam it is now pretty static.
As you can see from the cite - only particular people, experts in Islamic law and history can reopen this process of re-evaluation so that limits things.
As I keep saying, this is not like the Bible. There is no concept of personal interpretation and personal faith from which a Reformation can emerge.
Meanwhile we have an Islam which is hostile to basic liberal concepts and sanctions violence against unbelievers or unacceptable social conventions through a host of pretty explicit statements.
It would be fine if minorities in Europe adopted a relaxed approach to the letter of the law and it seemed for a while that that was happening. But 9/11 and the western responses have radicalised a new generation and they are, to differing degrees, seeking their identity in what to me looks like Islam as Mohammed intended it to be. A superior, expansionist, aggressive faith that demands everyone live under Islamic Law.
My preferred strategy for dealing with the problems this causes is two-fold;
A rigorous defence of core values including in the UK a secularisation of education and the abolition of blasphemy laws and a more just foreign policy that focuses more on making friends than blowing people up or exploiting them.