I agree, again.
I apologize as well. You have convinced me. Muslims are delicate flowers of beauty and perfection. Any time a Muslim does something bad, it’s not a religious issue, it’s a bad person who just happens to be Muslim. Perfect, delicate flowers.
I don’t mean to pick on your post, Sr Siete, but your quote neatly encapsulates a troubling line of thought I’ve seen expressed in this thread (starting at Page 1, I’ve read about 85-90% of it). There seems to be an extreme form of cultural relativism and ignorance of real differences between many (NOT all) Islamic societies and, to use the most common counter-example in this thread, Christian societies. It is almost as if people are saying “correlation implies ZERO degree of causation”.
It is not merely as if, one could run the Global Simulator 1.0 a few thousand times, and there would be a proportionate amount of results that simple blind chance might suggest. All holy books are not equivalent; all priesthoods are not equivalent; all governmmental forms are not equivalent. Off the top of my head, one might look to Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy, the institution of the Caliphate, or the manner in which Islam was introduced to India, as indicators that, whatever the beliefs espoused and/or practiced by its current adherents, Islam has historically not been “just another religion,” a ready analogue of Judaism or Christianity. It wasn’t just a flip of the coin that decided that Western Europe would dominate the societies of the Middle East - there were factors, including religion, which made it more likely to happen than not.
(For the record, I think all organized religions are ridiculous.)
I’m not satisfied until you say the Shahada.
no thanks… :smack:
Yup. That’s precisely what those who disagree with you are saying. Well done!
Oh, wait. It’s not. At all.
Speaking only for myself, it’s not that “correlation [between majority-Muslim countries and various Bad Things] implies zero degree of causation”, but rather that there are many, many factors at work, so why single out Islam as the cause? It’s not as though Islam is randomly distributed around the globe, it’s quite concentrated. For a start, it’s concentrated just south and east of Europe, which made the areas ripe for colonial exploitation and the resulting mess of artificial nation-states. For another, it’s concentrated in areas of harsh climates, north-south landmasses, and other geographical disadvantages, including sprawling deserts that are difficult to bring under central authority.
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[QUOTE=Fuji]
It is not merely as if, one could run the Global Simulator 1.0 a few thousand times, and there would be a proportionate amount of results that simple blind chance might suggest. All holy books are not equivalent; all priesthoods are not equivalent; all governmmental forms are not equivalent. Off the top of my head, one might look to Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy, the institution of the Caliphate, or the manner in which Islam was introduced to India, as indicators that, whatever the beliefs espoused and/or practiced by its current adherents, Islam has historically not been “just another religion,” a ready analogue of Judaism or Christianity. It wasn’t just a flip of the coin that decided that Western Europe would dominate the societies of the Middle East - there were factors, including religion, which made it more likely to happen than not.
[/QUOTE]
Certainly it wasn’t a flip of the coin…but a Muslim Europe would have dominated a Christian Middle East, because the other factors are more salient. Religion is made by, and serves, humanity, and is readily changed as needed. This isn’t true of geography.
That’s not anyone’s argument. I’m not sure you’re even trying to understand your opponents here.
I haven’t singled it out as the only cause. However, I object to revisionist attempts to imply that it wasn’t a significant element, along with a myriad of others such as geography, epidemiology, and fortunes of war, in forming the distinctive character of the Islamic East vis-a-vis the Christian West.
I’ve nothing to argue with you here. My academic background, such as it is, is in geography, so I am well-attuned to the factors you have mentioned. For instance, much of the contrast between the Greek polis and the despotism of Persia, long before either Jesus or Muhammad existed, can be attributed to the geography of Greece (mountainous with extensive shoreline and islands, contributing to political fragmentation) as compared with that of the Persian empire (a sprawling near-continental mass of land with relatively few natural barriers, tending to political consolidation).
There is some truth in what you say (after all, there actually was a Christian Middle East for a few centuries, and Byzantium was certainly far from a democratic society), but I’m not intersted in discussing a hypothetical Muslim Europe dominating a Christian Middle East, because, given the genesis of Islam on the Arabian penisnsula, the counterfactual you are proposing is a logical absurdity.
Yes, geography is important. So is religion.
Right, I didn’t mean to imply that you had, but others seem to, e.g.:
…and that this is what is being argued against: the idea that Islam makes people do terrible things, as opposed to putting as Islamic sheen on terrible things with other causes, such as poverty and authoritarian governments.
I don’t believe that’s what’s happening in this thread, but I’m willing to be corrected.
Precisely.
Merely a thought experiment to illustrate my point; Europeans that believed in the Five Pillars would still have steel mills and machine guns before their Jesus-following southern neighbors, in all likelihood (though of course we can’t know for sure).
Are there specific elements you can point to here?
Sure, no problem. I am not in agreement with Robert163 in the passage you quoted (or many others you could have).
Right. But do you realize that when you (and others) consistently try to argue that other non-Islamic societies facing similar socioeconomic problems is evidence that Islam is not uniquely horrible (I would never argue that it was), it can come across as saying that religion is irrelevant?
Well, I didn’t really want to put anyone on the spot, but here is the kind of equivocation to which I was referring (sorry, iiandyiiii - you’re usually one of my favorite posters):
["There’s nothing about what’s in the Koran that’s special. It’s not special or unusual that it’s being used to justify bad stuff. And these bad “instructions” are interpreted in different ways, including mostly peaceful ways (like “Jihad means fighting against poverty, sickness, suffering, etc.” which I’ve heard from moderate Imams) by some groups of Muslims.
It’s the geopolitical circumstances that are special, not the Koran."](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17801813&postcount=224)
And this is where I disagree, although considering this is a hypothetical, neither one of us could possibly be “correct” or “wrong”.
Well, I already mentioned Gregory VII and the Caliphate. Nearly a thousand years ago, the West had already begun to separate the machinery of state from that of the church. This, to me, is the single most important contrast between the historical development of Muslim and Christian societies.
I also mentioned the conquest of India by Muslims. This is an event which has no parallel, in scale, to anything done in the name of religion anywhere at any time in recorded human history. (Note - I say “in scale”. In degree, there are definitely equivalences across most [all?] non-Islamic societies. I also recognize that the conquest was extremely complex and at various times political concerns waxed and waned relative to religious ones.) Per historian Will Durant, “the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history.”
For one thing, how is that “equivocation”? It’s certainly what I feel to be true. For another, what in the Koran is uniquely bad that is not present in the Bible or other religious texts?
By the way, I won’t deny that Islam has been a critical and crucial part to the development of the Middle East and regional conflicts. I just don’t believe that there’s anything unique about the Koran that makes such conflicts inevitable, or even more likely, as compared to other religious texts.
This is precisely the sort of geopolitical circumstance that I’m speaking of. There wasn’t something unique about the Bible or the Koran that led to such differences in the practice of the religions, and the relationship between church and state.
And another example. Of course Islam was crucial to this part of history. But it didn’t happen because of Islam – it happened because of various geopolitical circumstances. Had the attempted conquerors been of some other religion, there’s no reason to believe that they would have been more or less likely to succeed (and to succeed in such a bloody manner) than they were as Muslims. Again – nothing special in the Koran, as compared to the Bible and other texts, that leads to bloodier wars… a Christian leader, were he inclined at the time (and there were many that were so inclined!), could find just as much justification in the Bible as Muslim conquerors found in the Koran.
I misspoke. My apologies. I didn’t mean to imply any deceptive intent on your part. Perhaps “false equivalence” would’ve been a more appropriate term.
I am not qualified to make any judgment, relative or absolute, about the Koran, for the simple reason that I have not read it. However, I really think that focusing on the book itself is a red herring. I’ve seen excerpts of awful shit from the Koran, but then I’ve also seen similar quotes from the Jewish and Christian holy books. However, while I tentatively agree with you that, “there’s [no]thing unique about the Koran that makes such conflicts inevitable,” I don’t think you can make that claim about the religion as it is actually practiced today by a significant minority, or as it has been practiced historically.
Again with the false equivalence! One religion separates church and state (for the most part), while another does not (also, for the most part). How can you assert that this is not related at all to the content or practice of said religion?
And here you are waaaaaaay off-base. The Muslim conquest of India was not similar at all to the Muslim conquest of North Africa and the Middle East. Those latter regions were largely inhabited by “People of the Book”, whereas India was populated mostly by Hindus, who were usually not seen as PotB. Instead, their temples were often destroyed in the name of combatting “idolatry”. There is a scarcity of non-Muslim invaders of India with which to make comparisons, but neither the Greeks, French, Dutch, Portuguese, nor British behaved in such a zealous manner when they were ascendant.
Well, being lazy is not the same as being wrong – for either of us.
Still, shame on you for such a gross cop-out.
Ok, good to know, I found his take abhorrent.
I suppose; I didn’t read it that way, but communication is imperfect like that. “Islam is not uniquely horrible” is the point I believe iiandyiiii, for instance, is trying to make, not that religion has no influence over its adherents, or that all religions are identical.
I agree with all those posts, and evidently get a different meaning from them than you do.
True, and I don’t wish to hijack the proceedings here, but as I am legitimately puzzled by this stance, I will ask a follow up question: What aspects of Christianity do you feel make it uniquely likely to lead to industrial civiliations?
But is that a difference in the religions, or a difference in the history of the religions? That is, the Pope was never in a position to militarily rule the Christian world; Christianity first spread into the Roman Empire, then subsequently a large number of European kingdoms.
Muslim Arabs conquered land to their east, and converted as many as possible to their religion. Christian Europeans conquered land to their north and east, and converted as many as possible to their religion. In what way is this a unique trait of Islam?
Questions of scale, rather than kind, are the result of factors like the number of soldiers that could be raised, and how unified command was, not religious doctrine.
This is my view as well.
Could, and did, e.g. the Northern Crusades, with the same caveats that it was a mix of political and religious motives.
Of course it’s related! But there’s nothing intrinsic about the tenets of the two religions that lead one to separation and one to church/state overlap. It’s geopolitics, not religion, that have led much of the Middle East towards church/state overlap.
These facts do not contradict anything I’ve said.
The reason I spend a lot of focus on the Koran is because the Koran is the only thing about Islam that is common to all forms of Islam. All other practices and policies, both violent and non-violent, differ by sect and type of Islam.
I tend to agree. I have no stomach for absolutists of any stripe, those who say “All X is _____” or “All X is not ______”. Of course, immediate contingencies have governed the vast majority of human actions through the ages. This does not mean there are not commonalities or patterns to discern from a wider perspective.
If you’re correct that iiandyiiii’s point is that “Islam is not uniquely horrible,” then I fully agree. I don’t think that’s the gist of his argument, though. I think he really sees religions as interchangeable belief systems, pretty much all the same. I cannot disagree strongly enough with this line of thought.
I agree partially (“[The Koran]'s not special or unusual that it’s being used to justify bad stuff”), but I think this is nonsense: “… [R]eligious practices could be swapped wholesale, and people could just as easily find religious justification in the Bible.” Perhaps the texts are extremely similar (as previously stated, I’ve not read the Koran), but it’s preposterous to claim that swapping Islamic religious practices (in some, not all circumstances) with non-Islamic ones would result in similar societal outcomes.
Well, again off the top of my head, there is that ancient phrase “render unto Caesar”. I am not a Christian, so I’m not up with theology and such, but I’m far from the first to see this maxim as expressing a distinctive aspect of Christianity.
I am also not a Hindu, though I have read the Bhagavad Gita. The one passage I remember from that text, though, certainly does not express intolerance or hatred. From my translation (there are obviously many different versions):
I would say “both” to your question, as one inevitably influences the other.
As I noted, there have been many conquerors of India over the millennia. None have behaved with the sustained brutality and zealotry that the Muslim conquerors did.
Questions of scale, when they involve a fifth of humanity, overwhelm other considerations in my estimation. The rallying cry of “Jihad!” dominated India for seven hundred years! Find me a parallel in world history.