Islam - the religion of peace

[fred41]

None of the monotheist religions (Abrahamic big three) are rooted in peace. The difference, I believe, is that Christianity, for instance, is often practiced in countries with a secular government, whereas in the middle east, where Islam rocks, government and religion are deeply intertwined...where Islam comes first. There's a good article on this by Kenneth Krause...see if I can dig it up.
On another note - I really like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and not just because I find her attractive.
Going to have to come back to this topic when I have all my faculties...Just discovered an excellent (and fairly cheap) baby Amarone that I drank without any food...

[bobvela]

None of the monotheist religions (Abrahamic big three) are rooted in peace.

That depends on how far back you focus and how much time in-between is ignored... which when speaking of being 'rooted' is quite a bit of time.

I must pause here and say that I am by no means a person of faith. While raised Catholic for 15-20 years (and trying to separate myself from it even then), I am best considered an agnostic (I don't know if there is a God and I really don't spend much time thinking or worrying about the topic). So what follows hopefully is not read as being form a bible thumper.

Aside from the God of Abraham kind of being crewel with that whole "kill your son to prove your faith" thing and much more (flood, pillars of salt, etc wrath), much of the older scriptures (of all three Abrahamic religions) tell of rather violent times of this people vs that, often in the name of their beliefs or other petty grievances.

Scripturally speaking, Jesus showing up was a rather big thing. Not just in the "I say I'm the son of God... so you should listen up" sort of way, but in a more fundamental "things are now going to change a bit with regards to messaging, and I don't just mean with me letting one of my followers betray me and me do nothing" bit, but a partial breaking from the past and a generally more peaceful message... hence stoning insolent children no longer being an acceptable thing.

Don't believe me? When did Jesus say "Hey flock, would you mind kicking that guys ass for me? He's rather offended me with his different views?"

You do see results like that from one and only religion today.

To quote one book which I thought rather summarized the time well:

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

The difference, I believe, is that Christianity, for instance, is often practiced in countries with a secular government, whereas in the middle east, where Islam rocks, government and religion are deeply intertwined...where Islam comes first.

There is a good reason for that, it was Jesus who was preaching the whole "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", a truly secular message of religion and government not being one in the same... while a ~500 years later Mohammed was setting up a system where government and faith are tightly intertwined along with a good bit of "Here is a list of people who you shouldn't like, and by not like I mean convert, tax or kill... and in that order."

There is a limited argument to be made for the difference between how such religions are practiced and what they actually preach fundamentally, often pointing to the Christian Crusades... while ignoring the Muslim conquests which lead up to them.

State religions on the Christian side are not unheard of, today we know of the Church of England, at the time of the founding of the US there were several official state religions, adherence to was necessary for public office in a given state. Heck even today a number of European countries have some form of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax">church tax</a>... we see only one Jewish state (in which there are multiple non Jews in government), and several Islamic ones... and when comparing the requirements or suggestions of faith installed into the laws of all it is clearly that only one faith has a difficult time separating itself from governments that it can control.

[Stavros]

So many acts of violence have been committed in the name of religion to imply that the religion is at fault, regardless of the context or contexts in which religions are developed. But I doubt that Jesus of Nazareth could predict that 1500 years after his death the Christian Kings of Europe would claim a 'divine right' to rule and take such delight in the harassment and murder of one set of Christians against another because they did or did not accept the Pope as the Minister of God on Earth. In fact, he might be -one would hope that he would be- appalled, as the meaning in the Crucifixion is that if there was to be a human sacrifice, Jesus offered himself as the last for all time, to relieve other humans of their need for human sacrifice when there is none. Moreover, Jesus offered love as a solution to human problems, yet this seems to be the hardest thing to do - compared to resentment, which seems to be at the root of political, perhaps all violence.
It is futile to look at the origins of religion in the context of secular politics or the modern state because religion was the science of its times, and the modern state as we know it did not exist. Perhaps the most difficult question to answer in the modern age is why so many people adhere to religious belief rather than secular, non-religious belief, as an explanation for life on earth, and as a guide to how to live one's life. It clearly brings comfort to a lot of people, yet for others in the wrong time and place can become a sentence of death, and on that score, no religion is short of fanatics and murderers who claim the authority of God for what they do. It could thus be not the fault of God, but the assumption of God-like powers by men with guns, or seated at the controls of an aeropane. That need for absolute power, even if only for a few minutes, points towards issues of power as another elusive enigma wrapped in the mystery of religion -or maybe that is where they meet with such devastating consequences?

[trish]

The world into which Christianity was born was henotheistic. Rome had no difficulty accepting the religions, gods and goddesses or other cultures into an expanding pantheon. Rome may not have practice separation of temple and state, but the effect of recognizing all temples approximates a kind of secularism. If you were a client state, Rome was interested in your political fealty, not your religion. However, Christianity proved to be a different animal: it was not only monotheistic but virulently proselytizing. It eventually consumed Rome and spread to the rest of Europe and the British Isles, subsuming pagan cultural practices while displaying little tolerance for pagan priests, witches, gods and goddesses. Christ may have had something different in mind, but he had little control over what Christianity would become centuries after his death.

Europe also was the home of the Enlightenment. The influences of Voltaire, Locke, Spinoza and others in Europe and Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Washington and others in North America are directly and perhaps singularly responsible for inspiring the secular governments we find there today. (Since we have a historian on board, I know I’m going to regret that last statement.)

Like Rome (though not a consolidated empire) the Indian subcontinent was home to plethora of gods, goddesses and religions. Hindu is more an of religions than a single religion. Like Christianity, Islam is monotheistic, proselytizing and virulent. When it made contact with India it swept through the continent eventually making millions of converts. However, Allah did not join the Hindu pantheon. Allah will not tolerate other gods and idols. Perhaps because India wasn’t a monolithic empire like Rome, Islam did not consume India like Christianity consumed Rome, though the relationship between Islam and Hindu is not an easy one. Pakistan, very definitely does not have a secular government. India does or does not depending on who you ask. I imagine India’s government is perhaps more like Rome’s was: not secular but displaying the tolerance of its henotheism whenever that tolerance is reciprocated.

The two younger Abrahamic religions seem to have little capacity for tolerance. Their adherents (at least their more fundamentalist ones) yearn to live within like-minded communities. They suffer a phobia of the “sins” and religious transgressions of those who don’t believe as they do. They fear that somehow those transgressions will rub off. That fear becoming collateral damage to God’s wrath. Every other year Pat Robertson warns that tornadoes may tear up your town if it harbored homosexuals, or if its schools teach “evolutionism.” Jesus was a revolutionary. He pushed for tolerance. Though we was successful in creating a new religion, two of its founding principles and directives (monotheism and go-out-and-convert-the-sinful) conflict with what I like to see as the main principle, tolerance. I excuse the oldest monotheistic Abrahamic religion (which suffers from a lot of self-directed intolerance) on the grounds that it doesn’t seek (at least not to my knowledge in the modern day) to gain converts among the pagans.

[Stavros]

The world into which Christianity was born was henotheistic. Rome had no difficulty accepting the religions, gods and goddesses or other cultures into an expanding pantheon. Rome may not have practice separation of temple and state, but the effect of recognizing all temples approximates a kind of secularism. If you were a client state, Rome was interested in your political fealty, not your religion. However, Christianity proved to be a different animal: it was not only monotheistic but virulently proselytizing. It eventually consumed Rome and spread to the rest of Europe and the British Isles, subsuming pagan cultural practices while displaying little tolerance for pagan priests, witches, gods and goddesses. Christ may have had something different in mind, but he had little control over what Christianity would become centuries after his death.

Europe also was the home of the Enlightenment. The influences of Voltaire, Locke, Spinoza and others in Europe and Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Washington and others in North America are directly and perhaps singularly responsible for inspiring the secular governments we find there today. (Since we have a historian on board, I know I’m going to regret that last statement.)

Like Rome (though not a consolidated empire) the Indian subcontinent was home to plethora of gods, goddesses and religions. Hindu is more an of religions than a single religion. Like Christianity, Islam is monotheistic, proselytizing and virulent. When it made contact with India it swept through the continent eventually making millions of converts. However, Allah did not join the Hindu pantheon. Allah will not tolerate other gods and idols. Perhaps because India wasn’t a monolithic empire like Rome, Islam did not consume India like Christianity consumed Rome, though the relationship between Islam and Hindu is not an easy one. Pakistan, very definitely does not have a secular government. India does or does not depending on who you ask. I imagine India’s government is perhaps more like Rome’s was: not secular but displaying the tolerance of its henotheism whenever that tolerance is reciprocated.

The two younger Abrahamic religions seem to have little capacity for tolerance. Their adherents (at least their more fundamentalist ones) yearn to live within like-minded communities. They suffer a phobia of the “sins” and religious transgressions of those who don’t believe as they do. They fear that somehow those transgressions will rub off. That fear becoming collateral damage to God’s wrath. Every other year Pat Robertson warns that tornadoes may tear up your town if it harbored homosexuals, or if its schools teach “evolutionism.” Jesus was a revolutionary. He pushed for tolerance. Though we was successful in creating a new religion, two of its founding principles and directives (monotheism and go-out-and-convert-the-sinful) conflict with what I like to see as the main principle, tolerance. I excuse the oldest monotheistic Abrahamic religion (which suffers from a lot of self-directed intolerance) on the grounds that it doesn’t seek (at least not to my knowledge in the modern day) to gain converts among the pagans.

It is difficult to reply to such a confused set of ideas, but I will try.
I am not sure why anyone would claim the Romans were tolerant of other religions, 'throwing Christians to the lions' does not seem tolerant to me, and although they did not invent Crucifixion, it was reserved as the most despicable form of punishment -the clue might be the view from Rome that Jesus was a truly nasty pest, Pontius Pilate washing his hands not amounting to much of an excuse. Perhaps if we looked beyond their splendid roads, their urban planning, their development of law and their homo-erotic sculptures, we might not find the Romans either so boring, or so benign.

This thread is in danger of morphing into the other God thread, but there must be a theme in the history of ideas which links the word's religions and the various strands of philosophy -and not just Western European philosophy- and that is the question of whether or not, left without law or politics humans revert to what Hobbes called 'a state of nature' in which human relations are characterised by violence and greed in which life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. In fact there is plenty of evidence that human societies without government develop rules which enable them to co-exist with others free of violence, trading if not always sharing resources, inter-marrying, and so on.

Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the Hindu -and throw Plato into this mix-are united in their determination to provide their social milieux with tools for living -a set of laws, values and beliefs designed first and foremost to provide the framework for peaceful living. In essence, at the level of design, all religions are 'religions of peace'. If people believe there is an all-seeing, all-powerful God who has the power of life and death, to claim to be speaking on behalf of this God -and to be believed- endows the 'Prophet' with awesome social power. That religions use threats when people are being or threaten to be disobedient is part of the need for social order in which certain acts are sanctioned. Whether or not any of the aforementioned messengers of God would approve of the way in which their ideas have been developed into ideologies of power that emphasise chastisement rather than love, war rather than peace, I doubt. Even in late times, we have the example of the violence perpetrated in the name of Karl Marx that he would have found both appalling, and remote from his analysis of capitalism. How one gets from Volumes 1 and 2 of Capital, to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot is a mystery to me but there is precious little evidence that these 20th century killers ever read Capital, or in Lenin's case, understood it. I doubt the majority of young so-called Jihadis have ever read the Quran and understood it least of all in the context in which it appeared, but many have read the violent tracts of Sayed Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, and a plethora of online nutcases and prefer to be pictured holding a Kalshnikov rather than the Quran.

It is absurd, as Bobvela implied with his link, to claim some special agency of violence by Muslims against non-Muslims as an enactment of the faith -where is the recognition that beyond state violence, social violence against Muslims is happening on a regular basis in the USA, the UK and Europe, Myanmar, Thailand, India, China, Sri Lanka and Australia to name just a few from recent news stories?

As for the USA, is it not a paradox of the American Revolution that the constitutional separation of Church and State took place where the issue was not that the founding fathers were not Christians -they were- but that the impetus for many of the early 'Pilgrims' (are Pilgrims different from Settlers?) was precisely the religious freedom defined in terms of Church loyalties, and that persuaded them to leave this arena free for all?

Is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana an extension of Constitutional rights to Americans in Indiana, or a violation of them, and indeed, the Constitution itself?

[broncofan]

Is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana an extension of Constitutional rights to Americans in Indiana, or a violation of them, and indeed, the Constitution itself?

That's the pretense. Indiana is part of the U.S and any citizen would have the full protections of the first amendment without the passage of a state law purporting to mimic the spirit of the first amendment. Insofar as the Religious Freedom Act itself would offer protection, it would be deciding by legislative fiat what would otherwise be determined by a court according to constitutional principles (this could get more layered depending upon whether the Indiana law is exempting someone from a federal mandate or protecting them from adverse consequences by a private individual).

Anyhow, it seems to me that it misses the spirit of free practice. It is the most authoritarian and intolerant interpretation of free practice. Is one only practicing his religion if he can prevent others from taking actions he finds disagreeable?

Religions are only religions of peace for their followers. Of course everyone has the right to convert and become part of the flock, but what about the various prescribed judgments in this life and the next for those who don't believe? Surely there are peace-sustaining edicts intended to protect human life as well as property....but what about the legislation of sexual morality beyond the bounds of informed consent (masturbation, sex of partners)? Or the advantages that are supposed to accrue only to those who believe in the right deity and the punishments reserved for those who don't believe, even if by any objective standard these are peaceable people who are destined to roast for eternity? I think all religions are by design inherently hostile to non-believers. That's why I think a focus on the Koran misses the point because the only way Judaism and Christianity (the latter in my understanding also uses the old books) is not violent is if one cherry-picks the text.

Yes, I know this has become an all religions post, but I think the issue is broader than Islam or the Koran.

[broncofan]

I realize some of what I say about religion can be said about any ideology. A person who believes strongly in any idea will believe others should believe it too. But religion uses a manipulative set of tactics to instill fear in people, to demand punishment and ostracism for non-conformers, and even to endorse violence.

[trish]

It is difficult to reply to such a confused set of ideas, but I will try.
I am not sure why anyone would claim the Romans were tolerant of other religions, 'throwing Christians to the lions' does not seem tolerant to me, and although they did not invent Crucifixion, it was reserved as the most despicable form of punishment -the clue might be the view from Rome that Jesus was a truly nasty pest, Pontius Pilate washing his hands not amounting to much of an excuse. Perhaps if we looked beyond their splendid roads, their urban planning, their development of law and their homo-erotic sculptures, we might not find the Romans either so boring, or so benign.

Well you got me there, the Romans showed no tolerance toward anyone who opposed or was perceived as being opposed to Rome; and as you point out, crucifixion was one of mode of displaying their displeasure (making this thread Holiday appropriate).

My claim, however, was with respect to religion. The worship of Egyptian deities did not automatically land you in the arena. There was no effort to convert the pagans in conquered territories to the religion of Rome. Obeisance and taxes were required.

My interest, however, is directed more toward the suggestion raised by Bobvela: Christ’s directive “give unto Caesar” and others like it is what renders Christianity amenable to secular government. I do not see Christianity as more amenable to secular government than Islam in particular or some other religion, say Hinduism. In fact, I see the coupling of monotheism with the proselytizing directive (which was and still is enthusiastically taken up by the followers of new religion) to become “fishermen of men” as incompatible with religious toleration. I always found it amusing that of His ten demands the God of Abraham wasted the first three on self-aggrandizement and intolerance toward other religions (You shall have no other gods before me. You shall make no idols. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain). With the spread of Christianity pagan religions went underground or died out entirely. Atheists kept their disbelief to themselves. In Alexandria, Hypatia was flayed and killed by angry Christians. Witches were burned at the stake in Europe and the Americas at the behest of crazed Christians.

It is not because of any difference between Christianity and Islam that the nations Europe and North America are now ruled by secular governments and the nations of the Middle East and North Africa are not. The former nations fell under the influence of the Enlightenment and adopted for themselves the political values of Enlightenment philosophers; while the people of the Middle East and North Africa were colonized and exploited by those same European nations that regarded themselves as enlightened. Surely to them, Sharia must now look a lot better than Enlightenment politics. (Not to mention that, in the interest of large oil concerns, we've propped up divine monarchies there for decades.)

[Stavros]

That's the pretense. Indiana is part of the U.S and any citizen would have the full protections of the first amendment without the passage of a state law purporting to mimic the spirit of the first amendment. Insofar as the Religious Freedom Act itself would offer protection, it would be deciding by legislative fiat what would otherwise be determined by a court according to constitutional principles (this could get more layered depending upon whether the Indiana law is exempting someone from a federal mandate or protecting them from adverse consequences by a private individual).

Anyhow, it seems to me that it misses the spirit of free practice. It is the most authoritarian and intolerant interpretation of free practice. Is one only practicing his religion if he can prevent others from taking actions he finds disagreeable?

Religions are only religions of peace for their followers. Of course everyone has the right to convert and become part of the flock, but what about the various prescribed judgments in this life and the next for those who don't believe? Surely there are peace-sustaining edicts intended to protect human life as well as property....but what about the legislation of sexual morality beyond the bounds of informed consent (masturbation, sex of partners)? Or the advantages that are supposed to accrue only to those who believe in the right deity and the punishments reserved for those who don't believe, even if by any objective standard these are peaceable people who are destined to roast for eternity? I think all religions are by design inherently hostile to non-believers. That's why I think a focus on the Koran misses the point because the only way Judaism and Christianity (the latter in my understanding also uses the old books) is not violent is if one cherry-picks the text.

Yes, I know this has become an all religions post, but I think the issue is broader than Islam or the Koran.

I think you probably need to see the reward/punishment factor in religion much as you see it in the law -the whole point of having a law is to present society with a structure, with the proviso that if a law is broken, punishment will follow -precisely what that punishment should be is clearly something that changes over time, though execution and eternal damnation does seem rather excessive to many of us, even if many other contemporaries have expressed a desire to punish people in as gruesome a fashion as IS, and it is perhaps interesting that their punishments induce horror -yet capital punishment as such is still common in the USA.

There is also the theme that links religion as an ideology to nationalism -as in 'Do you belong here'? Can you be a non-Muslim and live in Saudi Arabia? A non-Jew in Israel? It is clearly possible in both cases, even if militants think otherwise. I don't think this is an issue that Muhammad every came close to resolving in his own mind. The Constitution of Medina indicates his intention to integrate the Jews into his Community of the Faithful, whereas they allied themselves to a hostile faction in the town and lost out as a result. Muhammad had many conversations with Christians who lived in the vicinity of Mecca at the time, and there are enough references in the Quran that laud the 'people of the book' -as well as hostile verses- which suggest this was an unresolved issue, and which, dare I say it, points to the human element in religion, since we must suppose God has no problem with believers whoever they are.

[Stavros]

Well you got me there, the Romans showed no tolerance toward anyone who opposed or was perceived as being opposed to Rome; and as you point out, crucifixion was one of mode of displaying their displeasure (making this thread Holiday appropriate).

My claim, however, was with respect to religion. The worship of Egyptian deities did not automatically land you in the arena. There was no effort to convert the pagans in conquered territories to the religion of Rome. Obeisance and taxes were required.

My interest, however, is directed more toward the suggestion raised by Bobvela: Christ’s directive “give unto Caesar” and others like it is what renders Christianity amenable to secular government. I do not see Christianity as more amenable to secular government than Islam in particular or some other religion, say Hinduism. In fact, I see the coupling of monotheism with the proselytizing directive (which was and still is enthusiastically taken up by the followers of new religion) to become “fishermen of men” as incompatible with religious toleration. I always found it amusing that of His ten demands the God of Abraham wasted the first three on self-aggrandizement and intolerance toward other religions (You shall have no other gods before me. You shall make no idols. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain). With the spread of Christianity pagan religions went underground or died out entirely. Atheists kept their disbelief to themselves. In Alexandria, Hypatia was flayed and killed by angry Christians. Witches were burned at the stake in Europe and the Americas at the behest of crazed Christians.

It is not because of any difference between Christianity and Islam that the nations Europe and North America are now ruled by secular governments and the nations of the Middle East and North Africa are not. The former nations fell under the influence of the Enlightenment and adopted for themselves the political values of Enlightenment philosophers; while the people of the Middle East and North Africa were colonized and exploited by those same European nations that regarded themselves as enlightened. Surely to them, Sharia must now look a lot better than Enlightenment politics. (Not to mention that, in the interest of large oil concerns, we've propped up divine monarchies there for decades.)

Rather than say you are wrong about Rome, I would suggest you alter the perspective. The Roman Empire was both created and retained through military force, but also through the co-option of local elites into the higher strata of Rome where class was as important a form of social stratification as it had been in Greece. Whether this buttressed existing local elites, or created new ones who saw an opportunity and took it, is too varied an issue to be debated here, but it is also the case that there were urban riots and rebellions (eg, Spartacus) some of which rejected Roman power, others 'merely' complaints about living standards. Thus Rome can be seen to have been an 'informal Empire', a model copied by the British in, for example, West Africa, where a limited military presence enabled the Empire to function through a mixture of local elites and Christian missionaries, all of whom formed part of the economic nexus that tied the relationship together, just as the Roman Empire successfully used universal forms of coinage and literacy to establish lines of communication and transaction that linked the centre to the periphery. Recalticance could be fatal -the claim that 770,000 troops were sent to defeat the 20,000 or so Carthaginians cannot be truly verified, yet there are no records from Carthage because it was all but wiped off the face of the North African Earth.

Ideologically, all of the three monotheist religions thus challenged Rome, challenging the plethora of Gods with one absolute and all-powerful God -Plato's 'pure form' in another sense-, but replacing fatalistic inertia with individual purpose and salvation. Thus Jesus was rejecting the temporal power of Rome and insisting that spiritual power was all that mattered, because if you believed in his mission, that commitment to a personal God who would save your soul, it would enable you to have both a personal relationship with God, and form ties with a community of people who shared your belief. All of the rituals and practices common to religion follow. The ancient pagan religions did not offer this personalised salvation and eternal life, but note too how pagan rituals became absorbed into Christian practice much as happened with the Jews and Muslims. Indeed, from this perspective, you can see how unoriginal Muhammad's core message is. We may never know where the idea of one God began, Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt was a monotheist, and may even have been murdered by the pagan priests who saw this as a threat to their livelihoods, and while it did not catch on everywhere, it has clearly had universal appeal. It is also argued that Buddha by offering a concept of personal salvation or release from the material world, is part of the same trend toward the individualization of religious thought.

What seems to happen after foundations are laid, are splits and divisions among believers -the Pharisees and Sadducees in Judaism -one democratic the other elitist; the 80 odd Christian communities that existed with their own peculiar versions of Christ's message (these are the 'Gnostic' communities) before Paul developed the church as an institution which aimed to standardise all the ideas and practices of Christiaity -and not long after Muhammad's death as the locus of Islam shifted from Mecca to Damascus, a ferocious debate about whether the Caliph could be any believer or had to be someone related to Muhammad, the clue being a terrible anxiety about the purity of the faith being practised and the potential for new ideas to lead Islam away from 'the straight path' -but a set of arguments that has beset all religions, because after all they are human creations.

In the case of the USA, 1776 was a 'bourgeois' revolution that took the English Revolution to a new level, but are these not revolutions led by money in the sense that people, regardless of their faith, resent taxes that are taken from them but which do not then get spent on the society in which they live? Ideologically, there was nor rejection of Christianity in America; even in the fiercely anti-clerical revolution in France, resentment was aimed as much at the spendthrift monarchy as it was the Church, again, because many people saw them as leeches living off the blood of the people; an intimate relationship between Church and state did not exist in America as it did in France, and particularly in Russia.

Ultimately I think the problem is how each age interprets ancient texts of religion, because just as we practice punishment for crimes differently in the first quarter of the 21st century than we did in the last quarter of the 20th, there is always something that is living and something that is dead in ancient texts. That is what makes them interesting.