07-22-2017, 12:00 PM
(06-25-2017, 09:27 PM)Dill Wrote: Well it is good that we have someone in the forum who is informed about both the Qu'ran and Hadith as well as the Bible.
Seems to me like each religion-of-the-book handles detractors in a wide variety of ways. I know some Muslims who have become atheists and they are still tight with their families. Is it possible that some atheists who come from devout Christian families are no longer welcome in those families?
One thing that has always puzzled me about religions of the book is how their believers pick and choose among their religious texts. I see you have noticed this too. Christians who like authoritarian social regulation, like the above-mentioned Ms. Griffin, for example, often turn to the Old Testament for justification when the Sermon on the Mount blocks them from some desired oppression. They are fine with "the bad parts," even the ethnic cleansing; but there are definitely Christians who aren't fine with them. They are not even fine with "bad parts" of the New Testament.
On the other hand, I have to wonder why so many Muslims ignore the "bad parts" of the Qu'ran, given their role model was a "conquering warlord" as you put it, and there are so many concise messages urging them to kill non-believers.
Include the way these different religions have behaved over the last thousand years and you could get the impression that what religious texts say depends as much upon who reads them and how they are read as much as what is actually in them. In fact, just looking at the words of a text seems not a very good predictor of how people will interpret and act upon those words. I find myself constantly looking to other social and historical factors to explain the wide range of variations.
I have raised this problem with fundamentalists of two of the three religions at various times, and they do the opposite. They just look at what the text says and assume they are reading without interpreting. Or they have fixed hermenutic method, which they don't seem to think is a method (e.g., Biblical typology). For them, the text is unchanged so the message is unchanged. That is why whenever they argue, they are always citing lines and verses and scoffing at hermenuetic/linguistic/historical questions/problems. Why do fundamentalists of all three religions so often disagree with their fellow fundamentalists then, one wonders, if they are all seeing what's just there on the page? I am not a fundamentalist, but if I were, I imagine I would solve the problem quickly by recognizing Satan's snare and affirming my deep and unchangeable belief in with the text says.
Didn't see this well thought out response until now. One paragraph/bolded point at a time here. I go from the top down. I don't address the last boded point because I feel like I addressed that in my 2nd paragraph.
But yeah, I developed an interest in understanding 3 big religions at a young age. I wanted to understand what I didn't like and could never buy into growing up. Personal research + an infatuation with Christopher Hitchens is to blame there.
It's possible, at least in the west anyway. I don't know if you could say the same about say, an atheist and Saudi Arabia but my gut says no. Could be wrong.
When the foundation of your beliefs is rife with inconsistencies, you have to nitpick what and what not to believe/say. Instead of sitting down and say "Hey, if X belief has X many inconsistencies, I need to reevaluate why I have these beliefs at all", religious people say "everything is okay, because mai faith".
Depends on what you mean by ignore. Sure, the vast majority of Muslims aren't charismatic mid-life crisis aged men trying to take over the world. But a good many of them are sympathetic to those that are and the beliefs/interpretations driving them.
There's nothing wrong with looking other variables that could cause bad actions that appear, at first glance, to be motivated by religion. Just as long as you scrutinize them and any casual link thoroughly. First example that comes to mind are those that say that economic/geopolitical factors are more to blame. I checked out a dozen or so middle eastern muslim majority nations and pulled up with GDP figures I could find. There doesn't seem to be any link between Islamic extremism, abhorrent islamic practices/laws, and poor economies. Further, we can find plenty of cases of religous buttholery in the west. It's really one of those things that people intuitively believe to true but it isn't.
The problem I have with that is that we could say that about any text, religious or not. Sure, there's a subjective interpretation to religious text. That doesn't negate the fact that (A), some interpretations could be dead wrong; and (B), there isn't any core takeaway we can get from them.
It's gets even worse with Islam from what i've seen, at least when discussing its text and history. I've seen/spoken to several Muslims at my university (some of them in prominent administrative positions that try to whitewash history and spread ignorance. I remember there was a Muslim student on campus running a "ask a Muslim" stand in the student center. He was talking to a friend of mine in the free-thinkers and inquirers' group about Islamic conquest and history. As I walked by, I overheard him claim that actions taken against non-muslims, by muslims, were "defensive". I chimed in with a "I know right, those god damned Armenians really had it coming. Those assholes. He then stared at me for a couple of seconds and proceeded to change the subject.
You then get prominent figures like good Ol' Cenek, everyone's favorite buffalo doing things like.....
1.Claiming that the Ottoman Empire was pleasant to their minorities (lol, they only treated them as 2nd class citizens.)
2. Having a history of blatantly denying the Armenian genocide.
3. Naming his prominent news organization The Young Turks. He knew who the Young Turks were well before we started his medium, as evidenced by this 1991 article he wrote http://dparchives.library.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pennsylvania?a=d&d=tdp19911122-01.2.24
4. And worse of all, him, along with other grassroots progressives, have a strange habit of white-knighting for Islam, even going as far as to brand "new atheists" as closet racists http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/new-atheism-anti-muslim-white-supremacy-movement-426032443
Because yeah, let's work for marginalized groups....by going after atheists: the most marginalized voice out there. Whatever dude. /Endrant.
