Godless, Ismu ... um .. yeah. If it makes sense, good.
Why on earht would there be such a phenomena as radical Muslins, or Islam?
A lack of a strong economy and a lack of education, when prolonged, raises bad interpretations of writings. We might look back to
KalvinB's anti-Islamic tantrums in which he consistently ignored a simple difference between Christians and Muslims.
A Christian is told to turn the other cheek. Most Christians have a problem with this.
A Muslim is told to hit back until the aggressor stops hitting. Incidentally, most Christians seem to have a problem with this.
Weak economy creates conditions of suffering, and suffering breeds resentment. Weak education allows bad interpretations of such standards as the Muslim response to violence, hence unnecessary aggression. The only reason for fundamentalist phenomena among a people is that it's eventually all they have left.
I think given resource availability, even if it Christianity and Islam died off after the crusades, imbalances in economy and inconsistencies in education would still result in similar violence. People do learn. It just takes them a long time. I'm not sure that, had we eliminated Christianity or Islam, that the form of justification for violence (e.g. supremacy) would have disappeared with them.
The easy answer, of course, is that we have no idea what "peace" or "love" means to God. In the metaphysical, it's an acceptable answer. What seems to be wrong with the violence is that it is morally wrong. Yet who, aside from human beings, gives a rat's behind about that? If a tree falls in the woods ....
If a superplague got out of a government lab and everybody died, would the Universe care? No. If tomorrow we tortured and killed a million children, who outside of earthbound humanity would care?
Living in the United States, the definition of peace seems to be, "That state of no fighting that exists after we've stomped everyone's asses into mudholes." My own parents' definition of peace was to lie and bury family scandals. Hell, I didn't know my dad was a legitimate alcoholic until I was 25. I was about that age when he had his second affair; it would be another year before I learned about the first. To them, peace was a term describing a visible state. It didn't matter if you were chewing yourself up inside. As long as we gave the appearance of a "normal" (read "Ozzie & Harriet") family.
I think it's fair to say that any notion of peace or love is a purely human measurement. And such human measurements being subjective, the book can say what it wants. You know how hard it is to get a person to understand a simple sentence around here. Can you imagine if you were writing a holy book?
There is also the writing method of the Koran. If I recall, it was received in disparate parts over the course of years by the Prophet. On the one hand, I don't see room for error, but on the other, I still laugh when I read Master Therion's notes regarding the deliverance of
Thelema (I forget the specific Liber number). Crowley made an ass of himself disclaiming his role in it, and I think he was conscious of "errors" in other mystically-received books because he made several points about how Aiwaz instructed him to receive the text. I can't imagine Muhammed sitting in a cave taking punctuation and lexical advice from an angel. Rather, I can, but it would have to be a Monty Python film.
I would encourage perception of "infinite wisdom" as follows, and this is a theory I pull out from time to time when appropriate.
• Think for a minute as if humans were robots. You know, the brain is the mightiest computer and so forth.
• When you transmit data to a PC, the OS occasionally makes certain errors in the data transmission or reception. This is a consistent problem that programmers and designers are trying to fix.
• If humans were robots, we would make more of them on the factory line and then program them before operation.
• Such is not the case, though, and data transmission is an ongoing, lifelong process. Operational instructions are compressed, economized, and optimized to contemporary needs. This
changes both the nature of the data itself and the nature of its transmission and reception.
• Thus, imagine if you can, the moment of perfect understanding that Muhammed endured. I say "endured" because any wise man knows that knowledge can increase suffering as well as reduce it.
• If you were Muhammed (or even Jesus), could you transmit your data perfectly, and guarantee perfect reception?
• Now that the data is received, can you guarantee proper assimilation by diverse individuals?
• Count the data-transfer errors, omissions, and so forth.
• Now, multiply by the intervening generations.
I would assert that, on a metaphysical level, it is entirely possible that an "infinite truth" (read "ineffable truth" or "truth larger than knowledge") may well be present in the Bible or Koran. But no, at the popular level, there is no infinite truth. It's like subjective objectivity. Individuals' priorities determine the nature of perception and application. Bearing that in mind, we come all the way back to extended periods of weak economy and poor education. Get yourself a couple generations into it and wrong ideas rule. Armstrong, in the late pages of
A History of God (and throughout
Battle for God) explores the results of two famous purges in recent Islamic history. That of Kemal Ataturk and that of the Ayatollah Khomeni.
In each case, after the tyrants purged society of clerics and intellectuals, what remained was a superstitious population with no experienced guidance. Fundamentalism rooted in that absence.
I do believe, for instance, the Bible to be vitally and irreparably flawed. I have not studied the Koran enough to make that same conclusion, and do not look forward to 20+ years of similar relations as my experience with Christianity before making that judgment.
Perhaps you're an expert on Islam, but if you're anything like me and acknowledge the limits of your knowledge, I would propose that you're not getting anything useful out of taking on such fundamentalist issues in any religion. You'll get two primary responses: those who are defending the primary religion against notions of fundamentalism, and fundamentalists themselves. In either case, it is difficult to make any progress. The value of any idea, be it religious, literary, governmental, or otherwise, lies in its application. I would go so far as to assert that one cannot know the fundamentalist splinter without knowing the primary body. Rather, one can only know as much about the fundamentalist splinter as they do about the primary body. One of those, it seems.
And therein lies the better answers to the nature of Islam. Think about it this way: if one's primary interaction with Christianity is via abortion debates, homosexual votes, and fights about music lyrics, that is all they are dealing with. Think about that fundamentalist, young-earth, anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-expressionist, misogynist, and otherwise spiteful stain on humanity that is so influential in American Christianity. It's a little like asking Vanilla Ice about music theory. ("Rap is the hardest music in the world to write because you have to make the words rhyme.")
Don't challenge a religion by simply criticizing it. At that point, you're merely broadening the chasm and reinforcing the faithful's sense of righteousness. Rather, call a religion out on its application. I realize with Muslims that's problematic because the most of what we hear of Islam is about fundamentalist extremism.
Believe me ... people will hand you opportunities. No, wait ... you don't have to believe me. I think you already know that.
In my college dorm were a couple of guys from Singapore. One was Sikh. I remember once someone asked him a very basic question about something written in a holy text and he thought about it for a moment and said, "I don't know. I can't imagine when that would come up that I would have to think about it."
If I give license to Islam regarding the accuracy of their book, it's because I have little reason to care about those aspects. Christians claim Biblical infallibility, and I do object to that. But I object because stupid ideas compel stupid people to object to science in schools, to object to civil rights, to object to human dignity, and to insist on supremacy.
A teacher of mine once noted that if a work is good enough, it may or may not be regarded as art, but if a work is bad enough it won't matter. While this actually had more to do with "woman author" or "black author" labels, it still serves its point.
If a Christian writes a law according to his biblically-assigned conscience, I could care less where it comes from as long as it's a good law. If it's a good law, it doesn't matter where it came from because it's a good law. If it's a bad law, then it does matter where it came from because that origin might hold the key to its fault. A little different of a process, but I hope you can see the analogy.
In this country, though, Muslims aren't writing laws. They aren't f--king with my life or my freedom. 9/11? Beside the point.
Does it matter if violence is in the name of God or country? Wait ... to be sympathetic with those more sympathetic to warfare than I, it would be best to try that again.
If someone blows up the Sears Tower, for instance, in the name of God, does it make it any different than if they did it in the name of a country?
There is a point to this digression .... What the hell was it? Oh, I'm justifying my regard for Islam. That's right.
And poorly, by the look of it.
But that's a basic line I draw. I'll bury the Christian book any day because of what it produces. I'll worry about the Koran, I suppose, when the Islamic world is up to date with the Western world and we're on equal footing. In the meantime, though, I don't expect to learn anything by addressing ... um ... I'm looking for a word ... damn ... um, by addressing stupid ideas.
And on that note, I need a disclaimer.
Ismu ... actually, reading back through your posts, I'm not sure the disclaimer is necessary, but I'll include it anyway. You'll notice I've used the word "stupid" and other less-than-positive terms to describe my opinion of the subject at hand. I hesitated each time because I need to make it clear that what I'm after is the larger issue of debating such ideas. As you note, you are not yet a master of the Koran, but you show wisdom in your responses. I do not, in fact, consider either you or
Godless to be stupid. However, there are plenty of people out there who, as we saw with our Christian posters, are more than happy to entertain debates on this level and foster nothing more than division.
So to put a question toward you that might (or might not) help my case,
How important are the topic issues to the faith of the average Muslim?
That is, when we get into "contradiction" ideas about the Bible, they're quite important to the people of the faith. Even Genesis, despite its messy narrative.
I think of the aforementioned topics by KB and that's more of what I fear. I think issues of leadership, action, and responsibility--the conditions and justifications for violence--are much more important to any faith than how quickly God created the world.
I cannot stress enough to all of our posters how important it is that we get past this level of subject matter and undertake more insightful issues. In this country, the accuracy of Genesis is only important because very stupid Christians make it so. I'm curious how much such ideas affect the Islamic world. I mean, Christians took a man to criminal trial in this country for teaching something other than the Bible.
And while I'm thinking of Genesis ... does anyone know what a Children's Bible says about Onan? Sorry ... that just hit me. I wonder if that scene is illustrated ....
If it's messy, it's because I really should consider sleep at this point.
And I will do just that.
peace & harmony ... really,
Tiassa