|
Brainiac Five posted:What are these fundamental flaws? Why do they exist in Islam and not in any other religion or philosophy? Generally, the answers to these questions are never provided, or they're facile ones that are unconvincing. Firstly, these fundamental flaws are a matter of degrees. Christianity, Hinduism etc. share some but not all of them (different ones). It isn't a matter of Islam being the worst religion possible, or the worst religion that has ever existed. In fact, Islam isn't even uniquely bad in the modern era. Speaking as a member of half of a family that gradually broke away from Mormonism, I see many similarities between that religion and Islam, both scripturally and in terms of social organization. They are also similar in terms of the fact that both have a history of violent terrorism against nonbelievers in the relatively recent past, are aggressively political and tend towards theocratic impulses, and condone the despicable practice of polygamy. In fact, if I were forced to choose, I would probably say Mormonism is worse. They simply don't have the numbers or desperation to engage in the same kind of theocratic terrorism in the modern day. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is another example of a similarly despicable creed; nowadays it exists in a symbiotic relationship with traditionalist Islam through the vehicle of the Israeli nation-state held hostage by the Orthodox. In any case, to whit: here are the fundamental flaws of Islam which are not widely found in other major world religions; and to give a precise definition I mean the following religions: (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, Reformed, Baptist) Christianity, Reform Judaism, Hinduism, Theraveda Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism) -A lack of division between the spiritual and temporal (this is the big one) -A moral paradigm revolving around legalism and enforcement. Even the vaunted and supposedly progressive "Itjihad" is essentially just a process of self-policing that denies the believer the right to use their own moral reasoning; to the extent that Christianity does this it is almost exclusively about high-flying theological matters, I.E. the divinity of god, and not matters of temporal law. -Justification of violence and militarism so long as the religion itself can be claimed to be under threat (not that a lack of this has stopped other religions from being used to justify violence but, at least they have to redefine core dogmas first, Pope Urban II style; Islam is a tool for justifying violent expansionism right out of the box) -Extremely high levels of puritanism and a uniquely authoritarian attitude towards artistic endeavors -Explicit justification of domestic violence (The Christian equivalent in Ephesians 5:22 is simply not in the same category of horribleness as [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa,_34"] what appears in the Quran) Those are the principle unique (or uniquely intensely expressed) flaws. If you think these are "facile [arguments] that are unconvincing", you should at least offer a cursory explanation as to why you think that's the case instead of acting as if that is common wisdom. SSNeoman posted:
So why are these factors, which can be construed as being the fault of the west, the only ones that are ever allowed to be discussed? If the actual religious/cultural doctrines, styles and writings themselves are even a small part of this issue of violent extremism, why is discussing them out of bounds? And if discussing them isn't out of bounds, why do threads like these always get bombarded with threadshitting attempts in a way that threads critical of other political or religious ideologies do not?
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 03:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 10:53 |
|
|
Liberal_L33t posted:Firstly, these fundamental flaws are a matter of degrees. Christianity, Hinduism etc. share some but not all of them (different ones). It isn't a matter of Islam being the worst religion possible, or the worst religion that has ever existed. 1. Historically false. 2. Pharisaiacal Judaism was all about legalism in morality, dipshit. 3. "I come not to bring peace, but a sword." Ashoka. You loving idiot. 4. Not true at all. 5. The Pauline Epistles explicitly sanction marital rape, you loving clown. This sanction of marital rape, while at least nominally egalitarian in that the husband was expected to submit to the wife's sexual requests as well, is something that has remained part of Christianity down to the present day, usually in a less egalitarian form than Paul wrote it out.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 03:12
|
|
|
Liberal_L33t posted:So why are these factors, which can be construed as being the fault of the west, the only ones that are ever allowed to be discussed? If the actual religious/cultural doctrines, styles and writings themselves are even a small part of this issue of violent extremism, why is discussing them out of bounds? ...uh. Because they are so insignificant in the whole process that they're, uh...not...worth...discussing? And because they tend to muddle the waters for no good reason? Far be it from censoring you dude, but you're barking up the wrong tree. If you want to talk about actual issues in Islamic culture or within the Islamic doctrine, sure, more power to you I won't deny you that. But we're not talking about that itt. And as I said before, Islam has surprisingly little to do with terrorism. Liberal_L33t posted:And if discussing them isn't out of bounds, why do threads like these always get bombarded with threadshitting attempts in a way that threads critical of other political or religious ideologies do not? The culture surrounding Islam, regardless of which country you're from, is charged due to current events. So of course these discussions will be more heated as a result. And heated discussions are ripe for threadshits because this is the internet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 03:46
|
|
|
Liberal_L33t posted:So why are these factors, which can be construed as being the fault of the west, the only ones that are ever allowed to be discussed? If the actual religious/cultural doctrines, styles and writings themselves are even a small part of this issue of violent extremism, why is discussing them out of bounds? They're the only ones that have a plausible policy response. If Islamic doctrine is uniquely bad, or if Muslims are uniquely more likely to turn to violence, even that doesn't make it a good idea (e.g.) for the US to instate a religious test for immigration or refugee status, or to target Muslim holy sites as part of the campaign against ISIS, or to put Muslim citizens under increased surveillance, or anything like this. Even if we didn't have moral objections to these sorts of things, the policies are simply empirically ineffective. So if you identify, say, poverty and unemployment as predictive of radicalization, then a number of policies recommend themselves to meet that danger. But if the best we can do is to say 'well, adherence to Islam predicts violent behavior by a factor of X' then what do you expect anyone to do but throw up their hands and say 'well, poo poo.'?
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 04:14
|
|
|
MaxxBot posted:Jesus spent his entire life talking about selflessness yet his biggest followers here in the US are FYGM libertarians who want the poor to die in the streets. If you think about it, Jesus was the first socialist.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 04:22
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:5. The Pauline Epistles explicitly sanction marital rape, you loving clown. This sanction of marital rape, while at least nominally egalitarian in that the husband was expected to submit to the wife's sexual requests as well, is something that has remained part of Christianity down to the present day, usually in a less egalitarian form than Paul wrote it out. Paul's letters were heavily edited after he wrote them. There is a definite skewing of Paul toward misogyny that might not have been present in his original writing. Notable examples include Junia being turned into Junias. They scrubbed a female Apostle out of Paul letters! The Apostles were heads of Churches, think what the Pope is. And Ephesians is most likely a pseudepigrapha, that is to say not actually written by Paul only attributed to him later. And by the same people erasing female Apostles out of his letters. Anyway dude thought the world was going to end and was likely trying to accelerate it, by delivering a collection to Jerusalem. Probably thought nobody should be loving. McDowell posted:If you want to talk 'fundamental flaws' here is one for you - no man, no caesar can create the kingdom of heaven on earth. There will always be bloodshed and misery in this world unless everyone is of one mind - but which mind? Or one could go with correlation instead of synthesis. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 30, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 04:48
|
|
|
SSNeoman posted:*I'm not btw, even ISIL agrees. One of their issues of Dabiq focused on the loss of recruits to refugee migration and they spend a lot of time and effort making the west seem lovely to flee too. That's the answer from the horse's mouth. That's pretty interesting. I'd wanted to read Dabiq to see what kind of stuff ISIL are saying and how they're reacting to their apparent drubbing they're getting at the moment, but I'm worried it'll land me on a list.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 10:02
|
|
|
PiCroft posted:That's pretty interesting. I'd wanted to read Dabiq to see what kind of stuff ISIL are saying and how they're reacting to their apparent drubbing they're getting at the moment, but I'm worried it'll land me on a list. Right this way then: http://www.cracked.com/blog/isis-wants-us-to-invade-7-facts-revealed-by-their-magazine/ It gives a decent enough overview of what ISIL is about.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 10:52
|
|
|
BrandorKP posted:Paul's letters were heavily edited after he wrote them. There is a definite skewing of Paul toward misogyny that might not have been present in his original writing. Notable examples include Junia being turned into Junias. They scrubbed a female Apostle out of Paul letters! The Apostles were heads of Churches, think what the Pope is. And Ephesians is most likely a pseudepigrapha, that is to say not actually written by Paul only attributed to him later. And by the same people erasing female Apostles out of his letters. Unfortunately, I am referring to 1 Corinthians 7:1-6, which is not believed to be an added passage and expresses authentically Pauline ideas rather than the Pseudo-Pauline Pastoral Epistles. I mean, that's not particularly relevant to the passage's status because 1 Corinthians was very widely accepted and the ideas in this passage are still preserved in some churches to this day.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 11:06
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:Unfortunately, I am referring to 1 Corinthians 7:1-6, which is not believed to be an added passage and expresses authentically Pauline ideas rather than the Pseudo-Pauline Pastoral Epistles. Off-topic but I'd argue that, given the tone of the passage, the sentence you're referring to is not "no doesn't mean no" but "sex is part of marriage, don't be selfish and make an effort to please each other". I guess your interpretation is possible but it would require a malicious agenda or more likely either just unfortunate life experiences or existing heavy distrust in the text.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 14:54
|
|
|
So basically, the way a religion affects people's actions is determined by its interpretation, which is a function of society. The religion of an extremist and a moderate might be the same, but they will be interpreting things differently. Like they both wave the same book with the same words in it in your face to make theological arguments, but their arguments are going to differ because their goals will be different, and their goals are not a function of their religion. What people who say "Islam is fundamentally flawed" should be saying is "the philosophies of these violent people is fundamentally flawed". Which is basically like duh.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 16:50
|
|
|
BrandorKP posted:Or one could go with correlation instead of synthesis. Could you elaborate on this?
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 17:44
|
|
|
Fundamentally flawed as in "don't have sex with married women unless they are your sex slaves" and "kill infidels wherever you may find them". Oh and the death penalty for leaving Islam. I'm paraphrasing, but this disgusting and no amount of hand-waving, gymnastical interpretations, or false equivocating can make stuff like that go away.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
ComradeKane posted:Fundamentally flawed as in "don't have sex with married women unless they are your sex slaves" and "kill infidels wherever you may find them". It's actually pretty easy because it's religion. Somebody made it up, so somebody can change it too. If you have a problem with people calling themselves Muslims but also saying that they do not follow certain parts of the religion (like the ones you mention), then I don't know what to tell you. Those "fundamental flaws" are actually not fundamental to the religion... so they do not have any real effect on people's behavior in general. I think that if you ask most Muslims what the fundamental tenets of their belief system is, they will not mention your points. Except when they cherry pick them out in order to make an overgeneralized, and probably contradictory, statement, like religious extremists do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 20:33
|
|
|
SHISHKABOB posted:It's actually pretty easy because it's religion. Somebody made it up, so somebody can change it too. If you have a problem with people calling themselves Muslims but also saying that they do not follow certain parts of the religion (like the ones you mention), then I don't know what to tell you. Those "fundamental flaws" are actually not fundamental to the religion... so they do not have any real effect on people's behavior in general. I think that if you ask most Muslims what the fundamental tenets of their belief system is, they will not mention your points. It doesn't really make sense to follow some of what a prophet says and not all of it. Either god spoke to Muhammad or he didn't.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 20:53
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:It doesn't really make sense to follow some of what a prophet says and not all of it. It might not make sense but people do it all the time. e: Is this going to be another thing where atheists say that to be a real adherent of a religion you have to do everything exactly as it's written down? Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 30, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 20:55
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:It doesn't really make sense to follow some of what a prophet says and not all of it. Either god spoke to Muhammad or he didn't. Oh yeah it's totally that simple. Just do everything the book says! "Hey what does this line mean, I think it means this: <what the gently caress>" "Actually I think it means: <why would you think that>" "How about we edit it out-" *gets murdered by the first two guys* Then those two guys murder each other and their families.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 21:01
|
|
|
It's heartening that many Muslims decide to ignore that rot in their text, and I'm sure most Muslims in America find stuff like that deplorable. This nuanced view of Islam should be encouraged and it's really the only solution to this very real problem. However, religions, at least the Abrahamic ones, are essentially all or nothing. If you believe that Mohammed was the true prophet of God, how do you reconcile that with his disturbing edicts and deeds? This is what I'm referring to as the fundamental flaws in Islam. Even a blind man can see how stuff like that leads to Islamic terrorism, which was the initial point.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 21:03
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:1. Historically false. I don't know about Islam to speak about it but on the topic of Christianity, "3. "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."" is not supporting violence in the classical sense. It's symbolic violence, the type of violence that Gandhi practiced, the type of violence that upheaves the social order by weak ding the sword of Truth, rather than by shedding the blood of others. The idea is that Christ is the Truth, and people who want to love God and follow the Truth are going to be at odds with the world, and the Word of God, this magnificent blazing sword of truth will often cause conflict, but someone who knows God and loves God should put God above all else, which means sometimes disrupting social harmony foe the sake of the Father. If your friends and family are walking in darkness and you want to follow Christ, you must make the tough choice of choosing God over your social relations.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 21:52
|
|
|
ComradeKane posted:It's heartening that many Muslims decide to ignore that rot in their text, and I'm sure most Muslims in America find stuff like that deplorable. Is that actually what leads to Islamic terrorism? That's a bold claim that I do not believe is sufficiently backed up by your argument.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 22:04
|
|
|
Badger of Basra posted:It might not make sense but people do it all the time. Theres a difference between "exactly as it's written down" and blowing off what a prophet (is very likely to have) said. Have you heard of a plausible counter-arguement to the Koranic verses and hadith against apostasy?
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
SHISHKABOB posted:So basically, the way a religion affects people's actions is determined by its interpretation, which is a function of society. The religion of an extremist and a moderate might be the same, but they will be interpreting things differently. Like they both wave the same book with the same words in it in your face to make theological arguments, but their arguments are going to differ because their goals will be different, and their goals are not a function of their religion. Exactly. But that doesn't have a neat and easy solution and requires serious thought on how to best improve society. So people just blame Islam. But while this approach is proactive, it's completely facile. ComradeKane posted:It's heartening that many Muslims decide to ignore that rot in their text, and I'm sure most Muslims in America find stuff like that deplorable. Sure I can agree with this. And I'm sure many Muslims do too. It's just that all this poo poo takes time. I'd like to point out that Christianity doesn't have a stellar track record with women's rights and homosexuality either. It's just that you're likely looking at Christianity from a lens of a person in an urban environment with a stable government. You have safety, access to technology and so on. This lets you work on human rights issues and get your message out quickly and relatively efficiently. There are also safeguards in place, if you try and incite hate speech, you could get arrested. Wanna see what Christianity looks like without this sort of stability? Check it: http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n4/us-christian-right-attack-on-gays-in-africa.html ComradeKane posted:However, religions, at least the Abrahamic ones, are essentially all or nothing. If you believe that Mohammed was the true prophet of God, how do you reconcile that with his disturbing edicts and deeds? This is what I'm referring to as the fundamental flaws in Islam. Oh word? You're speaking for all 3-4 billion Abrahamic worshipers when you say that? LGBT Muslims state that the Quran was a product of its time or believe the words have a different meaning. I don't have any articles on hand, but I'm sure Muslim scholars would tell you to use your good judgement as opposed to following the Quran to the letter. Are you asking for a New Testament Quran? Would that solve our problems? ComradeKane posted:Even a blind man can see how stuff like that leads to Islamic terrorism, which was the initial point. Don't appeal to populism. Populist thought is one of the factors that got us here in the first place. And I don't accept your previous point so this one isn't working for me either. Seraphic Neoman fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Mar 30, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 22:15
|
|
|
ComradeKane posted:Fundamentally flawed as in "don't have sex with married women unless they are your sex slaves" and "kill infidels wherever you may find them". Apostasy and murdering infidels have been debunked plenty, these quotes have been cherry picked and are out of context, its not mental gymnastics either. There is even hadith about people leaving their faith in front of Muhammed without getting murdered. Its just a drat lot of homework to debunk these points, but really read these for apostasy and murdering people. I have not read enough about slavery to give an educated response, I am muslim, and the middle east does have alot of awful conditions and the last thing i'd like to do is give excuses, but alot of countries in there have abolished slavery even if its very late. I'm pretty sure there will be intense debate within the religious circles once we get more democracy and better civil society infrastructure.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2016 22:51
|
|
|
ComradeKane posted:It's heartening that many Muslims decide to ignore that rot in their text, and I'm sure most Muslims in America find stuff like that deplorable. This is not how religion is practiced in the real world. People disregard, warp, and practice doctrine, predominantly due to the filtering effect of culture, pretty much however they drat well please and this has been true since literally forever. Welcome to the last two thousand years please enjoy your stay. Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Mar 31, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2016 04:23
|
|
|
SSNeoman posted:Right this way then: http://www.cracked.com/blog/isis-wants-us-to-invade-7-facts-revealed-by-their-magazine/ despite being loving cracked of all things this is actually a pro click
|
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2016 09:26
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
|
Captain Oblivious posted:This is not how religion is practiced in the real world. People disregard, warp, and practice doctrine, predominantly due to the filtering effect of culture, pretty much however they drat well please and this has been true since literally forever. Welcome to the last two thousand years please enjoy your stay. Sure. But don't try to claim that those deeply embedded doctrines aren't paid attention to or referenced by anybody because they sure as hell are. The best analogy I can think of is if a particular brand of car (  ) came standard with a "Pedestrian and small pet targeting system", which makes the car ideal for running down joggers, small children, and other innocent bystanders in an urban setting. What threads like this tend to say is "Well, in the ~real world~ (most) people never turn that murder-facilitating system or or ever make use of it, and just use those cars to drive their children to soccer practice and other wholesome activities like anyone else. And besides, it's perfectly possible to commit vehicular manslaughter WITHOUT having any such targeting system installed!"All this is technically true - but the fact of the matter remains that the mechanism for murder is a part of this hypothetical car. It's fantastic that most people don't ever choose to use this brand of car for murder, but wouldn't it be better if they just chose to stop buying that brand of car? In any case, the counter-argument that "my parents drove this car and it's a part of my culture" doesn't strike me as much of an excuse for driving such a vehicle unless you very publicly and permanently rip the murder module out. So yes - there needs to be a mechanism for excising those unacceptably violent passages from the text completely. If they aren't going to be used to justify violence, why keep them in there? And if they have to be kept in even if they're completely, horribly wrong for a modern society, then I would say that's a pretty big loving flaw in the core of the belief system. If the Qur'an and Hadith officially and permanently removed the objectionable parts, then western secularists like me wouldn't be bitching about them. Why is the onus not on the religionists to remove such unacceptable language?
|
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
Oh, and while we're on the topic, "[Religious scripture x] was a product of its time" is a huge goddamn copout and I'd really like if religious apologists would stop using it. The objectionable parts of Islamic, Christian, or Jewish scripture were just as bad and harmful 2000 years ago as they are today; there is no cultural environment, no set of material circumstances, that can justify them. I don't care if the calls to punish apostates and oppress religious minorities weren't stringently enforced or backed with death. Any amount of fidelity to Islam's anti-apostasy laws is totally morally unacceptable, regardless of the year it was practiced in.
|
|
#
?
Mar 31, 2016 22:15
|
|
|
Liberal_L33t posted:So yes - there needs to be a mechanism for excising those unacceptably violent passages from the text completely. If they aren't going to be used to justify violence, why keep them in there? And if they have to be kept in even if they're completely, horribly wrong for a modern society, then I would say that's a pretty big loving flaw in the core of the belief system. If the Qur'an and Hadith officially and permanently removed the objectionable parts, then western secularists like me wouldn't be bitching about them. Why is the onus not on the religionists to remove such unacceptable language? You'll receive responses of "well in context your reading of what you think it means is wrong, what it actually means is ________," or "We should keep it in for historicity and it doesn't explicitly say that god condones it," and so on. All of these are responses you receive to parts of any/all religious texts that have things that transgress contemporary standards with the exception of fundamentalists. It doesn't matter what is "objectively" the correct interpretation of some religious text whose author is long dead and nobody ever was "objective" about faith anyway. Whether or not it makes sense to you that someone would be a follower of a religious text without being a fundamentalist about it doesn't matter in terms of whether they're a threat to your health IRL. And since you'll never able to bridge a faith-based gap in any conclusive way, why expend the energy? People like things and those things make perfect sense to them but not everyone else, film at 11. DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2016 00:45
|
|
|
Captain Oblivious posted:This is not how religion is practiced in the real world. People disregard, warp, and practice doctrine, predominantly due to the filtering effect of culture, pretty much however they drat well please and this has been true since literally forever. Welcome to the last two thousand years please enjoy your stay. This is true and often overlooked. But I think there is something to the idea that evangelical faiths like Islam and Christianity contain within them the germs of a kind of radicalism that is unmatched by what you typically find in other spiritual traditions (I'm not an expert in comparative religion so take this with a grain of salt). The fact that most Christians and Muslims ignore the logical implications of their beliefs doesn't make those beliefs any less creepy to a lot of non-believers. As Nietzsche once said of the Christians, "Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of today - from burning us."
|
|
#
?
Apr 1, 2016 00:56
|
|
|
Liberal_L33t posted:-Explicit justification of domestic violence (The Christian equivalent in Ephesians 5:22 is simply not in the same category of horribleness as [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa,_34"] what appears in the Quran) Ergh, Ephesians 5:22 is not an explicit justification for domestic violence. If you take it out of context of the rest of the chapter, then yes, you can do some mental gymnastics to try and twist it that way (as many, MANY churches have done in the past). But if you read Paul's full written statement on that, you'll find that it is actually an explicit prohibition AGAINST domestic violence, on both sides... 21 And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. 24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. 25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body. 31 As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.”[c] 32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. 33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. So Ephesians doesn't just tell people to "love their wives". It tells people to "love their wives as Christ himself loved his own 'wife'". And, maybe my memory is shoddy, but I can't think of any example of Christ showing any kind of violence period, aside from maybe that one time he was chasing corrupt businessmen out of his Temple. If you see any churches supporting domestic violence, that's more of a reflection on them than it is on the Bible.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2016 22:32
|
|
|
Well if they didn't have that kernel, they wouldn't be in such a dominant position today. What's an evangelical religion without something to push that evangelizing? But given the slow spread of these structures, it's almost a logical necessity that they're totally outdated by the time they obtain hegemony. So the risk of regressive fundamentalism seems like a mathematical necessity of the particular thing that religion present itself as, rather than anything to do with any particular religion itself. Your problem is you're still painting this as primarily a problem of domestic policies. Materially, belgium muslims live a better life than the people they identify without outside belgium, and conversely, belgium (and the eurozone in general) is better on all those issues than any other country they could immigrate to, where they can't identify with the majority. It's not perfect, but relative to the rest of the world, it's quite good. The EU in general doesn't support Israeli policy - yet all this apparently isn't enough. You call 'the nebulous everyone' (read - the demos, ya know, as in democracy) 'super reactionary', but I think that's incredibly elitist and infantilizing. Of course most people aren't well informed on these issues, it's not their job to be, but they have concerns that aren't being addressed. You're handing them platitudes, without telling them how they could both be moral and safe. You want to do that, you have to tell them something they can believe. Saying 'you, the people, have failed, because you weren't tolerant enough' isn't going to work, and it's wrong. When you perform this maneuver, you are giving the opposition (by which I mean far-right) ammunition, because you're out of touch. Let me give you an example of something that does work, and isn't infantilizing - These attacks are a result of regional actors in the middle east making power plays, namely Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. The first two are guilty of either ideologically justify, creating a space for, or using, groups such as ISIS, for their own narrow benefit. These groups are ideological organizations that have a fundamentally antagonist relationship with the West, on not just a strategic or geopolitical level, but a cultural level. Areas of this conflict range across gender, sexuality, religiosity/secularism, and governance. These attacks are part propaganda, part recruiting, and partly financial, in that they motivate foreign donors. These attacks are not strictly a failure of domestic policy in the countries where they occur, because that ignores that these organizations have agency, goals, an ideology - in short, a mission. They are not purely reactive phenomena from an Evil West that must still take the blame. To perform that dodge is to both ignore the wider context to this conflict, and legitimize these organizations as a 'natural' part of the global Islamic community, whose griefs you are now claiming they represent. They don't, they're assholes, recognize that and move forward. rudatron fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Apr 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 06:42
|
|
|
rudatron posted:... But you haven't done this either. All you've done is reassigned blame from Western interventionism to the geopolitical motives of the Islamic-majority regional powers. And maybe also laid some blame on the fact that Islam is an evangelizing religion. But assigning blame, even correctly, is not the same as a giving plan of action. And the line I've been pushing in this thread generally has been that, in this particular case, it isn't even a necessary precondition for developing good policy responses.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 14:38
|
|
|
rudatron posted:Well if they didn't have that kernel, they wouldn't be in such a dominant position today. What's an evangelical religion without something to push that evangelizing? But given the slow spread of these structures, it's almost a logical necessity that they're totally outdated by the time they obtain hegemony. So the risk of regressive fundamentalism seems like a mathematical necessity of the particular thing that religion present itself as, rather than anything to do with any particular religion itself. I think that religions like Christianity (and Islam, so far as I can tell, but I'm less familiar with Islam) are noteworthy for making the supposed "Truth" of their beliefs so central. There's no evidence that ancient Romans particularly cared about the sincerity of your belief in Jupiter or the Emperor, provided you made the correct public sacrifices. The Greeks didn't knowledge of the Truth about Apollo would liberate your soul. Ancient pre-Christian peoples treated their Gods almost like another set of capricious and arbitrary real life kings and queens who had to appeased and respected. For the most part they never acted as though knowing 'the Truth' about the Gods would influence your destination in the afterlife. Christianity changes that and makes the truth of its doctrines a central theme of its theology. Most pagans had a pretty easy time saying "Hey, that powerful sky god who leads your pantheon is clearly just your name for the God that we call Zeus". For a Christian, on the other hand, that rival sky god is a demon tricking people away from belief in the one truth faith. Zeus isn't another culture's name for Yahweh, Zeus is a diabolical deception that posses a real danger to the immortal souls of anyone who is exposed to him. So far as I know (and if anyone knows better then let me know) the Chinese treasure fleets that explored the western coasts of African never attempted to proselytize of change the religion of the locals. Christianity (and Islam), by contrast, seem to have made the conversion or extermination of the African people's they encountered a fairly big priority.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 16:41
|
|
|
Helsing posted:I think that religions like Christianity (and Islam, so far as I can tell, but I'm less familiar with Islam) are noteworthy for making the supposed "Truth" of their beliefs so central. There's no evidence that ancient Romans particularly cared about the sincerity of your belief in Jupiter or the Emperor, provided you made the correct public sacrifices. The Greeks didn't knowledge of the Truth about Apollo would liberate your soul. Ancient pre-Christian peoples treated their Gods almost like another set of capricious and arbitrary real life kings and queens who had to appeased and respected. For the most part they never acted as though knowing 'the Truth' about the Gods would influence your destination in the afterlife. virulent memetics ~ (more seriously, it is interesting that mystery cults and later mutually exclusive monotheistic religions have been very successful at outcompeting other religions)
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 16:44
|
|
|
Helsing posted:I think that religions like Christianity (and Islam, so far as I can tell, but I'm less familiar with Islam) are noteworthy for making the supposed "Truth" of their beliefs so central. There's no evidence that ancient Romans particularly cared about the sincerity of your belief in Jupiter or the Emperor, provided you made the correct public sacrifices. In theory, all of these religions required you to devote your undying love towards their religion. In practice, all of these religions required you to make the correct noises but didn't care too much about sincere belief.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 16:44
|
|
|
blowfish posted:virulent memetics ~ No, they haven't. Mystery cults are all dead and gone, and none of them "outcompeted" anything while they existed.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 16:45
|
|
|
computer parts posted:In theory, all of these religions required you to devote your undying love towards their religion. That's really not true. Those faiths often go out of their way to completely gently caress you up as a kid. Honestly a Catholic upbringing for some of the people I know seems to have amounted to little more than an attempt to install low-level anxiety disorders. And in many Muslim countries the "correct noises" you are referring to include wearing a veil most of the time and submitting to the authority of your husband, which is kind of a big deal. In many Christian communities those "correct noises" include spending your teenage years wrestling with the sincere belief that you'll spend eternity in a lake of fire because you had dirty thoughts. Religions, even evangelical ones, have their positive side. Most believers I know seem to be better off thanks to their beliefs (of course I live in a secular society where people can self select, if I lived a few generations ago when Christianity was socially enforced then probably I'd know a lot more miserable religious people) and it's hardly my place to judge other people's attempts to make peace with their role in the larger universe. That having been said I think it's really naive to ignore the totalitarian aspect of certain religious faiths, or the fact that some percentage of evangelical religious people do end up becoming real threats to everyone else by virtue of their beliefs in what amounts to organized and socially legitimized mental illness. Brainiac Five posted:No, they haven't. Mystery cults are all dead and gone, and none of them "outcompeted" anything while they existed. In some respects Christianity looks an awful lot like a Jewish variation on Hellenistic mystery cults. They just swapped in 'the Messiah' for Attis / Mithras / Dionysus / Osirus / whoever. Many of the hallmarks of mystery cults -- secret meetings, the half human half God figure, Resurrection, mysterious rites and doctrines, virgin births, gnostic or pseudo-Gnostic ideas about the universe, neo-platonic philosophy, etc. are present in early Christianity.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 17:03
|
|
|
Helsing posted:That's really not true. Those faiths often go out of their way to completely gently caress you up as a kid. Honestly a Catholic upbringing for some of the people I know seems to have amounted to little more than an attempt to install low-level anxiety disorders. And in many Muslim countries the "correct noises" you are referring to include wearing a veil most of the time and submitting to the authority of your husband, which is kind of a big deal. In many Christian communities those "correct noises" include spending your teenage years wrestling with the sincere belief that you'll spend eternity in a lake of fire because you had dirty thoughts. Why do you assume the Roman ones were any different? Probably because the only records we have of believers are the nobility, who are notorious (regardless of religion) of subverting the beliefs.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
Helsing posted:That's really not true. Those faiths often go out of their way to completely gently caress you up as a kid. Honestly a Catholic upbringing for some of the people I know seems to have amounted to little more than an attempt to install low-level anxiety disorders. And in many Muslim countries the "correct noises" you are referring to include wearing a veil most of the time and submitting to the authority of your husband, which is kind of a big deal. In many Christian communities those "correct noises" include spending your teenage years wrestling with the sincere belief that you'll spend eternity in a lake of fire because you had dirty thoughts. Most of those aren't mystery cult beliefs. The mystery cults didn't emphasize god-men any more than other Hellenic religions, Neoplatonism was a distinct philosophical religion, Jesus is fundamentally different from those, early Christianity's Messiah wasn't the Jewish one, and Christianity probably borrowed from the mystery cults much later than in its foundational period. Gnosticism isn't a mystery religion either.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 17:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 10:53 |
|
|
computer parts posted:Why do you assume the Roman ones were any different? You're being silly. If the Romans had been as hardcore about their religion as, say, the Spanish were in 1492 then we would be reading a lot more historical accounts from the period describing how various towns were forced to convert. We actually do have records of Roman trials where early Christian martyrs who had refused to make sacrifices to the Emperor were prosecuted. Often the Romans were utterly mystified by the fact that these religious zealots seemingly wanted to be executed (which, of course, they did. Nothing was more Christlike than being executed by the Roman state for your faith). According to one source (a lecture so I sadly can't reproduce it here) there are records of Roman prosecutors saying to Christians: "look outside. Look at the sun on the grass and the clear blue sky. If you refuse to sacrifice to the emperor we'll have to execute you and then you'll lose all these things forever because you'll be dead." Suffice it to say that is absolutely not how a Christian authority would be inclined to respond to heresy. Based on what we know of the Romans they, like many pagan cultures, tended to think that being alive was better than being dead. To use another example, borrowed from the Greeks: when Odysseus famously meets the ghost of Achilles during the Odyssey Achilles tells Odysseus that he'd rather be alive and be the servant of the lowliest shepherd than be king of all the dead, i.e. the greatest Greek warrior of all time, speaking in one of the most famous epic Greek poems of all time, straight up says that being dead sucks. By contrast most Christian doctrine says being alive is what sucks and that you should really just spend your entire life preparing for your death. Brainiac Five posted:Most of those aren't mystery cult beliefs. The mystery cults didn't emphasize god-men any more than other Hellenic religions, Neoplatonism was a distinct philosophical religion, Jesus is fundamentally different from those, early Christianity's Messiah wasn't the Jewish one, and Christianity probably borrowed from the mystery cults much later than in its foundational period. Gnosticism isn't a mystery religion either. Neoplatonism is a distinct philosophy but my impression was that it's uncontroversial to suggest that it influenced other mystical traditions and beliefs that it was contemporaneous with. Gnosticism isn't a mystery religion but some people have tried to suggest some amount of similarity in terms of their beliefs and rituals. There was a lot of cross-pollination between different mystical traditions in that time period. But either way the upshot here is that while the mystery religions all died out and were never the faiths of the masses, they did seem to leave a distinct impression on the early Christians. Christianity emerged from the same sort of social and political period of late antiquity, and there are at least enough similarities for scholars to have taken note.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2016 17:30
|
|