The Left and Religion

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Brainiac Five: Mar 28, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

ComradeKane posted:

Are people seriously denying that belief in Islam plays some role?
I know the left doesn't want it to be true, but the absence of similar attacks in other lovely parts of the world where America's hosed around in never gets addressed properly.

You can cite fundamental flaws in Islamic faith/scripture without hating the people who believe.

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.

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Brainiac Five: Mar 28, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

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.

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.

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

Brainiac Five: Mar 28, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

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.

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.

Or one could go with correlation instead of synthesis.

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: Mar 28, 2016; by FactsAreUseless

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