At 2/10/08 03:01 PM, chocolate-penguin wrote:
"Yes, yes, yes, blah blah blah, Christianity and Jews have that, too."
It shouldn't matter. Very, very, very, few Christians and Jews practice that.
Yet many Muslims still live in the 6th century, sadly.
I'm afraid that you're oversimplifying the issue of Islamic terrorism, and to be honest that does more harm than good.
I mean - You admit that Christians and Jews also have "that" in their respective sacred books, but they don't practice it. The real question is, how come so many Muslims go crazy while most Christians and Jews are chillin'? I mean, we've stablished that the religion - the set of beliefs themselves, [Q'uran + faith + religious traditions] (not to be confused with cultural or political traditions) probably doesn't contain anything that can't be found in some point during the history of Christianity and Judaism.
Just like believing in salvation via good deeds and/or faith in Jesus Christ, going to church in general and/or following the bible are some of the things that make you Christian, the things that are undeniable requisites to being Muslim are the Five Pillars (creed, charity, praying, fasting and pilgrimage) and following the Q'uran. That's all that Islam, in and by itself, is about.
Islam in its basic definition is 5 pillars + Q'uran, everything else being an external construction, much like the line that divides Christianity as a whole from the Catholic or Orthodox Church.
So we know that :
1) the Bible and the Torah have crazy parts about butchering a lot of people.
2) the Q'uran has crazy parts about butchering a lot of people.
The fact that a lot of Muslims actually want to butcher a lot of people can't be just explained by the Q'uran, since that doesn't explain why other texts about butchering don't ellicit the same butchering urges, or why western, well-adjusted and adapted Muslims (as opposed to first and second-generation immigrants who tend to favor sentences such as the famous "behead those who behead Islam") don't want to butcher no peoples either. Since the explanation can't be found in the Five Pillars of Islam either, we are left out of explanations within Islam itself.
That is, unless there's some sort of invisible evil hand that magically makes Islam much more evil than any other religion despite not having any inherent evil that can't be found elsewhere, as I said earlier.
So what do all these countries full of rabid fanatics with AK's have in common, other than Islam? They're all in the Middle East or Africa. They were all under the sphere of influence of the Ottoman Empire. Let's remember that the Ottoman Empire was pretty fond of (coincidence!) butchering. And, here's a big one, they're all brutal dictatorships, repressive monarchies or thinly-disguised theocracies.
Once we realize this, we begin to see a pattern. The longer that a nation with a sizeable amount of Muslims has been a functioning democracy, the less crazy people you'll find in charge (or in the streets burning stuff up, for that matter). Turkey is a rather thriving secular republic. Indonesia is still recovering from the Suharto regime and is still kind of freaky but is steadily marching towards liberalisation. Lebanon has been a rather weird democracy for the last 15 years or so, and despite having deep political problems (being Syria's bitch) and having to deal with Hizbullah and assorted lunatics, it's probably the Muslim country with the most modern laws regarding censorship, free speech, civil freedoms, etc. (Example: It was the only nation in the entire Arab world that didn't have the Borat movie banned)
This all has little to nothing to do with Islam itself. It's all politics. Repressive governments are the ones that created and implemented the Shariah. Repressive governments are the ones that issued fatwas calling for the slaughtering of Salman Rushdie. Repressive governments are the ones that instill anti-semitism, sexism, anti-americanism and homophobia on the general population. None of these things can stem merely from religious influence.
