Hi all, As Billy and I were discussing Hinduism offline, it occurred to me:
"Religions generally tolerate each other when they don't perceive existential threats, but react violently when they do." I think this is a fairly robust statement, and covers the vast majority of cases pretty well. There are probably exceptions, but not very many. (In fact, you could probably substitute almost any entity for "religion" and get the same result. :-). I would actually agree with Billy that Islam is inherently worse in this regard than others. I'm less concerned with "why", though, than "how". Specifically, is the problem that Islam: a) Defines its existence very broadly? b) Has a low threshold for perceived threats? c) Has few built-in checks to inhibit a recourse to violence? Or (aha moment!) maybe the unique problem is that Islam has all three, while other major religions (relatively speaking) only have one or two. For example, Christianity is very expansive in its self-definition (a), but biased towards pacifism (c). This seems of both academic and practical interest, so I'd be curious if more could be done with it... -- Ernie P. _______________________________________________ Centroids mailing list: [email protected] http://radicalcentrism.com/mailman/listinfo/centroids_radicalcentrism.com Archives at http://radicalcentrism.org/pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/
