Ernie : A couple of observations-- ( 1 ) you'd probably feel right at home if you went back to school and majored in social science. Very astute social-sciency observation, spoken like a true Durkheimian. Or maybe like a Weberian, well, you get the idea. Nice typology, and it may-- mirable dictu-- be something new. I'd need to do some searching but this is my first reaction. ( 2 ) there are different ways to tackle the problem of confirmation of your hypothesis. I'd start with an analysis of the Qur'an --the core text-- and look for passages that are directly relevant, After that you could look at the historical record, especially the evolution of Shariah jurisprudence. Then as part of the process would be a "popular culture" analysis, best done region by region since Muslims of South Asia can be different than those of the Mid East. etc Nice work. Billy In a message dated 12/14/2009 7:20:15 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
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/
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