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I personally don't think that it helps
the cause of Islam to have all of those passages in the Koran that
could basically be called "death to the infidels" passages. These
passages are relatively frequent and are not toned down by later
passages. It is my understanding that they become more frequent instead
of less as one goes on. The Old Testament has some of those, too, but
they are generally directed towards nations at a given time and not
permanent in nature. The New Testament comes along and modifies the Old
and those passages usually aren't referenced therein. To me, there is a large problem for Islam to have a problem with b). They seem to have a high threshold for broadcasting threats. ACTUAL threats. So if they are very sensitive to perceived threats, maybe they would get fewer threats if they quit spewing threats themselves. "You reap what you sow." I think somebody famous said something real close to that.... David "Free
speech is meant to
protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no
protection."—Neal Boortz Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: 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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