On 7/15/2014 12:27 PM, John Clark wrote:
Yes, the Bible contains its own sadistic lunacy—but the above quotations can be fairly
said to convey the central message of the Qur’an—and of Islam at nearly every moment in
its history. The Qur’an does not contain anything like a Sermon on the Mount. Nor is it
a vast and self-contradictory book like the Old Testament, in which whole sections (like
Leviticus and Deuteronomy) can be easily ignored and forgotten. The result is a unified
message of triumphalism, otherworldliness, and religious hatred that has become a
problem for the entire world. And the world still waits for moderate Muslims to speak
honestly about it.
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But
there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in
the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening
world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion
intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating
around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable
language of "respect". What is there to respect in any of this,
or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around
the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal
results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill
for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of
affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's
problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in
India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
--- Salman Rushdie 2002
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