Noah
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Joined: 7/5/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: philosophy
..the short answer is that, almost without exception, the phrase 'religion of peace' is incorrect. Religions generally create extremist versions of themselves that see the concept of peace as applying only to themselves. Christianity and its 'heathens', Islam and its 'Infidels', Judaism and its 'gentiles'; all identify non-followers in a negative light. To a minority of mind sets this equates non-believers to less than human. Once you see someone as less than human you no longer have to apply civilised standards to your behaviour towards them.
To answer your question, Islam is behaving as it is, because it is a religion.......
Oh fer Chrissakes, Philosophy. We're used to this kind of muddle-headed talk from any number of quarters but it is discouraging to hear it from someone like you who generally seems to try to think a thing through and state an observation or a theory in a way that holds clarity in high esteem.
"Religions generally create" So a "religion" is a creative agent? What is the nature of its agency? In fact what sort of a thing are you applying the word religion to, that they can "create" things.
If you mean nothing more than the commonplace phenomenon of extremist groups forming at the edge of all sorts of things (animal rights, the political left or right, football, etc) then your observation seems trivial. Yes, the typical continuum extends to what we might call outliers, in cases of where the word religion comes in and in all sorts of other cases as well. This applies in sociology and in other spheres too. What is your point?
For you to highlight this observation about religious groups seems assignificant as pointing out that among all mammals, ring-tailed lemurs have warm blood. Quite unobjectionable in terms of a certain raw truth value, but so obvious that it seems to signify nothing in particular unless you'd like to indicate for us some interesting place that this banal observation might lead.
If you meant to make something more than this trivial and self-evident point then please explain.
"Islam is behaving" Now this one is astonishing. Islam behaves? Islam acts? What possible sense of the word behave can you have in mind here?
Then, once we get a grip on what you mean by the word "behave" as it may be applied to either one or another of a bunch of bodies of doctrine (or maybe you're sweeping great bunches of them up, who can tell?) or one of a number of intersecting historical movments? or some presumably vast set of sets of human beings numbering in the millions? Well then perhaps you can give us some insight into what you are arbitrarily sweeping up under the rubric of "Islam" and what you have decided doesn't belong there.
The radicalization of the us 'n them dynamic to which you refer can be seen happening all over history and the world today in instances where the "sides" indentify in terms of religion and in instances where they identify irrespective of religion and even in cases where they identify as anti-religious.
For instance, in this thread we can note a tendency of otherwise rational and caring people to demonize a particular "them."
Since the sort of "behaviour" you're attributing to "Islam" in virtue of it being a religion can also be seen in and among all sorts of groups and individuals which have nothing in particular to do with religion, how is it that this behavior, for you, can be explained in causal terms as a result of the religiousness of the agent in question? I'm referring of course to your "... because..." claim.
Is it written in the stars, or the DNA, or built somewhere else into the architecture of the universe that groups associated by religion will tend to "behave" in excruciatingly specific ways in virtue of their being religious, while other groups, very similar in many respects, will yield the very same excruciatingly specific results somehow in virtue of not being religious?
The guy from Occam would slit his wrists, I think, to hear this kind of theory.
Or is it likely, as the Occamite might suggest, that this phenomenon which is so well documented both within and without the religious sphere will be much more usefully explained in a set of terms which can account for all of these very similar instances of this phenomena, religious and otherwise?
It may be important to explain how it is that ring-tailed lemurs, in particular, have warm blood. I can hardly imagine the context in which this would be true, myself. Whereas understanding warm-bloodedness in general seems ever so worthwhile, and noting that these lemurs are found in this basket would be one tiny aspect of a thorough treatment.
Now let me abandon as utterly unworkable notions such as Islam as a monolithic agent of change in geopolitics today to speak for a moment in terms of fairly specific, identifiable groups such as either armed militant Shiites or Sunnis in Iraq today, and utterly godless multinational energy and arms corporations as currently comprised. On this scale I think some tentative, qualified generalizations might help move the discussion along.
I put it to you that we can say that a religious group "behaves" in this certain way (i.e. us/them radicalization) 'because it is religious' only if we very carefully blind ourselves to the vast body of data which shows that groups of all kinds "behave" in this perticular way irrespective of religion.
What do you say, bro?
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RE: Islam Religion of Peace??? - 
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