Koran Burning -- the left feeding the left?

[lemur]

There were 234 acts of violence in the name of Islam between July 14th and September 9th that cost 1024 people their lives. Find me similar numbers for any other religion.

 

You are actually taking it one step further than me and choosing to paint all religion with what is predominantly a problem with Islam. This doesn't actually put you on the high road.

 

It wouldn't matter if the majority of violence was committed in the name of Islam or if the majority of Muslims committed violence. It would still be wrong to attribute that violence to Islam as a religion OR to Muslims in general. You can't hold individuals accountable for actions that they didn't commit individually. And it doesn't make sense to hold a book or an ideology responsible for actions because the actions are the result of interpretations, not the text itself. A cookbook doesn't prepare meals or ruin them, cooks do.

[Sisyphus]

There were 234 reported acts of violence in the name of Islam between July 14th and September 9th that cost 1024 people their lives. Find me similar numbers for any other religion.

 

I personally know a number of Christians who believe they are fighting a holy war by being a member of the U.S. armed forces. My understanding is that that point of view is not very uncommon, though I don't have any statistics.

 

You are actually taking it one step further than me and choosing to paint all religion with what is predominantly a problem with Islam. This doesn't actually put you on the high road.

 

Sorry, I thought my rhetorical point would be clear. I was implying that equating all of religion with radical Qutbism is the same as equating all of Islam with radical Qutbism, and that both positions are unreasonable.

[jryan]

It wouldn't matter if the majority of violence was committed in the name of Islam or if the majority of Muslims committed violence. It would still be wrong to attribute that violence to Islam as a religion OR to Muslims in general. You can't hold individuals accountable for actions that they didn't commit individually. And it doesn't make sense to hold a book or an ideology responsible for actions because the actions are the result of interpretations, not the text itself. A cookbook doesn't prepare meals or ruin them, cooks do.

 

 

But is one recipe tends to lead more often to ruined meals maybe it's time to reconsider the recipe.

 

I personally know a number of Christians who believe they are fighting a holy war by being a member of the U.S. armed forces. My understanding is that that point of view is not very uncommon, though I don't have any statistics.

 

Well, then that is fairly useless. For each person you supposedly know who think they are in a wholly war I can point to entire Islamic governments who believe the same thing.

 

 

 

Sorry, I thought my rhetorical point would be clear. I was implying that equating all of religion with radical Qutbism is the same as equating all of Islam with radical Qutbism, and that both positions are unreasonable.

 

And I am not stating that all Muslims are Qutibists. All Muslim terrorists aren't even Qutibists.

[lemur]

But is one recipe tends to lead more often to ruined meals maybe it's time to reconsider the recipe.

 

You can't even begin to reason about this until you fully understand all the ingredients that go into cooking a meal, of which the recipe is just one part. This is getting into a discussion of textual authority verses interpretative authority, which is an endless discussion that I don't want to get into. Roland Barthes proclaimed "the death of the author and the birth of the reader" in the 1970s but the issue arguable goes back at least as far as Christ's controversial statement, "before Abraham was, I am." In any case, the point is that no religion or other ideology has been successful at preventing violence. Mostly, if anything, they tend to displace and restructure violence. The main ideology responsible for the kind of terrorist violence blamed on Islam, however, is the ideology that targeting some individuals will have an effect on others who identify with the victims. This is generally the ideology of collectivist warfare where people organize into factions and attack anyone wearing a certain uniform or otherwise marked as part of the enemy faction. You can hardly blame Islam for factionalism. If nothing else, part of Islam is that it celebrates Mohammed as being a uniter of tribes. In other words, Mohammed STOPPED tribalism, which is part of why people revere him as a prophet. So it seems rather hypocritical to blame an anti-tribalist ideology for tribalist violence, imo.

[swansont]

There were 223 reported acts of violence in the name of Islam between July 14th and September 9th that cost 1024 people their lives. Find me similar numbers for any other religion.

 

 

 

Similar numbers? What happened to the 100,000:1 ratio you claimed just a few posts back?

[John Cuthber]

If the answer given here

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_died_in_the_Crusades

is even remotely close to accurate then a lot more than 1024 people died in the name of Christianity than on 9/11 in the name of Islam.

However the point isn't a number; both religions (and others too) have been responsible for plenty of deaths.

 

What the daft pastor was planning to do was set fire to some paper.

Only religion could make that into a reason for violence.

 

Left or Right doesn't really seem to be the issue to me.

[Mr Skeptic]

Back on topic, though the original Koran burnings have been canceled, a few people burnt some anyways.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1311785/Indian-police-kill-18-Kashmir-Koran-burning-riots.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

 

Also, the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church burnt a Koran along with an American flag.

 

On the news/reporting side,

"Mohammad Yahya, a protester apparently unaware of Pastor Jones' decision to cancel the burning ceremony, said: 'The Governor [of Logar] must give us an assurance that the church is not going to burn the Koran, otherwise we will attack foreign troop bases in our thousands.' "

 

It's so much more fun to publish things that spark outrage, I suppose.

[Mr Skeptic]

!

Moderator Note

lemur's argument about swansont's counterargument technique has been moved here: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/51813-is-this-a-good-counterargument-or-does-it-validate-the-premises/page__pid__564116#entry564116

If you feel there is something from there that needs to be said here, say it but make sure it is not in an argumentative tone.

[swansont]

Back on topic, though the original Koran burnings have been canceled, a few people burnt some anyways.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1311785/Indian-police-kill-18-Kashmir-Koran-burning-riots.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

 

Also, the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church burnt a Koran along with an American flag.

 

On the news/reporting side,

"Mohammad Yahya, a protester apparently unaware of Pastor Jones' decision to cancel the burning ceremony, said: 'The Governor [of Logar] must give us an assurance that the church is not going to burn the Koran, otherwise we will attack foreign troop bases in our thousands.' "

 

It's so much more fun to publish things that spark outrage, I suppose.

 

I think one can draw the conclusion that in such non-secular countries where fundamentalists (Muslims, in this case) hold significant power, the kind of democracy practiced by the US and other western countries just isn't going to work — they aren't ready for it. You can't truly have a right to free speech when asserting that right routinely puts people under a threat of violence.

[lemur]

I think one can draw the conclusion that in such non-secular countries where fundamentalists (Muslims, in this case) hold significant power, the kind of democracy practiced by the US and other western countries just isn't going to work — they aren't ready for it. You can't truly have a right to free speech when asserting that right routinely puts people under a threat of violence.

 

The irony is that religious faith is often about transcending fear to speak freely DESPITE any threats. I think one of the things that so impresses people about the story of Christ's persecution is that he endured it all without complaint or pleads for mercy (as far as I've heard). When the goal of violence and torture is to bring people to submission, where does secularism value resistance to that?

 

Also, I'm glad someone brought up the flag-burning because that raises the issue of the sacred within the secular, which shows that violent defense and retaliation for desecration of sacred symbols is not so much a religious phenomenon as it is a general phenomenon that people engage in whether they're theist or atheist. Personally, I don't think people should hold things sacred for religious or secular reasons, but even if they didn't they would still find ways to provoke each other symbolically I think. The question is what you should do when people engage in provocation? Ignore it?