Einherjar86
Active Member
But plenty of Christians and Jews "believe" in the Bible, yet are able to resist amplifying its violent, homophobic, or misogynistic portions. I'm not familiar with the Koran, so I can't make any kind of textual claims beyond what I've heard Muslims say. None of what you're describing conveys "objective maliciousness." It conveys that Islam is perhaps the most convulsive and troubled modern monotheistic religion, but there's nothing objectively malicious that underlies every form of belief that Islam takes. This is what I mean by your tendency to absolutize or universalize, which you express here with the notion of "cultural baggage":
What you're saying here, as I understand it, is that all Muslims experience some kind of internal torment over their religion. I don't see any reason to agree with this, and this is where I'm getting hung up on your sense of "objective maliciousness."
What I think you're talking about when you discuss its objective maliciousness is something more like the contemporary tumult of Islamic belief in the (primarily) non-Western world. There's nothing objectively malicious about Islam itself, since Islam takes many forms and there is no possible way for you to verify inherent defects or crises in the personal faith of every single Muslim.
When I resist your appeals to objectivity, I'm not trying to deny that Islam tends to exhibit violent and oppressive tendencies, particularly in non-Western countries, or that there are Islamic criminals abroad. I'm simply denying that you can attribute this to the "cultural baggage" of Islam itself. Many, many, of these crimes (especially in the West) are just as likely crimes of passion or personal matters in which Islam is invoked retroactively as a cause, or contribution. A Christian might commit a violent crime, but that doesn't make the crime itself Christian in nature; and the same must be said for Islam.
I don't have time to respond to all your comments, so I apologize; and I appreciate the link. But I honestly hope that most of what I'm saying here expresses my general perspective on your position. I did want to address this though:
Sure, we can say that it's a different religion in the past--same goes for Christianity and Judaism. But the problem is that you're focusing solely on Islam in the present and using that example to claim its "objective maliciousness" as being worse than Christianity or Judaism.
If you're making appeals to the objective maliciousness of a religion, then you cannot isolate your examples strictly to a given historical moment--you need to take all of its historical development into account. This is why, when you have this debate, many of us try and introduce historical variances, which you always reject. You can't reject these details if you're going to claim objectivity. At that point you're simply making a category error.
I could make an argument that Christianity is the most objectively malicious religion because it has committed more atrocities throughout its long history (I have no idea if this is true, I'm just making a point). Your rejection of history doesn't work in this argument.
And if you say that you're talking only about modern Islam--or Islam after the Great Divergence, or something like this--then I would say that history moves at different speeds in different places. Which is an entirely separate argument.
