Thread: Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the United States

Originally Posted by Woofness

You seem to be arguing that violence is inevitable and religion is simply a channel through which people vent. I would say that more often the violence is a direct cause of the individuals strong belief or emotional attachment to the religion, and yes if it wasn't religion it would be something else.. a political view, a country, a family. Not because it provides a convenient excuse for their actions but because it is important to them and will cause them to be driven to the extremes of human behaviour it its name.

It's true that religion can be used to encourage violence, but the heart of the issue is that if people didn't have the propensity to commit this violence in the first place, or found such violence abhorrent through any means (religious included), they wouldn't accept the religious justification for violence. The people who commit violence in these situations are ones who are willing to commit violence in the first place. It's the same effect of normally law-abiding citizens in a riot situation who turn to looting because it is suddenly considered socially acceptable, if only for a short time. When the contraints preventing the use of violence are loosed, it will be used by those who wish to use it, and it won't be used by those who don't normally turn to violence, or see it as an easy escape.

Originally Posted by Woofness

...used in the context of the argument about whether the Quran is a book which encourages or justifies violence. As it does, and the Bible doesnt.

But the Bible does justify violence. There are numerous examples that I can think of that display extreme violence, for example, the battle of Jericho.

Originally Posted by Joshua 6:

21And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
24And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
27So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout all the country.

Admittedly this is just an example of violence, but when we're speaking of religious texts, little more is needed. Any preacher wishing to whip his congregation into a fury could use this quotation to justify violence, for in spite of Joshua's egregious violence, "The LORD was with [him]; and his fame was noised throughout all the country." There are no negative consequences here for treating your enemies as though they were subhuman. Deuterotomy 20 gives instructions from God on how to make war on your enemy. Matthew 18 reinforces the concept that if there is an offending part of the whole, it's better to excise the part considered diseased than keep the body whole, which is an admittedly tenuous link that still supports the idea of complete removal of things that offend you. There is no concept of tolerance or acceptance in that, and this is easily subverted as a metaphor to use when preaching to your congregation. To top this off, Proverbs 20:30 says: "Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being." How in all of this does the Bible not encourage violence, or is very easily subverted into doing so, which has the same effect as though the quotations directly incited violence? In terms of effect, there is no difference, and saying semantically there is is a poor argument, because that distinction has no measurable effect in reality.

Look, I'm not Christian, nor have I ever read the Bible in its entirety, but it is not hard to find this stuff at all. I think most of this sentiment comes from some unwritten cultural belief that Christianity is anti-violence, which has about as much validity as the belief that the Bible never contradicts itself.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Oh absolutely -- I wasn't singling out Islam as The Violent Religion at all. All I was doing was pointing out the contrast between a religion like Islam is in certain places in the Mid East, and how it's able to be so effectively weaponised by political and religious leaders, and a religion like Church of England, which is mostly ineffectual and, in general, not able to stir up anything except tea.

Well, yes, but this is a comparison of the best of one field to the worst of another. An accurate comparison would be one made between violent extremist groups in Islam and violent extremist groups in Christianity. Comparing a moderate, easy-going sect of Christianity with a violent extremist group is going to give an obvious result. I realize that you're making a comparison between groups in power, but the heart of the organizations in power is the real differentiator here. If the moderates of Islam were in power and the extremists of Christianity were in power, the same comparison between the two is still faulty.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Protestantism is, as far as I'm aware, not the same thing as the Church of England, which is the Anglican Church. But I could be wrong. In any case, I don't think the example of the Irish Christians' war is the same thing as the religious warfare in the Middle East -- I only know so much about that particular conflict, but it doesn't seem like either Catholicism or Protestantism has been "weaponised" in anything like the same way; rather, there is a divide between the people and it's being fought over.

It's still, at its heart, the same issue - religions being used to encourage violence. The particulars of justifications are more means to an end in this situations. In this case, this is how Christianity is used to encourage violence, although other examples exist in history, such as, most famously, the Spanish Inquisition. The assumption made before was that Christianity is a religion solely of peace and does not encourage violence, but there are plenty of historical and modern examples of it being used in these ways, the same as Islam. As Christ himself said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." Condemning another religion as violent without first looking at your own religion, and this still goes for anyone who lives in the Western world, because they all have close ties with Judeo-Christian ideology on a cultural level, is a foolish thing to do.