Is Islam really a peaceful religion?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that there's currently something 'wrong with' (as it were) Islam that isn't as wrong with most other religions, but as with all else in religion this is historically particular and not because of some sort of inherently violent essence that the religion has.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that there's currently something 'wrong with' (as it were) Islam that isn't as wrong with most other religions, but as with all else in religion this is historically particular and not because of some sort of inherently violent essence that the religion has.

You acknowledge that Islam is different but you refuse to consider that those differences might be caused by it's different beliefs.

Its different beliefs, and you're (willfully?) misreading what 'historically particular' means. Religions, sociologically speaking, don't have their essence--if they do have an essence--primarily on the level of doctrine.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'm not a liberal, and admitting that there are serious problems with a religion but refusing to engage in mean-spirited essentialism about it is not 'defending' it.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I didn't say that.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Reductio ad absurdum.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

An interesting idea, but no, I don't.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that there's currently something 'wrong with' (as it were) Islam that isn't as wrong with most other religions, but as with all else in religion this is historically particular and not because of some sort of inherently violent essence that the religion has.

You acknowledge that Islam is different but you refuse to consider that those differences might be caused by it's different beliefs.

Its different beliefs, and you're (willfully?) misreading what 'historically particular' means. Religions, sociologically speaking, don't have their essence--if they do have an essence--primarily on the level of doctrine.

This is where we come to a fundamental, unbridgeable difference of opinion.

I will say though, while I think the idea that doctrine isn't the essence of religion is dumb in and of itself, I find it particularly bizarre that someone who is devoutly religious would put such an argument forward.

Of course there are senses in which doctrine is the essence of (at least some) religion(s). But 'does this religion have attributes that make its devotees more violent?' is a sociological question, as much as people may prefer to shoehorn it into being a philosophical one, so for those purposes the essence of a religion if it even has one is its social function. (In this respect that you might very well conclude 'there are elements of this religion's doctrine that have XYZ bad social outcomes', but there would be ways of changing doctrine (or, in religions like Islam that are leery of the idea of 'changing' doctrine, reframing or reemphasizing it) that would leave the religion's social function intact and thus keep it recognizably the same religion.) There are also, obviously, ways of being devoutly religious that don't manifest as a fixation on or even particular interest in doctrine. There are plenty of people who think that being devoutly religious inherently means being obsessed with doctrine, but in my experience such people are almost universally either not religious and not genuinely interested in understanding why one would be, fundamentalist Protestants, or very certain types of Catholics (most notably those who want so very badly to be fundamentalist Protestants). Most Jews or Hindus, or even other types of Catholics, would find the notion curious at best and offensive at worst.

But I wouldn't expect somebody who reduces Bernie Sanders's issues with black voters to 'the blacks are too poorly educated to know what's good for them' (whereas whites who vote against Sanders are voting in their rational self-interest) to understand that religion is complicated and that starting with the presupposition that everybody in the world is culturally Protestant and working out from there is not actually the best way to understand it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why MUST the issue of violence in Islam be discussed from a sociological point of view? Why can't it be discussed from a doctrinal point of view?

Because you're uncomfortable with the answer when it's done that way, that's the only reason.

No, it's because violence occurs socially, is a social consequence, and is part of a religion's social context, not some cute hypothetical or gotcha issue. I'm not 'uncomfortable' saying that there are deeply disquieting aspects with the way Muslim doctrine gets applied in situations of conflict and with the fact that it's constructed in such a way as to make it easy to do that, that's clearly a serious problem and I've said things that concede as much in this thread twice so far. I just didn't use the apparently all-important word 'doctrine' so you assumed that I couldn't possibly have meant or implied it. The one who's completely unwilling to even approach discussing the issue through a lens other than his preferred one is you, because you're uncomfortable with any discussion of anything that doesn't result in people like you coming out as manifestly the best people in the world who have all the answers. Religion, racial politics, sexual politics, everything that people care about at all on anything more than an immediate material level, all has to be bent into service to Atlas Forum user WillipsBrighton's need to feel like youngish nonreligious white men from the Northeastern United States are masters of the universe who can explain it all. It's not even that you're mulish about this one issue, it's a ridiculously salient and consistent feature of your posting history on practically any subject of interest.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why MUST the issue of violence in Islam be discussed from a sociological point of view? Why can't it be discussed from a doctrinal point of view?

Because you're uncomfortable with the answer when it's done that way, that's the only reason.

No, it's because violence occurs socially, is a social consequence, and is part of a religion's social context. I'm not 'uncomfortable' saying that there are deeply disquieting aspects with the way Muslim doctrine gets applied in situations of conflict and with the fact that it's constructed in such a way as to make it easy to do that, that's clearly a serious problem and I've admitted as much in this thread twice so far. The one who's completely unwilling to even approach discussing the issue through a lens other than your preferred one is you, because you're uncomfortable with any discussion of anything that doesn't result in people like you coming out as manifestly the best people in the world who have all the answers. Religion, racial politics, sexual politics, everything that people care about at all on anything more than an immediate material level, all has to be bent into service to Atlas Forum user WillipsBrighton's need to feel like youngish nonreligious white men from the Northeastern United States are masters of the universe who can explain it all. It's not even that you're mulish about this one issue, it's a ridiculously salient and consistent feature of your posting history on practically any subject of interest.

What an odd personal attack. You're attacking me because I think my positions are correct. How many people on this board debate things thinking they are wrong about them?

No, I'm attacking you because you think your positions are the only ones that could conceivably have any merit from any perspective and that the only reason I could possibly prefer a different heuristic is that I'm uncomfortable or afraid, because you have obviously self-congratulatory reasons for behaving this way, and because it's a consistent feature of your posting style on a variety of subjects. Not the same thing, as you know good and well.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I mean, man, WillipsBrighton, this is hilarious and you'd bomb most religious studies classes with this stuff, but you're obviously fixed enough in your desire (need?) to think like this that it's useless to continue trying to correct you. But one thing I will ask, actually: Why, do you think, do most forms of Islam advocate a form of scriptural literalism? How, in your understanding, did Islam develop that feature? You don't need to go into any specifics if you don't know or have an opinion on them; I just want to know what your understanding is of the general type of reason that caused that.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I mean, man, WillipsBrighton, this is hilarious and you'd bomb most religious studies classes with this stuff, but you're obviously fixed enough in your desire (need?) to think like this that it's useless to continue trying to correct you. But one thing I will ask, actually: Why, do you think, do most forms of Islam advocate a form of scriptural literalism? How, in your understanding, did Islam develop that feature? You don't need to go into any specifics if you don't know or have an opinion on them; I just want to know what your understanding is of the general type of reason that caused that.

What am I bombing?

I'm going to spell this out in very small words: Members of a certain religion commonly do bad things, for reasons that did not have to be that way, have not always been that way in the past, and might stop being that way again in the future. You are saying that the fact that those reasons did not have to be that way, have not always been that way in the past, and might stop being that way again in the future is not important. That kind of claim is frowned upon by most people who study religion. It is frowned upon because it turns the religions that people make it about (usually this religion these days but it has been made about many, many others in the past on all sorts of grounds) into abstractions that pop into being and persist in being without context. It is a way to get out of doing historical or sociological work to understand how these things happen. It makes it harder to solve these problems or learn from them to try to keep them from happening again.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Yes, and claiming that such a person has an inherent violent or evil essence would be wrongheaded and a faintly dangerous claim to make too.

but as to the reason why Islam mandates the infallibility of the Quran, it's because without the infallibility and the literalness of Mohammad's revelation, there basically is no Islam. It's the entirety of the religion.

You're using 'infallible' and 'literal' interchangeably. I don't entirely blame you for this, as doing so is a next-to-universal flaw in the thinking of self-important most-important-person-in-the-universe-who-has-all-the-answers atheist edgelords such as yourself, and especially as many Muslim scholars and ideologues who talk about this subject unfortunately do so too, but there are also those who, well, don't. Or are you actually going so far as to deny that Muslims and Muslim leaders who reject reading violent passages in the Qur'an as literal calls for physical action exist?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How have I moved the goal post?

That was in response to you attempting to reframe the question as 'both sociological and theological components vs. only theological components', when before you'd been denying the sociological components. If that denial was unintentional on your part then I apologize for reading it in.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I'd say there's some very good stuff there and some very bad stuff there.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Because it's incredibly and willfully stupid at best and at worst batsh**t insane, and, either way, it is so 1891.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The idea that any particular interpretation of what's meant by Qur'anic infallibility is as universally and fundamentally important to Islam as the existence of Christ is to Christianity is an odd one but I guess I can't stop you from framing (your conception of) the religion that way if you really want to. I couldn't disagree more with the part I've bolded, partially because I don't see 'fundamentalism' and 'Arabic flavored Unitarianism' as the only possible options and am frankly baffled by why anybody would. They're not even the only options that demonstrably exist now.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

There are a lot of assumptions here that I don't particularly feel like picking apart right now so instead I'm just going to say that I disagree with many of the assumptions but might agree with the conclusion if I didn't, and move on.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This would be like comparing a high school drop out to someone with a PhD and saying that the drop out was smarter because they got better grades in elementary school.

...holy sh**t, you are awful.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If you ask a Jewish person why they keep kosher, they will say because the Torah commands it. They will not say "well, a long series of a historical happenings that are still ongoing".

I don't even know where to begin with this.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Every time I make a point you just come back with some crap like "ugh!" "I can't even!" "you're the worst!" Eventually you're just going to start responding with emojis.

Okay, I'll respond in more detail than that statement deserves: You're assuming that Jewish people agree with you in seeing 'because the Torah commands it' and 'because of a long series of historical happenings that are still ongoing' as mutually exclusive, or even as inherently separate. This actually may be a legitimate point about Islam that you're making here--you're not convincing me of your position as this conversation continues but you are challenging me more than I'm letting on so I grant you that--but you're undercutting whatever legitimacy the point has, or your other points have, by making these terrible, sometimes morally reprobate analogies and comparisons. Judaism has a historiography to it that's at times almost eerily perceptive and self-aware and that is one of the first things anybody who really understands Jewish culture thinks of when they think of it. If you don't know that, but use keeping kosher as a basis for this sort of comparison anyway, then yes, you are the worst.