Opinion of this meme

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Satsuma makes a good point about "Abrahamic". It is a term with anthropological value and one that I see bandied about in secular society, but when I became religious one of the things that struck me was how little value classical Christian thought assigns to someone being Jewish or Muslim, and so forth. If you were to ask me whether Christianity is more similar to Islam or Buddhism, I would answer the question based on the theology, cosmology, and phronema of these systems. That Christianity and Islam both credit Abraham as a major forebear is essentially irrelevant in the calculus.

[Associate Justice PiT]

   Satsuma makes a good point about "Abrahamic". It is a term with anthropological value and one that I see bandied about in secular society, but when I became religious one of the things that struck me was how little value classical Christian thought assigns to someone being Jewish or Muslim, and so forth. If you were to ask me whether Christianity is more similar to Islam or Buddhism, I would answer the question based on the theology, cosmology, and phronema of these systems. That Christianity and Islam both credit Abraham as a major forebear is essentially irrelevant in the calculus.

The Abrahamic religions not only share a common regard for the Tanakh, they also largely developed in a millennium and a half of dialogue between Aristotelianism and Platonism. They thus have not only a “genetic” commonality, but also Lamarckian adapted features.

     "Common regard for the Tanakh" is an interesting way to put it when Muslims frequently argue that the Tanakh has been corrupted and the Quran is the only trustworthy holy book available today. I certainly don't mean to imply that they are unrelated or entirely different, and my example was a rather weak one because I would agree that Islam is more similar to Christianity than Buddhism is. My point was rather that there is little concept of inter-religious brotherhood among adherents of the Abrahamic religions, and I did not fully realize this while I was on the outside of that.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Satsuma makes a good point about "Abrahamic". It is a term with anthropological value and one that I see bandied about in secular society, but when I became religious one of the things that struck me was how little value classical Christian thought assigns to someone being Jewish or Muslim, and so forth. If you were to ask me whether Christianity is more similar to Islam or Buddhism, I would answer the question based on the theology, cosmology, and phronema of these systems. That Christianity and Islam both credit Abraham as a major forebear is essentially irrelevant in the calculus.

I hadn't really thought about this before. The "Abrahamic" category makes obvious sense from an outside perspective, and it makes perfect sense from an Islamic perspective, being basically an Islamic concept. It does not clearly make a lot of sense from a Christian perspective. I think it does make some sense from a Jewish perspective, considering the concept of the Abrahamic covenant, but then again Christians by and large do not practice circumcision so maybe the only Abrahamic religions are Judaism and Islam.

I suspect the "Abrahamic" category makes different amounts of sense to different denominations. But I'm biased in favor of Abrahamic both as a nonbeliever and as a "cultural leftist"

It's worth noting that the East/Southeast Asian countries that are majority/plurality Christian have high male circumcision rates. Source

     Malaysia and Indonesia are majority Muslim though, and South Korea is majority unaffiliated (though those who claim an affiliation are predominantly Christian). The Philippines are a bizarre case, because they have an extremely high circumcision rate but it usually occurs at the ages of 11 to 13. I don't know what the rationale is there.

     In terms of Christian countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea are notable for having very high circumcision rates. This is attributable to their distinctive practice of Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodoxy, which has extensive Jewish influence that is not seen in other Christian sects (e.g. not eating pork). Though looking at that map for the first time in a couple of years, I notice there are other African countries that are surprisingly high, e.g. Democratic Republic of the Congo.