See Mark 12:17 and compare with the Throne Verse.
Maybe you should spend less time reading the bible and more time reading about the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, the Church of England, etc. etc.
The bible has a lot of crazy stuff in it that people ignore.
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Best thing about the Church of England and its American cousin, the Episcopal Church:
Wherever ye find four, ye shall find a Fifth.
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Part of the problem is that people with an agenda write the analysis showing how bad Islam is.
For example, Wikipedia says that the vast majority of Moslems in many countries, and huge minorities in others, believe that Apostasy (deliberately forsaking Islam for another religion) should be punishable by death.
The fact is, the findings of the two Pew Research surveys on the topic that are cited have been selectively reported (the first study) or completely distorted (the second study).
In the first study, large majorities of Moslems in several countries DO believe that the death penalty is appropriate, but the statistics from 2 other countries (Lebanon 6%) and Egypt (5%) were left out of Wikipediaās quote, strongly implying that in every country surveyed, the majority opinion was ākill 'em.ā
In the second study, Wikipedia neglected to point out that the followup question āshould apostates be put to death?ā was only asked of people who agreed that Sharia Law should be the law of the land and this invariably skewed the data. In the case of Afghanistan, where 99% wanted Sharia Law to be implemented, not by much, but in the case of Egypt, where only a tiny fraction of Moslems want Sharia law, multiplying the raw data by the percent who want Sharia Law (12%) takes 17% down to 2%, so the raw data reported by Wikipedia is off by a factor of 8.5.
One editor attacked that normalization factor suggesting that we really canāt be sure what the normalization should be, since there might be a substantial percentage of Moslems who donāt want Sharia Law but still want everyone who leaves Islam to be killed (presumably by illegal death squads).
With that kind of bias, rational discussion is impossible.
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Of course Christianity has taken over states, Inman Roshi. I am not debating that. But the founding of a religion has an effect on the psychology of the religionās followers, particularly the psychology of dealing with apostates or secular people. Yes, enlightenment values find it harder to spread in a world where the religion rules the state. And a religion whose founder created a state is very different than a religion whose founder was in opposition to the state. Religious conservatives will ALWAYS try to make the religion the center of the state, and, to the extent they succeed, they create tyrannies. Christianity has better inoculation against that than Islam. Thatās all Iām saying, not that the inoculation has worked throughout history.
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You can go by what they do rather than what they say. Islam is perfectly happy to crush homosexuals under walls. Christian conservatives are equally happy to crush homosexuals under walls, but are often held back by the secular state. Islam and Christianity differ on their idea of the acceptability of a secular state.
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I was always under the impression that Mohammed copied Catholicism when he founded Islam. Christianity had The Reformation period where different beliefs led the way to separation of church and state. Islam is still fighting any split offs between Shia and Sunni.
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Agreed. Ben could learn a little from Obamaās cucumber cool demeanor.
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I agree withāand like-- most everything Iāve seen you write in here, Doremus, but not this point. Why should the most extreme and stupid interpretation of a religionāor any system of thoughtābe taken to be its core? One could just as easily argue that the Tea Party constitutes the core of liberal democracy.
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I believe Christianityās different attitude towards church and state preceded the Reformation by a millennium, but Iām no religious scholar. This might be of interest: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/hrahner_csec_sept05.asp
Really? So, thatās what Constantine meant when he made Christianity the religion of the empire?
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Donāt know much about the late Roman and Byzantine Empires, do we? Christianity as we know it today is largely a creation of Roman emperors and bureaucrats.
Christianity and the state were bound together as thoroughly and inextricably in every nation, empire and principality where it was the majority religion from the third century AD to the beginning of the nineteenth as in Iran today. The Byzantine emperors were more like pharaohs or ayatollahs than kings. The officials of the Church were one of the three estates in the Estates General of pre-revolution France. Europe endured a century and a half of savage religious warfare between basically theocratized states that didnāt really end until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Even into the twentieth, the extent of Church influence was a major factor in the Spanish Civil War.
Different patterns, different words, same pattern. Secularization, true separation of church and state and religious toleration are basically twentieth century phenomena in the Christian world. Even today, weāre still fighting a political battle with unabashed theocrats in this country. The tendency of western nations to be smug about our still rather shaky secularization when looking at Muslim countries is both ahistorical and fails to take account of the extent to which the theocratic impulses there are a direct result of the association of secularism in the Middle East with brutal tyrannies propped up by American, British or Soviet aid.
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The problem with Harrisā argument is that with some variation, all the threatening behavior he attributes to Islam has always existed in all of humankind in one form or another. You donāt have to go back very far at all to find general acceptance in Western cultures for things like the persecution of gays, women and minorities. There has been plenty of recent fascism with dire results in non-Muslim societies. And if youāre trying to identify truly threatening behavior, isnāt fascism in one form or another really what it always boils down to?
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Taliban, ISIS, full-strength modern Christianity (it was American Christians who were largely responsible for the recent anti-gay law passed in Liberia [ed. think I meant Uganda]) - itās the exploitation of fear and suffering that paves the way for mass injustice. Isnāt it a bit arrogant to essentially dismiss the Westās very recent forays into human rights transgressions while drawing charts of Islamās? Or if not arrogant, at least myopic?
Itās social and economic conditions that incubate overt violence. Humans have always found ways to exploit difficult conditions to concentrate power. The particular irrationality they choose to promote in doing so is never the cause.
I agree with Maher that we need to severely moderate the influence of religion in our public policy. But he really misses the mark when he convinces himself that religion is the source of all irrational behavior - itās really just one of many outlets for it.
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Thereās a lot to criticize in all religions, but Maher just sounds ignorant, and bigotry and ignorance usually go together. The Islamic states (the real ones, not ISIS), saved and expanded the scientific knowledge of the Greeks and Romans during the Dark Ages of Europe. And as Iāve pointed out before, the most skilled and professional fighters against ISIS are the Kurds, who happen to be Sunni Muslims. ISIS is supposedly Suni, too, but the difference between ISISā brand of Sunni Islam and the Kurdish brand is the difference between night and day.
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What Sunni Islam needs is a Pope, that is, a leader of an institution that has the religious authority to say exactly what it is that his creed represents. The Sunni congregational approach has led to Jihadists with no religious training at all issuing fatwas and declaring holy war.
Iranian Shiāism, by contrast, is characterized by a clear clerical hierarchy with Seghatāolesmans, Hojatāoleslam, Ayatollahss, and Grand Ayatollahs. That is why the Shia are less crazy than the Sunnis.
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I watched this and Affleck is a total IDIOT. This guy has a bloated head and a Bullwinkle mentality. Affleck gets on a tangent with his I know everything position and Affleck fails to listen to the conversation but hand digresses into a bunch of BS.
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They have forgotten the glorious past and have allowed religion to silenced intellectual growth.
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Muslims also invented Algebra and the alphabet we use in our language.
Islam is not the problem in the Middle East.
Would-be dictators and the bloodthirsty thugs who follow themāusing a perversion of Islam as a āreasonāāare the problem.
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āChristianity,from the beginning, has argued that it is separate from the stateā.
Hard to understand the meaning of this without seeing any basis for it. My understanding is that Paul said that all authority comes from God, so governments are legitimate, but that doesnāt mean Christians didnāt want to influence public policy or have overtly religious elected officials.
First, no, I donāt know much about the Roman or Byzantine empires. Iām not sure that requires a ādo we?ā, but letās let that slide.
For a couple of centuries after its founding, Christianity was in opposition to the state. It was a revolutionary prophetic religion, not a bureaucratic toe-the-line one. I believe, though as Iāve said Iām no religious scholar, that this has created an openness for secular states within Christianity that does not exist within Islam. Christians hear regularly about how Christ overturned the tables at the market and ended up dead at the hands of the state and the existing religious authorities. I believe that creates a different dynamic.
And, although I donāt know much about the Roman or Byzantine empires, I do have enough understanding to know that there have been many states where Christianity was bound to the state. Thereās really no need or justification for the straw man.
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