What Makes Islam Different?
There is all kinds of speculation going on about Fort Hood. I'm going to do better. A wild eyed raving lunatic speculation.
Here are links to some data points:
Muslim Attack On Army Recruiters earlier in 2009. Then there are attacks on various targets. And then buried in this comment: Military related attacks.
Jihad is one of the seven pillars of Islam.
Out of a billion people there are some who are going to take it seriously. And some one heard him yell the jihadis death cry. Allah Ackbar. And then the firing starts.
Is is he unbalanced? Yep. Not part of a plot? High probability. Did his religion have some influence in his choice of suicide methods? Well duh.
And this isn’t the first “Islam Is Not The Problem” shooting in the Army or in America for that matter. You can start with the above links and do uour research. So why don’t Protestants go out in a blaze of glory as often? Or Catholics? Or Jews? Or Atheists?
What makes Islam different? Really tough question. Can I have a week or two to do some Google searches?
Shrink Wrap says that if we don't start being honest not only will we be more vulnerable to attack but we will actually encourage such attacks.
On the other hand Pravda and Izvestia helped bring down the Soviet Union. Maybe "Truth" and "News" will do the same for us. So far no need to resort to surrounding the Parliament Building except sporadically. So what was the first word on every one's tongue when they heard the initial news? Muslim. So they already have us trained to think what they don't want us to think. If it weren't for Newspeak they would be in big trouble.
Eric at Classical values gives us a minute by minute history of "Newspeak" (sometimes also called PC) in action at:
"the name tells us a lot"
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1 comment:
msimon,
the main idea that makes Islam different than the other monotheistic religions is its understanding of Man and God and the relationship between the two, which leads to a stunningly different morality.
Judaism and Christianity both start with the understanding that God is rational and wants to guide Man in a rational manner, hence reason is from god. Thus God's commandments, despite being spoken in language, run deeper than language and are intended to be interpreted with reason by Man. Thus, scripture and guidance in Judaism and Christianity despite being said to have come from God, are understood (even by the fundamentalist snake shaking evangelicals) to be spoken through human language and to be translatable and understood by reason.
Islam starts from the assumption that God is so all-powerful as to be unknowable, and possibly even irrational and capricious to a human mind.
As such, under Islam the only reliable indicator of God's commandments is in the unalterable, literal "word of God" as poken in 7th century Arabic by the Prophet Muhammed.
This is so true that "valid" Koranic studies take place exclusively in Arabic, even today.
As a result, while under Judaism and Christianity, morality is understood to be rational, self-consistent and deeper than the mere language that moral commandments are spoken in. Thus under this type of morality, the end cannot justify the means unless the means itself is just, because the opposite case would violate moral self-consistency. Thus, suicide attacks and violent compulsion are not justifiable without vast contortions under multiple judeo-christian principles.
Meanwhile, under Islam, since God is not necessarily rational in his commandments, morality is literal and subject only to agreement on what the language actually says. Thus, moral self-consistency is not necessarily required, only maximum adherence to the langauge of the commandment as the reader understands it or is guided to understand it by an Imam.
Under this kind of morality, the means is justified depending on the good of the end. And if that end is in the defence or furthering of Islam ('submission'), than literally ANY action can be justified.
Thus taqqiya --deliberatly lying or violating oaths in defense of Islam, violent jihad, and even suicide, are all morally defensible --as long as they are in the service of Islam.
Walid Shoebat has some excellent explanation of the morality of jihad.
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