{"id":5528,"date":"2011-03-11T18:24:01","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T18:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5528"},"modified":"2011-03-11T18:24:01","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T18:24:01","slug":"literal-reductiveness-angelic-and-demonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/literal-reductiveness-angelic-and-demonic\/","title":{"rendered":"Literal reductiveness, angelic and demonic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean, our resident Islam expert who advised me to go meet those Muslims whom I’ve never met, said something which caught my attention below<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Islam is as a realized matter\u201d is also a lot broader than \u201cthey support terrorists and beat women and and and.\u201d I have lived in Islamic countries, and I can say for certain that the average Muslim is simply a more generous, warm person than the average American. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them must surely be the way the Koran is written so as not to allow people to read Randian economic principles into it<\/b>, even if they really wanted to. This is an observation based on years of interaction with them, and having been raised in a Pat Robertson-watching homeschool environment. I know both groups pretty well. (I also used to teach Muslim culture and counter-terrorism at the US Army Intelligence School, so I\u2019ve some background on those issues as well.)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nFirst, the practice of Islam probably has more to do with the Sunnah and Hadith<\/a> than the Koran. Second, the implicit contrast with conservative Christians is interesting, because many Christian socialists imply that the New Testament is the most communitarian religious text you could unearth. The bigger issue is Sean’s strange inversion of a phenomenon you see among many Islam-skeptics. Whereas they reduce the demonic nature of Islam and the perfidy of its believers down to the narrative of the Koran, Sean attributes the acts of generosity and kindness to the Koran.<\/b> I don’t believe that the behavior of Muslims has much to do with the Koran in a necessary causal sense, let alone that Reformed Christians are truly sola scriptura<\/i>. Religion emerges as a social enterprise through social consensus, and references to scripture are often post hoc rationalizations. The cursory pre-Islamic Arabic prose and poetry we have makes clear that like the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible these were a people who were steeped in the necessity of generosity and hospitality to the guest. This is typical in many “developing societies,” in the Malthusian world of bare subsistence this sort of gifting was a necessary manifestation of reciprocal altruism. Institutional religion tends to scale and scaffold the raw material which is already there. The literary text of a book with only a minority can read, and only a tiny minority read with any comprehension, would seem of marginal impact in the broader scheme of things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean, our resident Islam expert who advised me to go meet those Muslims whom I’ve never met, said something which caught my attention below: \u201cWhat Islam is as a realized matter\u201d is also a lot broader than \u201cthey support terrorists … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[50,499],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5530,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5528\/revisions\/5530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}