This post will be long. It is commentary from another forum I read about the ISIS articles that I thought you would appreciate, and perhaps get your grey matter stimulated a bit. The commentators vary from liberal to conservative tilts but are all Christians. First the two articles, links have been posted already in another thread but I'm including them here for clarity.
... Mountaineer
Atlantic article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arc ... ts/384980/
NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opini ... 22000&_r=0
Commentary 1
The NY Times piece brings out what was troubling me about the other article. It seems possible to conclude from the other article that Islam is, must be, and will inevitably be what ISIS is today. So the reaction to all Islam will tend to be "We know you're not ISIS, but you will be someday. Your religion requires it."
Isn't that a little like judging Christianity from the prevailing attitudes during the Crusades, or perhaps during the Spanish Inquisition? Or the Massachusetts Bay Colony? Or Salem during the witch mania? Or any period of deadly anti-Semitism?
Is Islam, or a majority of Muslims, or the prevailing "true" Islam destined to be ISIS-like?
Commentary 2
I think we need to keep in mind that there are three parties to this discussion, not two. It is not Christianity vs Islam. What we have is really what you might call the Enlightenment* vs. Christianity and Islam. The New York Times represents the Enlightenment view, as it uses the current sins of Islam to rehearse its favorite list of the sins of Christianity.
The Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials are two [in Pr. Austin's list] that stand out. The common conception of the Spanish Inquisition is that it was driven by the Catholic Church and that most of the deaths occurred at the hands of the clerics. The truth is that there were two inquisitions, the Royal and Church. The vast majority of deaths happened through the Royal courts. Far fewer were sentenced to death by the Church. Furthermore, the Church courts were much more likely to follow rules of procedure and evidence than the Royal courts. Finally, a similar number of Jews, "witches" and religious dissenters were being killed by Protestant courts in Germany and England at the same time. This misconception of the Inquisition, that it was the exclusive work of "Papists", was promoted both by Protestants and by the Enlightenment. It is sometimes refereed to as the Black Legend.
A similar thing can be said about the Salem Witch Trials. The popular image is of witch hunts lead by Puritan clerics. The truth is that is did not originate among clerics, nor was it driven by clerics. Many in the clergy opposed the witch trials and helped to bring them to an end.
The Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials are favorite talking point among the New Atheists. They use them to argue for the moral equivalence of all religion over against reason and science. Now imagine if a Christian would draw a moral parallel between ISIS and progressive atheism. Why remind Christians that they are not morally superior but not at the same time remind the enlightened atheists of the same thing?
*I'm looking for a better description of Enlightenment era criticism of organized religion.
Commentary 3
Must Islam inevitably become ISIS? There are many Muslims in the world today, and have been for centuries who are peaceful people, even willing to live peaceably with their neighbors. Also, there seem to me in my limited knowledge of Islam some tendencies of ISIS that are at odds with classic, Islam - especially the tendency to slaughter fellow Muslims. That is not in the foundational texts.
Still there are some elements of the foundation and founding of Islam that seem to me to make it easier for Islam to morph if not into ISIS into a militant aggressive religious/political movement.
Contrasting to Christianity. Christianity was founded as a minority movement with little or no political power and at best tolerated by the states in which it existed and spread. To be sure, after some centuries when it came to have access to political power, Christians soon became as adept as any in exercising the power that they had gained and abusing it. But for the first formative centuries, Christianity had little power. Christianity also had at its founding a concept of separation of church and state. "Render unto Caesar" and all that. It also had little or no governmental power in its earliest days. So Christianity has a tradition of living under non-Christian government, and not feeling that it had to dominate.
Now, as said, as soon is Christians gained access to governmental power and influence, Christians proved as corruptible as any by power. But that is a story for down the road.
Contrast this to the founding of Islam. Within the lifetime of its founding, its founder and leader had gained control over the cities and region of its founding, religious and civil control. Also, within the lifetime of its founding, its founder and leader became a warlord, leading the army of the faithful against their enemies and beginning a campaign of conquest. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Muhammad sought a kingdom of this world for Islam and sought to bring the whole world under Islamic control. And there is no natural separation of religious and civil in Islam. Which makes freedom of religion problematic under Islam.
None of this makes ISIS inevitable. But the seeds are present. The ISIS ideology is perhaps a selective reading of the foundational Islamic texts, and for the extremes to which it goes, it must ignore some of the material. The extent to which the core leadership is devoutly Islamic and the extent to which they are opportunists using religion as a cloak to their greed, hatred, and cruelty is a question that I cannot answer.
We Christians need to remember that our hands have not always been clean, and we need to carefully watch lest the power we have been granted corrupts us. But that does not excuse others either or make them less of enemies out to subjugate or obliterate us.
In order to counteract ISIS and their allies we need not only to understand that they are terrorists, but we need to understand the roots of their ideology in the classic Islamic texts, as the articles in the Atlantic and elsewhere indicate. Whether or not the leadership are devout or opportunists, it is by their use of these texts that they attract followers and have created a world view to justify their actions. Ignoring the roots in Islam will defeat any effort to counter the ideology and leave only military options.
Commentary 4
I find it interesting how the intellectual community seems to delight in pointing out how Christians have supported injustices and atrocities over the ages - even perhaps suggesting the Christianity was responsible for that evil. The Inquisitions, Salem witch trials, Crusades, slavery and Jim Crow have all been laid to Christianity's door.
Yet now when it comes to Islamic Extremist Terrorists, it is at least impolite to mention that they are Islamic, as though the Islamic faith espoused by ISIS and such groups, and the religious fervor of their fighters were an unimportant accidental coincidence. Recently in reporting the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians on a beach in Libya, the White House in its initial statements referred to the simply as Egyptians, their Christianity - although a reason given by ISIS for their killing - being apparently unimportant to understanding the gravity of the event. Yet when 3 Muslims were killed in North Carolina, even though initial investigation suggests it was more about a dispute over parking and noise in an apartment complex, the White House highlighted that they were Muslims killed.
4 Jews were killed in the attack on a Jewish deli in Paris, and the White House tried to suggest that their being Jews were accidental. I guess when one attacks a Jewish deli perhaps Jews might be there to be killed but who would think about that?
Commentary 5
ISIS per se was not inevitable. However, Islam is an aggressive religion charged with bringing all people to their proper role as followers of Allah. Many of the Muslims who have immigrated to the US and Europe come with at least a partial goal of bringing Islam to the forefront in these lands. Islam has spread by the sword because that is part of who and what it is. Our failure to understand that will keep us always back on our heels in the inevitable confrontations.
Muslim nations lived in peace with their neighbors over the last 400 years because they had no real choice. They lacked the military and economic strength to impose their will. What we see today is the outgrowth of wealth for some Muslim nations and the willingness of those nations to finance others to spread the influence of their religion. The Saudi government is afraid of the radicals, but many of the radicals, especially those from the West, have been trained in institutions funded by the Saudis.
As followers of the Christ, we must always remember that Islam is not a benign group of fellow seekers after righteousness--it is a tool of Satan to attack the true Church. I suspect Mohammed did receive his ideas from Allah just as Joseph Smith received his from Moroni. Convenient names for demons.
Commentary 6
An observation made by my son last night: when Christians have tortured or killed in the name of Christ, they did so AGAINST the words of their Lord in the Sacred Scripture; when Muslims have tortured or killed in the name of Allah, it would be very hard to argue that they did so AGAINST the words of the Koran. I think that's at the heart of it and it eviscerates the typical enlightenment-shaped perspective that would lump these two together as just "imagine there's no heaven, no religion too."
I thought the article's take on the group that postpones this out to the future and only by the action of God and so works towards personal cleansing resonated with certain of the groups Chaim Potok described where some Jews hated Zionism not because they disagreed with the final vision; but they disagreed with human hands bringing it to be.
