Alizia wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:52 pm
I looked into that author. I appreciate the referral. I see his writing as pretty open apologetics though. I was hoping for something with a bit more
scholarly distance.
Well, here's the problem with "scholarly distance." Usually, it's a good thing: especially when one is dealing with physical objects and phenomena -- keep any agendas out of it, until after the inquiry's done. Good plan.
The problem is that "religion" doesn't work like that. Take the beliefs and suppositions out of it, and it stops being a thing at all.
What can a purely objective observer know about religion? Very little. Just that it exists, and produces some sociological patterns. But the reasons remain opaque. Regarding what it's like to live within, to indwell, to believe -- of that, he can know little. Empathy helps: but even empathetic guesses about how religious people experience things are often incorrect. Imagination helps, but imagination also sometimes goes wrong.
And scholars of religion recognize this: they talk about the "outsider" versus the "insider" perspective. You need to "get inside" what it's like to believe a particular belief system, even if you don't personally believe it, to see what's in there. So you've got to talk to people who actually believe it, see what they think about, figure out how they structure their lives to work with it, and so on.
That's why I say, "Read the Koran." But if you're not going to read the Koran, you could do a whole lot worse than to consider the experience of someone who once indwelt Islam and believed it and lived it, who later decided to depart from it. He's likely to have both sides of what you need.
Mo had some familiarity with both Judaism and the version of Christianity known as Nestorianism. He tried to borrow from both, but got all his borrowings wrong. One could say that Islam was actually a cultic misrepresentation or mimicry of Judaism or Christianity. It was certainly an attempt to get credit from both. But no Jew or Christian with even a modicum of knowledge of Islam mistakes it for Christian or Jewish.
I did read through the Koran at one point, rather quickly I admit, and I also read some essays by Englishmen who really did not have much to say about it because, for them, it really did not have much in it to comment on; that is, of content comparable to the Jewish Bible and the New Testament. They presented it as something to be read and known about, but dismissed its content.
Ah, so you've got experience with the problem of which I'm speaking.
Yes, there can be little learned from that perspective. Either one goes to the original documents, or one needs to investigate the believers in that religion.
It is interesting to look upon an entire culture, as this is what it amounts to, as being established on an improper, mistaken foundation. If you 'get all your borrowings wrong' that is what you'd wind up with. My intuition -- I see this as something quite innate and instinctive -- indicates to me that these people and this religion must be driven from 'our lands'.
Well, and it also depends on what they actually believe, doesn't it? I don't think too many of us would object to fascists and tyrants, if such persist, being "driven from our land." So that could be good. But either way, one has to look at the particulars again.
What's worrisome are two opposite dangers: the danger of arbitrarily excluding or evicting those with whom one can and ought to live, and on the other hand, of being so devoted to a narrative of toleration that one does not realize a really dangerous culture when it appears and makes demands -- as when might try to placate actual evil with mere multicultural sugar. Which one Islam is, will be determined on the basis of what Islam actually teaches and does to people.
It's odd because I 'know' this, or I 'believe' it (feel it at an instinctive level), and yet I would have to go in search of scholarly explanations in order to justify and rationalize the belief. I'd imagine that your position would be that they should be converted.
Not at all costs. If violence against conscience is required, or violence against bodies, then no. Conversion is a matter of the intellect and heart, not of forced submission to dogma.
Interestingly, "Islam"
means "submission." And in it, conscience is not required, so much as conformity is. It's a truly religious-political cult; and to ask that it become "tolerant" is essentially to ask that it stop being "Islamic" (submission-valuing) at all. That's a serious impediment to the liberal "tolerance" narrative.
But in Europe -- as Belinda seems to indicate and explain -- there is no longer a 'believer'! The believer just gazes out on 'myths', and one myth is equal to any other one, and all are unreal in essence. All there is is people who must be 'managed' by Marxist state managers. Thus, a people, the people, are stripped of the lofty objects and idealism of Occidental Civilization and are reduced to managed and manageable aphids.
It seems evident -- to me at least -- that this is an aspect of the numerous European nations losing their nerve. They have lost a sense of something needing defence. Or, they cannot any longer defend the specific but develop a sense of justice based on the general and the universal.
This generalization holds, but only to the extent that we imagine "Europe" is a block. It's really an iron-and-clay mix, to use the prophetic metaphor; the people-groups within it have long-standing differences of agenda with each other.
What I mean is that certain processes which I do not fully understand have acted on northern peoples over a long period of time to remove them from their own foundation within themselves.
"Secularization" is usually the name given that process: at least by sociologists. What's happened is that the ontological beliefs that make any sense of humanist ethics have been disbelieved; and for a time, it was possible to sustain the ethics without bothering about their inconsistency with the new ontology. Custom and tradition, along with law, permitted that. But when time has passed, the ontological asserts a kind of slow "gravitational" pull against the ethics, and humanist sympathies are collapsed. The reasons not to mistreat each other become increasingly inaccessible. And people begin to conform to the real trajectory of the new ontology, which is Nietzschean and Heideggerian at first, and then goes beyond both.
But we have not seen the fulness of that yet. Two World Wars...so far. The next war is likely to involve not mere nations or even alliances of nations: it will be formed around these larger and more volatile collectives like "Europe," I think, and will involve major zones of ideology, such as "The Islamic World" and "the East." Scary thought, really. So we ought not to allow ourselves to enthuse about these potentially volatile collectives forming.
That is what people seem to mean with the term 'globalization' (though it is also a symbol and various meanings are injected into it).
"Globalism," I believe, will be the bone of contention. The question for the larger trans-national power blocks will be, "Along whose ideological lines with the new world order be formed?" Each block will have a different vision, and each will believe it is the legitimate and necessary determiner of the "global" direction.
If I'm right about that, then the future of Globalism is not humanist decency, but rather massive zones in conflict: not John Lennon's future, but Orwell's.
