What do you think of Islam?
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 2:28 pm
Honesty, please. It shows respect.
Dignity, as you are capable.
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Dignity, as you are capable.
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Roughly, yeah. ...wait, you're counting Catholics?!?!?met wrote:Honestly, I barely know the bare bones of Islam....& have little feel for Islamic thought or practice....but, my first question, there are what? - nearly as many who identify as "Muslim" as "X-Ian"?
Gak! Err....next question!????met wrote: Is there a single, essential "Islam" underneath all the cultural variations and the individualized perspectives?
(I'm approaching the question like this, instead of more abstractly & theologically this time, since you put this thread up on the "social issues" board, btw, )
Well...on the other hand, if you take Samuel Huntington's word for it, Islam might be your greatest ally in the fight against globalism! A little bit of organization on common principles goes a long way, in that regardrvhill wrote:Idolatry of the law is still idolatry, any law. I agree with Tolstoy organized religion like anything man made is inherently evil, because humanity is evil.
I totally agree.rvhill wrote:Also justice is a foreign concept to humanity. No one understand what justice, really mean. I know I don’t, and I have studied it. I know what people think it mean. This why I believe in grace.
Do you think there are degrees of guilt? Can anyone ever turn away from evil to some degree and do the 'right thing' in any situation? If the moral law is written on the heart, then i can't see how we would be completely evil, at least in terms of what we intuitively know if not in terms of our actions.rvhill wrote:Idolatry of the law is still idolatry, any law. I agree with Tolstoy organized religion like anything man made is inherently evil, because humanity is evil.
I think we have a sense in the abstract of what justice is, although practicing it is a different matter. There may be aspects of our cognitive set-up that make completely disinterested behavior very very hard.rvhill wrote:Also justice is a foreign concept to humanity. No one understand what justice, really mean. I know I don’t, and I have studied it. I know what people think it mean. This why I believe in grace.
I wonder if it is as hard to talk about Islam as one thing as about Xianity ( and here my extremely superficial knowledge will probably get me in trouble!) In Islam, you've got one text which is believed to be the direct transcription of God's intent given to one 'stenographer' and in the original language. In Christianity you have multiple witnesses/authors/traditions talking about something that's inherently mysterious. God became a man. W-Wait...whut?! ST will correct me on this but I wonder if there is the same level or type of mystery at the foundation of Islam. I know there've been many schisms and theological disputes in Islam, but the main one, Sunni/SHiite I believe is about lineage and succession. Look at the disputes that raged in the Byzantine world ( and in the West) about what the foundations of Xianity could even mean.met wrote:Honestly, I barely know the bare bones of Islam....& have little feel for Islamic thought or practice....but, my first question, there are what? - nearly as many who identify as "Muslim" as "X-Ian"?
... & if somebody asked me that about xianity, I might be reluctant to add me there even WAS such a thing, a single, encompassing meta-concept like that.
So, how do you feel about that? Is there a single, essential "Islam" underneath all the cultural variations and the individualized perspectives?
(I'm approaching the question like this, instead of more abstractly & theologically this time, since you put this thread up on the "social issues" board, btw, )