All day long a post fermenting, only to end up boiling away to nothing.
Is Islam uniquely violent? That Christ died on the cross and Muhammed took up the sword—does that matter in some fundamental way?*
It does, I suppose, if you want it to. If not, then not.
This isn’t a slam against Christianity or Islam or belief (in anything. . . ); it is an observation of the condition of belief.
We construct our beliefs, believe because we want to believe, have to believe, believe how we want to believe. Or not.
We deprecate this and emphasize that, as is our preference, driven by yet other preferences.
I don’t mean to be a lazy relativist, even as this reads as lazy relativism. That is not my preference. No, it is just that beliefs arise from narratives, and the more complicated the narrative, the more beliefs can arise, and the more complicated the beliefs about the beliefs, the greater the likelihood that the beliefs and the beliefs about the beliefs can and will justify anything.
Hitchens said “religion poisons everything.”
Perhaps. But it is not the only source of poison. It is not the primary source. For if, as Hitchens believed, there is no God, and religion a construct of humans, then would it not be more accurate to say that the source of the source is the problem?
I’m tired and my thoughts are fading, and I do not wish to excuse ideologies and religions that celebrate or even excuse violence, but it seems rather too convenient for those who profess belief in Narrative C (of which some streams has in the past celebrated or excused violence) to claim that Narrative I (of which some streams currently celebrates or excuses violence) is inherently violent, while the former, only contingently or mistakenly so.
Shorter version: double-reverse No True Scotsman!
Be glad that my brain is flat, or else I’d ramble on trying to puzzle out if this means we are all Scotsmen or if there are no Scotsmen or how does one come to construct a Scotsman. . . .
*By way of Sullivan and Dreher
AbsurdBeats 