Frederick Anderson says: Some two or three years ago now, I was asked to prepare a piece on the historical background of Islam. What I found was a ‘young’ religion which began (if you take the unification of disparate faiths by Muhammed as a marker) some six hundred years later than the Christian movement. If we look back at what Christians were doing even five hundred years ago we find any number of extremist sects murdering wholesale in the name of God. Beside the activities of the Jesuit Inquisition in Central America, for example, today’s Islamist forays pale into insignificance. It seems to me that generally speaking, no matter what the pace of civilization, religious thought evolves at a fairly constant and unvaried rate. The Church of England is only this year agreeing to ordain women bishops; the Roman Catholic Church has not yet conceded that priests should be able to marry, to raise a couple of instances (there are many more). My point is that Islam still focuses its whole existence upon a jealous deity and the unquestioning devotion demanded of its adherents was equally a feature of Christianity in the Middle Ages. Islam is still growing up, and like all teenagers it is subject to fits of angst and unreasonable obstinacy. Islam as a religion has not yet matured enough to put its god into perspective. I am not trying to say the followers of Islam are retarded in any way, or to belittle the strength of their feelings. I am merely saying that religiously they need time to catch up. Or maybe they are right and we have turned our back on our God. I don’t really know, but you get a general idea of my standpoint from my previous comments. But all religions are abused by the power-hungry who visit doctrine upon the poor and unthinking as a narcotic to help achieve their aims. The answer is education. Once a populace begins to think and reason for itself, it is no longer willing to accept any doctrine at face value. Meeting violence with violence only plays into the hands of the manipulators, who will use it to raise a ’cause’. For every trouble-maker you wipe out, there will be a dozen more to take their place – further yet, you make them ‘martyrs’; heroes for the susceptible and the young. Murder never solved anything: ask any Vietnam veteran, any soldier returning from Afghanistan. Do we leave the world a better place by shooting people? Such a proposition needs careful thought. THE ISLAMISTS | madukovichs cogitations - madukovich.wordpress/2014/07/03/the-islamists/
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 08:48:14 +0000
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