Radical Islam: Likely be around for quite some time

Conservatie Evangelical Christianity is probably going to be around for a great while also. The US for example has gone through a couple of waives of fundamentalism like the present one.

One thing is for sure conquering the Arabs and trying to force our religious values on them will probably not work any better than for example when the Soviets conquering Poland or Yugoslavia and tried to make the Chrsitians there be secular atheists.

Relgions tend to become more humane and less "radical" when there adherents are treated well. Religions with lots of martyrs and their followers don't tend to become more moderate.

It is too bad that the current mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims by the West, primarily led by the US and Britain, is exacerbating the problem so much.

 

Great Post

 

Mango, am I mistaken or is Qutb the guy who lived in the US for a while and was impressed with the number of churches yet revolted by the attitude/lifestyle of most (churchgoing) Americans? Was that him or some other guy? I remmber reading about it once but forgot. I'm pretty sure he was egyptian whoever it was.

 

Not if we take Ann Coulter's advice and convert them all.


edit: got the quote wrong:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

 

Religion......sheesh !!

 

Fascinating post, Mango. There is an interweaving connection and timeline, it seems, that led to bin Laden's Al Qaeda. But, as you clearly point out, bin Laden is only one of a series of fundamentalist radicals. And every attempt to stamp them out by secular and monarchial governments, in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan... has not ended the movement, but only suppressed it and/or widened it's popularity. It would seem that anyone thinking the demise of bin Laden will end the threat of the fundamentalists to their perceived enemies is making a serious error.

The best way to deal with them, in my opinion, would be to end the major points of friction. An end to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict would top the list, obviously. A pretty tall order! But I'm not sure how you deal with corrupt regimes like those in Saudi Arabia. What replaces them that could be acceptable to American strategic interests? The secular regime in Pakistan, now with atomics, is corrupt, it would seem, and hanging on by the skin of it's teeth. Syria has a firmer grip on it's fundamentalists, but the brutal oppression will come at a cost someday. And does Syria export the problem to Lebanon? For how long?

What a complex problem! What are the answers?

 

When was the last time that a fundamentalist Baptist organized terror camps and flew planes into buildings in the name of Jesus Christ?

 

Come on, guys... what does this have to do with Mango's post?

 

I just finished reading what I consider to be the best book I've ever read, Civilizations Of The Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor. The book makes a persuasive arguement that the Catholic Church's acceptance of the writings of Plato and (later)Aristotle as educational tools for the clergy were fundemental in creating a society that was prepaired for science.

On the other hand, Islam always kept a strict seperation between science and religion, which resulted in a society which was initially much more enlightened in the sciences than was Europe, but which by the 12th century had rejected science in favor of the purity of religious teachings.

The disturbing thing about this (to me) is that starting around the 12th century with St. Bernard and others, Christianity began to seperate it's self from science, culminating in a post-reformation world which has some elements that are very similar to the classical Islamic model, in which science supercedes Christianity.

The narrative is much more complex than that, but the book has left me concerned about the path of protestant Christianity. The similarities to the current world of Islam are legion.

 

Ottomaton, what years were Plato and Aristotle's writings accepted? Just wondering the obvious - where do Galileo and Copernicus fit in. IIRC it only took a few hundred years for the church to admit maybe Galileo got some things right when it was convenient for them to do so.



When was the last time that a fundamentalist (not) Baptist organized terror camps?

Timothy McVeigh was and other white supremacists are pretty active. The Ku Klux Klan is and was a fundamentalist christian terror group. In todays terms, the Confederacy was a christian terrorist group.

 

there is nothing fundamentalist at all about the KKK. read the words of Jesus Christ and try to spin that there's anything fundamental to that which justifies the KKK.

tim mcveigh was not in the least a christian, and never claimed to be. in fact, upon his death, he cited a poem of a noted atheist which basically said, "your God is crap...life is meaningless...blah, blah blah." existentialist, at best...but that's assuming he even thought deeply enough to consider it.

the Confederacy??? christian terrorists??? Woofer, seriously...you post some doozies, but that one takes the cake! congratulations!

 

I disagree...the more we learn of our universe..of the cosmos ...the more it points to a Creator. Leading Stephen Hawking to say that the odds against the creation of a universe that could support life as we understand it are so astronomically large, that it certainly has "religious implications."

 

If you think the core beliefs of white supremacists rose from anything except protestantism, I'm really surprised. Your ignorance of history is astounding.

I'll provide one link on the KKK, maybe you'll read it.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=73


Hate and Hypocrisy
What is behind the rare-but-recurring phenomenon of Jewish anti-Semites?
By Daniel Levitas

For more than three decades, William Potter Gale warned the world that a satanic Jewish conspiracy disguised as communism was corrupting public officials and the courts, undermining the United States and wrecking its divinely inspired Constitution.
Jews, the self-described "reverend" taught, were offspring of the devil, while non-whites were "mud people" and whites were the real Hebrews of the Bible. By the time of his death in 1988, Bill Gale had spent half a lifetime energetically promoting his particularly bloodthirsty brand of anti-Semitism across America.

"Arise and fight!" Gale preached in one infamous sermon broadcast to Kansas farmers in 1982. "If a Jew comes near you, run a sword through him."

But William Potter Gale had a secret. It turns out that Gale, founder of the Jew-hating Posse Comitatus that raged through the Midwest in the 1970s and 1980s, was descended on his father's side from a long line of devout Jews.

In interviews with this author for a book being published this fall, Gale's daughters revealed with some bemusement the Jewish roots of their grandfather and his forebears.

Ironically, like so many other 19th-century Jews from Eastern Europe, Bill Gale's father Charles was fleeing Russian anti-Semitism and seeking economic opportunity when he arrived in the United States in 1894, changing his name from Grabifker in the process.

Four years later, Charles, then 18, lied about his age and place of birth in order to join the U.S. Army — but he was truthful enough to declare on his military enlistment papers that his parents' nationality was "Hebrew."

While Charles Gale eventually abandoned Judaism, married a non-Jew and raised his children as Christians, all of his siblings proudly embraced their religious heritage. Charles' younger sister, a practicing Jew, was often a guest in the Gale family household in Los Angeles when Bill Gale was a teenager.


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Almost every one of the white hate groups in the United States is based on some interpretation a few choice phrases of the Christian bible. Even the ones that reject Christianity base their core beliefs on the same crap.


If you think rising up in arms against the government of the United States is anything but treason, you need to reread the Constitution. The confederates were nothing but a bunch of guys who didn't want to give up their slaves.



http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showarticle?item_id=98

Militias, Christian Identity and the Radical Right

by Michael Barkun

Michael Barkun is professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He it author of Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (University of North Carolina Press). This article appeared in The Christian Century August 2-9, 1995, pp. 738-740. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current Century articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org.



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The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City opened a window on the previously invisible subculture of militias, survivalists and conspiracy theorists. This radical right-wing subculture has existed for more than a quarter century, and its roots extend back to manifestations of nativism, racism and anti-Semitism earlier in this century.

Many of the subculture's current denizens portray themselves as asserting individual rights against federal government encroachment. Their hot issues are gun control, taxation, and the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. They interpret the Constitution through a kind of "legal fundamentalism." For example, some claim to have discovered the essence of the Constitution in doctrines that raise individual gun possession above the powers of the national government. As one widely circulated militia manual puts it:

Our constitutional liberties are systematically being eroded and denied. The fact that officials are infringing gun rights on every front is simply a manifestation of their inner tendency to empower themselves. Left unchecked, this power will lead to genuine tyranny... The more citizens that own guns, the less willing the government will be to threaten us.

In the world of militias, the national government is a devious and dangerous force, the enemy of its own population.

While this bizarre theory of politics often revolves around issues of law, rights and the state, it ultimately rests on religious foundations. The religious beliefs that undergird the radical right are hard to describe for two reasons, the first having to do with the far right's organizational structure, the second related to its doctrinal basis.

Structurally, the radical right is a confusing, seemingly anarchic world. Survivalists, militias, Klans, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, skinheads and Christian constitutionalists do not inhabit neatly defined segments. Their styles of rhetoric, dress and symbolism are not mutually exclusive, and often interpenetrate and overlap. A person may be a survivalist Christian Identity believer who likes skinhead music, has a fondness for Nazi symbols, and is sympathetic to Christian constitutional arguments. Another participant in the movement might accept some parts of this world but not others.

The memberships of right-wing organizations often overlap, and the groups themselves (like those on the far left) are often riven by factionalism and internal conflicts. It is not surprising, therefore, that months after the Oklahoma City bombing journalists still have difficulty describing suspect Timothy MeVeigh's relationship to the Michigan Militia and to Christian Identity groups. Within the subculture, individuals migrate easily from group to group, sometimes appropriating one set of ideas and symbols, sometimes another, sometimes several simultaneously.

Whatever cohesion this world possesses comes from its alternative system of communications. Mail-order book services, computer bulletin boards, gun shows, Bible camps, pamphlets, periodicals and short-wave radio broadcasts knit the far right together. This network compensates for a fractious organizational life, and it allows the neophyte who enters the communications network to become aware of other groups, doctrines and styles. The picture these media provide is a kind of mirror image of the worldview that prevails in the larger society. These media suggest that the dominant worldview is fraudulent, that things are not as they seem, that only the chosen few within the movement really know what is happening and why.

The melange of right-wing organizations also makes it difficult to discern the movement's religious profile. A few of its members espouse Norse-Germanic paganism or reject all supernatural religion. But the vast majority rely on ideas that originated in conservative Protestantism, albeit sometimes these ideas have been so distorted that they would be rejected by mainstream evangelicals. No organization has the power to enforce a clear religious orthodoxy. Nevertheless, some family resemblances do appear among the various religious concerns.

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you're equating subtracting a few choice verses from context to fundamentalism. jesus christ is the cornerstone...the fundamental element of christianity...and there is nothing about his fundamental nature that justifies race warfare. in fact there are more than a few choice verses that speak to that.

i will not argue with you that people have hijacked the faith to support some political aim throughout history. but there's nothing about that that makes them fundamentalists in any sense of the word.

your argument about the confederacy makes zero sense to me...of course they were treasonous by definition. how does that make them fundamentalist christians??

however hard you try to paint mcveigh as a christian, he made it very clear that he had never and would never submit himself to God...he made that clear over and over again. he is, like the other examples you mention, nothing close to anything that resembles the fundamentals of christianity.

 

The roots of almost all these far right wingnuts is in a weird interpretation of Christian fundamentalism. Even the ones that proclaim themselves free of Christianity have an uncanny knack for picking up the same viewpoints on blacks, Jews, and gays. One could call these same interpretations by the Christian and *later* non Christian racists a coincidence or luck which I would argue is silly. The fact that some form of these interpretations persisted into the 1960's in the most southern churches is documented in most accounts and histories of the civil rights movement, Parting The Waters or for those with a shorter attention span, Why We Can't Wait or for the ADD affected, Letter From A Birmingham Jail. Happily those viewpoints were mostly turned around but this menace is still a threat today.

 

i just seems to me that if someone is a fundamentalist christian they ought to, at least in some respect, be living out something that looks fundamentally like a discipleship to Christ. having a hard time seeing that. maybe we're arguing semantics, because i won't argue with you that people have hijacked Christianity through the centuries in an attempt to justify all sorts of jackass behavior, despite Christ's assertions that the greatest commandments were to love God and to love neighbor .

 

Stop using things like logic and rational thought. Such things are banned in threads about religion.

 

Thats one of the intresting things - Plato was common philosopy from the start of the church but the writtings of Aristotle were lost to the western world until they were regained from the Arabs.

Plato is big on the concept of the "platonic ideal" in which something like a desk is just an object seeking to live up to the "platonic ideal" of what a desk is. In turn, every major Royal autobiography "pre-Aristotle" was an idealized account in which the subject is made to look as much like the "idealized king" as possible.

Aristotle's world was one that was based on individuals being "the sum of their experience" and a world in which observation and discovery were important.

The return of Aristotle to the west coresponded with the birth of science and individualism, the latter first being expressed in Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum, an autobiography that goes out of it's way to shock and disturb, clearly not attempting to idealize the subject.

BTW, both Aristotle and Plato were compatable with the view that the earth was the center of the heavens. I wouldn't be too hard on them, particularly, as they were living in a world in which modern scientific principals were nonexistant. I find it much more disturbing that people today find it so easy to ignore science in favor of religious dogma.