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Two Videos Juxtaposed – Son of Hamas on Islam; Jacob Olidort on Variance in Salafism
26 Thursday May 2016
Tag Archives: religion
FTAC – A Comment on Attitudes and Beliefs and Religion
08 Monday Feb 2016
Tags
attitude-belief theory, political psychology, political science, political topology, politics, religion, social science
I believe in Judaism, but I don’t want to see a religious court developed in place of a secular one.
As an American, I appreciate the symbolism of the Jordan River as depicted or used in the Torah, but my river is the Potomac and my soul altogether American.
_God is Red_ by (Native American) Vine Deloria, Jr. makes an interesting case in regard to the relationship between a land and its people.
Also of basic interest may be Daniel Everett’s _Language: The Cultural Tool_ and _Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes_, both of which tell about our use of language as a tool of survival.
Those “internal variables and functions” operate with and through language over a base of emotional turmoil and valence.
In “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence” studies (at least back in the 1980s), for some, “Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy”. What needs looking at are the arrangements of multiple beliefs. In survey form with the Likert scale, “Do you believe in God?” (1 = Not At All, 5 = As Strongly as Possible” becomes one question and “Do you believe that Muslims can never be friends with Christians and Jews” (1 = Completely Disagree, 5 = Completely Agree).
Add 38 more questions, distribute to 150 students on one campus somewhere, apply regression analysis to the response set, and see how “beliefs” — or statements about beliefs — correlate with one another.
Recapitulate on another campus.
Recapitulate with another age group.
Such studies can go on a while, but I would suggest that through social science and other methods, one will find certain beliefs, like the belief in God, primary, and other beliefs, like that having to do with not being friends, either dismissible (“completely disagree”) or minimized in the mind of the surveyed subject, and, when aggregated (through survey method), also minimized.
“Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy” may be the BackChannel’s author’s own addition to the more customary configuration, “Attitude = Belief x Affect”. It simply adds in the intensity of good or bad feeling (“affect”) about a belief and it recognizes that some of what we believe about our existence — start with one’s own name, which is fairly “low level” or basic in the programming of our own personalities — may be more dear to us than other aspects of an object, including ourselves as our own possession.
As regards an “American religion” — might there be such a thing? — BackChannels may turn some attention to revisiting early American literature and the classic visitor commentaries.
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FTAC – In Response to Carson’s Statement
24 Thursday Sep 2015
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The ways of “secular humanism” are like a membrane surrounding religious aggregates, lol, but also from which the same more (apparently) satisfying beliefs about man and the universe may be hung. The helpfulness of the moderate outlook is to blunt the power of a narcissistic drive attached to any convenient existing “ism”, including humanism, and then muddle through in an uncomfortable (to all) but reliable (for all) equilibrium.
It’s okay in the boxing ring and for entertainment, but in public office, much less high and highest offices, it’s best to know that “God is greater” or “Master of the Universe” and humanity is just guessing, passionately, but guessing, in any case.
The Facebook chat veered toward refusing endorsement of any “fundamentalist” for office.
That’s fine.
I wouldn’t want a First Family handling rattlers to prove to itself on a recurring basis its own favor in the sight of God in exchange for its fervent beliefs.
However, how available is what is opposite the religious zealot, i.e., the irreligious “secular humanist”?
The quest for that right-for-president guy or gal may be impractical, especially if “secular humanism” is either positioned or seen as debunking all religious faith and thereby becoming a faith in itself. Intuition suggests that the better framework in which to place a “godless humanism” is as a method — not a faith — designed to manage the separateness of differing beliefs and drives: we want to be free, and to be free means to be as we believe God wanted us to be, or to be as we believe we were fashioned by fate or nature, and doing that means “being ourselves” while also keeping out of one another’s way as a matter devolving to custom and law.
That faith — any — which would fail to recognize political, religious, and social boundaries forged in both the forming processes of communal and personal identity, would seem here to doom itself to perpetual conflict and defeat.
Focus of the discussion: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/09/there-was-nothing-illiberal-about-ben-carsons-muslim-president-comment/ – 9/22/2015.
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FTAC – Syria – A Terrible Puzzle
01 Tuesday Sep 2015
The world has been dealt a terrible puzzle: Syndicate Red Brown Green (Shiite) has through “Red” (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia) a nuclear armed block to its ability to impose its better nature; “Brown Green” — national socialist, Islamist (Sunni side) promotes a program unpalatable most to those whose humanity, sense of justice, and sentiment could motivate intercession despite a nuclear armed Russia and an Iran positioned to acquire a similar capability if given about a year’s lead surreptitiously. Change those politics. I think Putin-Assad-Khamenei cannot get off their track by way of their investment in a medieval world view intended to keep themselves in power to the end of time. Baghdadi is about in the same place, but others might not be.
The God (concept) intended by the Jews was thrown out beyond the universe, made greater than even the universe, and with finality separated from humans, even Moses — and not even Moses parts the waters — and this is why. Somewhere between Assad and ISIS, the middle must pioneer its way, cast off the medieval, reach for something more human, more kind, more modern, more present, more survivable, more evolving, more progressing.
Perhaps when Syrians involved in fighting perceive their jihad as one involving the middle against the extremes, they will be on their way to peace.
For this day, dependence on the medieval concentration of power in one dictator, dynasty, junta, or nobility masks off the potential for a greater future. “Syndicate Red Brown Green” appears to be playing — by having other people die for its privileges –for the feudal mode and the perpetual war needed to keep the criminally powerful and wealthy in business for generations.
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Three Links – Two Thoughts by “The Last English Prince” +
18 Tuesday Aug 2015
Posted in Islamic Small Wars, Religion
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I have discussed this issue with two Islamic lawyers. One man is part of an Islamic Tribunal. The second, received his law degree from Damascus. These rulings are applicable in a modern age. There was no backing down, when I pressed hard for a logical explanation. The age of nine years was also given as a legal age for men to have intercourse with little girls.
Two schools of thought exist regarding apostasy. One school of thought is that an apostate Muslim must be killed immediately with the sword. The second school of thought allows the apostate to be secured alone for three days and given a chance to repent. If unrepentant, the individual can be clubbed to death. This clubbing, just might make the person repent before being beaten to a pulp. This ruling comes from a companion of one of the four great Islamic jurists, ash-Shafi’i.
Swofford, Tammy. “Islam: Death for Apostasy.” The Last English Prince, August 17, 2015
That the religion of Islam lends itself TODAY to such criticism bodes ill yet for Muslims and others. As loud as outrage has become toward Daesh, which purports to represent the Islam presented by Muhammad, not one Muslim army has risen to crush it and crush away its barbarism (this despite some Big Talk from Jordan). Instead, the Kurdish community, which has to defend its own ethnolinguistic culture against Islamic aggressors (Turkey is the other), has proven the most effective army in the field; granted, Iraq’s Shiite militia infused with Iranian Revolutionary Guard have also gone up against their old familiar but transformed Baathist foes (become Daesh generals for the money dispersed by Baghdadi), but that is to sustain Shiite vs Sunni animus to the benefit of the career and legitimacy of Ayatollah Khamenei.
Contemporary Islamic humanists, reformers, rethinkers, revisionists, secularists have certainly emerged on the world’s sociopolitical radar (M. Zuhdi Jasser, Qanta Ahmed, Irshad Manji, Tarek Fatah, Sultan Shahin [New Age Islam]), but their names are yet young in history, and they too are in a kind of intellectual cradle within a universe of exegetical counterpoint to the al-Qaeda Typicals and the Hezbollah Viruses.
Abstract or dimensional variables associated with argument around “Islamism” or “Political Islam” may include conservatism, fascism, inflexibility, liberalism, narcissism, and religiosity, each term begging its own build-out in meaning. High intensity emotion, narcissism, obsessive focus, and rigidity — in one word: “intolerance” — begs disaster every time out as nature appear to prefer across flora, fauna, and human culture and thought abundance, adjustment, and variety.
(CNN)I am an observant Muslim. And because I am a Muslim, I believe in pluralism. I believe in tolerance. These are the beliefs that Islamist totalitarians are determined to extinguish in the world as they oppress and brutalize those they deem to be “the other.”
Guided by a false, supposedly Islamic doctrine, ISIS has enslaved and systematically raped Yazidi women and young girls. These crimes, described last week by The New York Times, are the latest example of how Islamism defiles Islam. This travesty crosses new thresholds of human depravity: holding pens for humans, busy slave markets, the bureaucratic herding, bidding and buying of Yazidi women and girls. ISIS demands that we confront these new horrors.
Ahmed, Qanta. “When bigots use ISIS atrocities to smear all Muslims.” CNN, August 18, 2015.
Related Reference – Pew Forum and Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_States
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_schools_and_branches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Muslim_movements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhhab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reconstruction_of_Religious_Thought_in_Islam
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FTAC – Many Worlds — One World — Many Worlds
04 Tuesday Aug 2015
“Kritarchy”? “Caliphate” in other words? From Afghanistan to Yemen, how is that working out?
The “Communities of freedom to live the way they want to live” needs to cover about 7,000 living language cultures, Including Arabic and Hebrew cultures while not excluding any of the 6,998 others who have evolved in their own ways. Those 7,000 are distinctly speaking peoples distributed across about 40 major religions and Thousands of subsets and cults, cults including idolatrous ones like ISIS.
Shouldn’t we all just get along?
I advocate for geospatial ethnolinguistic cultural concentration and separation attenuated by forgiving and largely secular margins and mutually respectful cultural diaspora.
None of us, individually or culturally, are all that special on any physical or metaphysical basis; however, each of us as persons and as parts of uniquely evolved cultures, is precious. Perhaps we should think about that in place of supremacism.
“Kritarchy” refers to the exclusive rule of judges, e.g., the “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists” as in benevolent, liberal, modern 😉 Iran. Even if the judges are mixed in some fashion, who would they be to judge others not of their faith, sensibilities, or traditions?
Related:
http://www.ethnologue.com/world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions
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The Imam’s Deceived Woman – K. M. Lessing – On the Most Brazen of Lies
14 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted to YouTube June 3, 2015; first viewed as a “Video Greeting” on author K. M. Lessing’s web site.
Reference: Qur’an 3:54
According to the Qur’an, Allah is the “best of deceivers” (3:54; 8:30). The phrase is often translated into English as “best of planners,” “best of schemers,” or “best of plotters,” but the root word (makr) means “deception.” Hence, the following Qur’an verses should be rendered as follows:
Qur’an 3:54—And they (the unbelievers) planned to deceive, and Allah planned to deceive (the unbelievers), and Allah is the best of deceivers.
Qur’an 7:99—Are they then safe from Allah’s deception? No one feels safe from Allah’s deception except those that shall perish.
Qur’an 8:30—And (remember) when the unbelievers plotted deception against you (O Muhammad), to imprison you, or kill you, or expel you. They plotted deception, but Allah also plotted deception; and Allah is the best of deceivers.
Wood, David. “Is Allah the Best of Deceivers?” Answering Muslims, March 2, 2014.
With reference to Qur’an 3:54:
The historical background for the verse is that the Jews ‘planned’ evil in order to get Jesus arrested and crucified. And Allah in the verse says as they planned evil, so too Allah planned to thwart their wicked plan. Christian missionaries have an issue with the words used for both the Jews and Allah. They prefer to translate this way:
“and [they] deceived and Allah deceived and Allah is the best of deceivers”
The above translation does not exist. It is only made up by crazy deluded missionaries in order to lead people astray. Arabic word(s) makr, Makara can be used negatively and for good. So when the Jews planned to get Jesus arrested and crucified, that was evil, whereas when Allah thwarted their evil plan by saving Jesus, this was good.
Discover the Truth. “Response to Critics Claim ‘Allah is A Deceiver’ – Quran 3:54.” January 24, 2015.
True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.
Verily methinks the woman was deceived, the Jews were libled — the whole lot, and the post-Holocaust Vatican compelled to clarify the truth of its position in relation to the Jewish People.
Ironically related reference on the Soviet framing of WWII’s Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope”: Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013. (BackChannels readers will find more of similar in “The Russian Section” of the resident library).
Further related and more conveniently accessed: Akin, Jimmy. “How Pius XII Protected Jews.” Catholic Answers, n.d.: “Hochhuth’s fictional image of a silent (though active) pope has been transformed by the anti-Catholic rumor mill into the image of a silent and inactive pope—and by some even into an actively pro-Nazi monster. If there were any truth to the charge that Pius XII was silent, the silence would not have been out of moral cowardice in the face of the Nazis, but because the Pope was waging a subversive, clandestine war against them in an attempt to save Jews.”
As people lie — engage in deception — either to hide something or to get something, we know, this according to Ms. Lessing, what the ignoble imam was after; and according to Jimmy Akin as well as the breathtaking revelations of Pacepa and Rychlak (2013), we know what the noble Pope Pius XII was hiding for good cause.
The Discover the Truth blog goes on to note the moral ambiguity involved in the term “makr” this way: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
The argument places the determination of good deed or evil beyond the declaration of Surat 3:54: “And (the unbelievers) plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah” (Yusuf Ali’s translation).
Again: “The word, makr in Arabic denotes a subtle and secret move or plan. If this is for a good purpose, it is good; and if this is for a bad purpose, it is bad.”
It would appear that “being the best of planners” — being the most proficient among the makers of subtle and secret moves or plans — would be a thing separate from being either good or evil, i.e., the statement is about facility in the making of “subtle and secret moves” and neutral about ethical and moral virtue, plain dealing, and straight talk as behaviors civil, desirable, good, and lawful in and of themselves.
Given so much encouragement and license for the making of “subtle and secret moves”, who then — or what — determines the qualities of good cause?
I’ll leave that question rhetorical.
One might suppose that had Lessing’s imam been honest with her, Lessing may yet be wearing her hijab with pride.
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FTAC – Global Meld – Primary Reconsideration
10 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in Notes On Reading BackChannels, Philology, Philosophy, Religion
The question:
. . . . its very interesting to note that Judism and Islam are very similar. you have two systems biblical Judaism and rabbinical Judaism. we muslims have alhe sunat and ahl hadees. two sect one follows the Quran and the hadees while the other follows the Quran only. grin emoticon grin emoticon
Torah is the word of GOD. and Talmud is the commentry by the Rabbis. true?
Poor man — he could not have seen the loooooong answer coming, and neither could I who wrote it:
The books left to me by my synagogue’s former rabbi are The Torah — the Five Books of Moses — and the Nevi’im or “The Prophets”, which Wikipedia refers to as “the second main division of the Hebrew Bible”. It begins, “After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ attendant: / “My servant Moses is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all this people, into the land which I am giving to the Israelites. Every spot on which your foot treats I give to you, as I promised Moses . . . .”
It looks like a sequel to me 🙂 , but for a language culture embedding and transmitting its codes and history in next generations, it’s powerful stuff.
It informs belief, and that’s enough, apparently, to provide culture its interior sense of mission.
With language art created and supplied, perhaps mysteriously so — there’s a subject for long discussion (first question: from whence comes the breath of inspiration? — artifact in text becomes available to interpretation: now the critics, the moral entrepreneurs, and the wise get to do their thing in the spirit of the work obtained.
This model of communications I think inescapable. We want meaning. We want to be more certain about something about which there can be no human certainty. And there you have it: volumes upon volumes of addendums, commentaries, and associated inspirational works — at least out of enthused or exuberant language cultures.
From Wikipedia on the Talmud:
The Talmud has two components. The first part is the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), the written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism’s Oral Torah (Torah meaning “Instruction”, “Teaching” in Hebrew). The second part is the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The term Talmud can be used to mean either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara as printed together.
The whole Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Tannaitic Hebrew and Aramaic. The Talmud contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law and is much quoted in rabbinic literature.
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When it comes to being Jewish, I’m not that Jewish: I have to look up everything, and I’m still ambivalent about re-reading The Torah, reading the Nevi’im; for scholarship, add: re-reading the Qur’an, and reading the Hadith (“Riyad-us-Saliheen” says the cover of my two-volume set).
It may be noted here that while Israel supports a Jewish-majority state, the state itself does not follow “Jewish law” but works off of a secular legal system while supporting the prerogatives of Jewish custom, e.g., Saturday as the day of rest (the U.S. does the same with its Christian majority: without the imprimatur of the law itself, Sunday is nonetheless recognized as the nation’s predominant day of rest, but it’s odd too within the folds of capitalism: the church goers go to church; the weekday nine-to-five workers have the day off; the printing presses continue publishing a thick newspaper for the day: however, many basic consumer businesses, starting with the grocery stores, remain open).
I suppose if the Torah, Nevi’im, and Talmud defined my existence in language, I would be quite a different person moving through the atmosphere created and bounded by those works.
The similarities sustained as time moves through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are there because the initial Jewish program — what Moses did not only with Jews but a “mixed multitude” (! — all who wished to leave Pharaoh and take their chances with the Jews) has proven attractive and robust. The Hebrews, being an ethnic cohort demarcated by language, could not share out the “Hebrewness” of the way in a universal manner (it could take in conversions, much as any may learn Arabic or Latin and become today scholarly and mysteriously authentic in identification with Islam or Catholicism). The opportunity to borrow ideas — and with Hillel the Elder modernizing Jewish thought about Judaism and making the same more accessible to converts — simply came along, imho, and here we are.
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I / you / we and billions of others should not wish to (as Daesh may wish as indicated by its example) destroy worlds.
We need our inventory in language for its own sake.
We just don’t unnaturally build human languages. Esperanto did not make it. smile emoticon
However, we appear to need a supra-common ethical and moral platform from which to derive a few rules of universal good conduct.
We have elements in place like the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but in our souls we cling to that which has been most familiar to us, i.e., our legacy in language as affected by the history and politics of our regions.
You asked a simple question. 🙂
And offered a sensible observation.
Oh what a little bit of stimulus can do!
What are your thoughts on culture and language, cultural updating, and and a religious progressivism?
Advice from a life-long heavy reader, the little boy always with a book: even given a lifetime of time in a library, we may read only so much, but as little as may cover individually, we may choose the breadth of our literary experience and, related to it, the expanse of our spiritual existence.
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