I think no religion preaches violence, including Islam. Its the followers that have their own interpretations.. Do we relate the acts of Hitler to Christianity?
The only non-violent religions I know of are Jainism and Theravāda Buddhism. The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain passages encouraging their followers to torture, kill, and otherwise harm non-believers. Mainstream adherents followed these directives for millennia. It's taken centuries of conflict with enlightenment values to relegate such views to extremists.
After September 11th, I read the Qur'an[1] to see what the fuss was about. I encourage others to do the same. Unlike the Bible, it is not a long text. Even if you take notes while reading, you can finish it in a few days. Unless you're indoctrinated in the faith, it will be obvious that the Qur'an preaches violence toward the infidel much more than nonviolence.
1. Or more correctly, an English translation of the Qur'an.
I've studied Quran too and a bit of comparative religion and nowhere did I find any instance where it preaches violence.
Look on the life of Prophet Muhammad for instance (you'll find plenty of non-Muslim accounts on His life that are non-biased) never you'll find any instance where he punished someone just because he ridiculed him.
Forget about prophet, just when Europe was going through the dark ages and Muslims were building knowledge cities in Spain etc. There were departments specifically reserved for scholars to come and discuss and question each other's religion! It's part of our history books, and a fact.
What we're seeing today is some radical Muslims dominating the majority and just because they have taken up guns people have started associating violence with Islam.
Do you know that the most number of people that have suffered from these extremists are infact Muslims themselves? I'll urge you to dig this further :)
p.s "Islam" when translated to english means Peace. Do I need to say any further?
This is just outright disingenuous. Both books have ample violence and the Quran specifically commands followers to chop off the body parts of the infidels. I can quote you the verses if you'd like. The Bible has its share of violence and gore too. What game are you playing at?
>never you'll find any instance where he punished someone just because he ridiculed him.
Abu 'Afak seems close. He wrote a politically charged poem against Muhammad and was killed. Perhaps not just for ridicule, more for political opposition but even so it seems bad form.
> I've studied Quran too and a bit of comparative religion and nowhere did I find any instance where it preaches violence
Then you didn't read the actual Quran. I will not claim that the Quran is more violent than other holy books, but it certainly has its share of calls to violence.
Give any religion enough uneducated, miserable, humiliated young people and you will get the same result. The world, unfortunately, is not in short supply of such. Even buddhists can become rabid.
Actually, no. Jains simply don't use violence, even in self-defense. It would take quite a literary gymnast to get violence out of commands such as, "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being."[1] Jain protests can involve fasting[2], but never violence. Other forms of Buddhism (such as Zen) can be violent, but compassion is at the core of Theravāda. This is why there are no Tibetan suicide bombers, despite a brutal occupation by the Chinese government.
Religions really do cause their hosts to have different propensities for violence.
It's too easy to completely dismiss the effects of a particular religion or group. There are uneducated, miserable, humiliated young people from many groups in the world, yet only those from some of those groups kill comic writers.
Well, people get what they want to hear/read out of religion. Take the old testament, you have enough instances of God-sanctioned large-scale murder to justify most of anything. Some groups have taken inspiration from it, while others have had a completely pacifist outlook. No religion is exempt from that.
If you take my personal ethics out of the equation, I don't think I could say that one interpretation is more valid than another. I just agree with one interpretation more because it more closely aligns with my views ("do what ever you want if you're not hurting anyone else").
When religious folk say that the other religious folk are misinterpreting religious text x, I can't help but think they are in no position to make that judgement fairly unless they have their own sense of ethics that overrides the ethics fed to them by their religion. Their view is simply another interpretation of their texts on the broad scale of interpretations of their religious texts.
If their ethics are therefore not derived from their religion, seems like a large chunk of the utility of their religion is an illusion. They are not good or better people because of their religion, their ethical foundation is already formed inside them regardless of what religion they pledge membership to.
At least for Christians what counts most are the teachings of Jesus and apart from a few predictions of purgatory of the wicked the gospels preach peacefulness and non-violence. Of course when Jahwe was just a tribal god, they had to invent lots of stories on how he was much more powerful than other gods, who didn't even exist because there was only one god and it was theirs.
You've obviously never read the Qur'an. There are pages and pages of material condoning and inciting people to violence. Sam Harris printed pages of quotes from a translation of the Qur'an in The End of Faith, it was an eye-opening read for me. I often hear liberals repeating that it's not really a violent text, without knowing anything about it, they just want to believe it, maybe because it fits with the liberal philosophy of tolerance. The old testament also has some of that, but I think Islam easily wins as the most violent mainstream religion, both in reality and in their holy texts.
The old testament is incredible violent, with literal genocides ordered by God. I struggle to see how anybody who have read both could consider it less violent than the Quran.
At the risk of going slightly off topic, quoting Hitler:
“I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were."
And to quote the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie:
"Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitler's passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed...because for centuries Christians have held Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus."
So the acts may indeed have been related. Not so much to the teachings of Jesus but to the various churches that followed.
(2) Religion does not preach, people preach. It doesn't really matter what is in the text of these old books - the only relevant question is what people do. I couldn't care less if their theological thoughts are sound or not.
if HN as a community cannot accept a simple, logical and apparently non-offending statement against christianity. Then it really needs to declare it as a policy, and endorse Islamic bashing officially!
My downvote is for the wrong premise (the parent never said that Islam preaches violence) and nonsensical argument (no one relates Hitler´s acts with christianity beacuse his motives were mainly ideological and political, while the only motive of Islamic terrorists give is religious).
You are probably being downvoted because every single Abrahamic religion advocates violence and killing as a response to blasphemy in the basic holy texts. It's an issue of facts, not offense.
@throwaway90446: Well I'll be more happy to accept this, if anyone here had quoted any verse from Quran (taken with context). But sadly people believe what they have heard, without doing much research.
"A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique."
"Then, when the sacred months have passed,
slay the idolaters wherever ye find them,
and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush."
Peaceful stuff eh? "This verse is often cited to justify attacks of Muslims on non-Muslims both in classical exegesis and in contemporary jihadism" according to Wikipedia.
