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Notes -
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
How does this work as a practical matter? How are modern people able to read a 1400-year-old version of Arabic?
Think of the Quran as the bedrock anchor to Arabic. All Muslims are expected to pray five times a day which involves reciting memorized surahs (basically short "chapters"). The more surahs you knew the better, and the most venerated achievement was memorizing the entire Quran (earning the title of Hafiz meaning "Protector"). So literacy was directly encouraged and maintained through this daily repetition and crucially this practice was never relegated to just a clergy caste (which doesn't really exist in Islam).
There's still going to be some linguistic drift over the years but it's necessarily going to stay banded to the Quran's version of Arabic. Think about how different English would sound today if all English speakers maintained a 1400 year old tradition of reciting original passages from Beowulf every day.
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Your view of Islam is too fixated on mainstream Sunni ideology and argumentation, which makes you mistake the map for the territory. Theologically arguments about Quran and Hadith are interesting but they have a distorting effect if you are trying to deduce whether Islam can be compatible with a fulfilling life.
Islam is ultimately nothing more than a sum of Muslims and their communal practices. In today's world Muslims are often (but not always) in the position of a poor backwards ignored uneducated masses. Even when they move to rich western countries with theoretical equal citizenship they are hardly more than an unwanted minority barely tolerated because the locals don’t want to clean the sewers themselves. So the practice of the religion is heavily influenced by this inferiority complex and backwardness. Muslim populations have a habit of sticking together, fatalism, being wary of outside influences because they instinctively feel that the outsiders will only bring more harm and humiliation. They have a point.
But this wasn’t always the case. When the conditions allowed, Islam in history also acted as a vessel for wildly creative philosophy, cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom. There are a myriad of ways to work around the limitations of Quran and Hadith. Quran is quiet an obtuse text and there are a million trillion Hadith with contradictory opinions. This is a religious tradition that created as divergent streams as Sufism and Salafism for this exact purpose.
I am also an ex-Muslim by the way. But over time I got to recognise my rejection was more based on a feeling of class superiority than any deeper inquiry. That’s how Turkey works unfortunately and I don’t plan to abandon my social class anytime soon. But I also recognise that if the economic and political currents change Islam is more than capable of once again becoming a religion of good life and progress instead of the current bigoted mess.
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It's a bit exclusionary to claim that CINOs are Christians while MINOs are not. Yes, Islam places tighter controls on the doctrine, but it's still variant enough to spawn Salsfism/Wahhabism, which, as I understand, is something of a Calvinism. Or Jadidism, if you want legalist interpretations of the Quran that embrace modernity. Or Sufism, if esoteric intepretations are needed.
In general, I think studying the history of Islam in Russian Empire and the USSR is quite important for the evolution of modern secularized Islam. Muslim-majority countries often do not allow religious pluralism: there's a single branch of Islam that is accepted and everyone else is a heretic. When a Christian or an atheist state tells you, "you all are Muslims, even this Ahmasomething guy, now shut up, smile and hold hands or it's Siberia for you", this does wonders for intrafaith dialogue.
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In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.
If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.
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They do this with Christianity, too, and they just love them some "former/ex-Evangelical/Fundamentalist" who is now out there saying "it ain't necessarily so" (sorry, Bart Ehrman, but you're the poster child for this as far as I'm concerned).
I don't know. From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.
I think it works both ways; for the liberals who have discarded religious tradition but aren't out-and-out declared atheists (they'd probably mumble something about being agnostic if pushed on it), the liberal Christians/Muslims/Jews give them that aura of authority by association, too, by coming out with "Yes, guys, you're in good with God because Godself never said nothing about contraception/polyamory/queer trans IVF babies" and propping them up that way. It's a two-way transaction: the religious liberals get the acceptance and support of the mainstream liberals, and the mainstream liberals accept them as weapons to use against the redneck knuckledraggers: "Oh, A is educated and knows the history and theology, unlike Bubba-Joe the Southern Babtist".
laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation? Very big on this, that the True Pure Gospel Message had been corrupted and infiltrated by human interpolations and interpretations and that you had to go back to the Source. All through the history of Protestantism, there have been new denominations created over "No, we have the One True Pure version" - not to be picking on the Baptists, they just have the most accessible example for this in the Trail of Blood. 'Our church is the One True Church which survived in secret down the centuries despite the corruption and falling-away of others' (usually it's we Catholics who get it for this). The insistence about the KJV translation is just one attempt at the preservation of inerrancy, a complex topic of its own, but comparable for the necessity of adding in "in the original manuscripts" to cover this problem.
Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.
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Unless you're some weird flavor of Greek-Catholic I've never heard of... You know that there were various latin translations, and the current one (the vulgate) wasn't finalized until St Jerome, several hundred years into the A.D., right? That's an awful long time for errors to creep in before we get into the translation stuff.
Maybe that's why the Catholic church has the reputation for changing quicker than the Orthodox churches (probably the only groups for which that comparison is valid).
Right, the Protestant Reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc.), following Erasmus, were going back to the actual Greek and Hebrew, so the "translations are the problem" take doesn't apply here.
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Oh, I know about St. Jerome and the Vulgate and the Septaguint.
But the "real Holy Book has been perverted by corruptions over the years so we have to go back to the original texts in the original language" isn't unique to Moslems, is what I'm saying.
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I think most of them, heart of heart don’t actually believe but don’t want to admit it to themselves. They like the trappings, the music, the friends they see at church, and the idea of helping their fellow man. It just boggles the imagination that someone could legitimately believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth says that something is wrong and you given the equivalent of a “yeah, but i want it to be okay so it is okay.” Ideals, especially ideals that you hold dear always have consequences. And to me, the absolute hallmark of a person believing a given set of propositions is whether they change their behavior in light of that.
Most people really use religion as a security blanket or insurance policy.
Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”
55% of American adults believe that the bible is inerrant, so that is the most common belief, and is usually taken as pretty important—Protestants tend to have a high view of scripture, and Catholics also affirm that the scriptures are infallible, I belief. (Officially speaking, of course. That doesn't mean every layman knows every thing.)
Ah, you're referring to 1 Corinthians 7:12.
Here's the passage:
I've seen some take this as talking about Jesus' own teachings on divorce, and still affirm that Paul is infallible. Some others think that Paul is fallible in that passages, since he recognizes it as from himself, even if he's infallible in general. In any case, Paul goes on to say at the end of the same chapter:
This reads to me as that it might be defending or affirming his authority, in some sense, at least. He does so more strongly in other places. Paul says in the same book (1 Cor 14:37),
In 2 Peter, it says
So there, at least, Paul's writings were considered to be scripture.
But 55% is barely better than half. And for those who consider it to have errors, I think you’d have to figure out what they don’t buy for the thing to make sense. 63% of Americans call themselves Christians, and 55% of Americans hold the Bible as inerrant. Which gives almost 10% who don’t. But “has errors can mean anything from very minor typographical errors to “oops we have the wrong books”.
I personally think the Jesus of history is best reflected by the Ebionites’ tradition, which would be a fairly strong “yes there are errors” thing. But then again, I don’t think anyone else would call Ebionites Christian in the modern sense.
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Thank you for your explanation of 1 Corinthians 7. I’d probably respect it more if it did make a distinction between inspiration and personal best judgment, but I can see how the text supports your interpretation. Agnostically speaking, I probably shouldn’t hold it against Paul in the event that he either truly always speaks with inspiration or honestly believes that he does.
I’m having trouble squaring some of the statistics in your link with broader statistics in the USA. In particular, their survey would have it that 71% of Americans, in 2021, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God in some sense (even if it might contain errors). But in 2021, only 63% of Americans said they were Christian.
So is the discrepancy all made up of Jews and Muslims? Are there “unaffiliated” people who nevertheless believe the Bible to be inspired by God? It would be helpful to know how the responses in the American Bible Society survey split up by stated religious affiliation, honestly.
In any case, this certainly supports the idea that a large percentage of Christians think the Bible “has no errors” (even if many say some of it is “symbolic and not literal.”) Still, as an outsider, I think I’m still most inclined to define “Christian” to mean people who believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t think that someone who believes that Paul believed in an imminent apocalypse and writes with reference to that view is somehow “not Christian” if they still think that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and will someday return to judge us all, for example.
To be clear, I gave two differing interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 that could be consistent with asserting the infallibility of Paul in his letters.
As to the surveys, that's a good point. Here's another poll with a number higher than 63%, which is odd as well: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx
It's less clear in the options than the American Bible Society survey, but it does have a number higher.
I wonder if these have different sampling mechanisms, and ones unrepresentative of the general public?
Pew research appears to be depending on data from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/religious-projections-appendix-a/ Gallup appears to be using telephone calls: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/394616/220706ViewsofBible.pdf
American bible society also had theirs from online surveys, but its number was higher than Pew's, so it's not just surveys vs. telephone.
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I disagree that most churchgoers don't believe in a way that would be hard to admit to themselves.
There are so many degrees of belief, especially about confusing things on which one is not an expert, that it only takes a small amount of rationalization to deal with any discrepancy. All you have to do is consider doctrinal disputes to be above your pay grade and defer to the theological experts, who assure you there is a complicated answer.
E.g. you might believe in quantum physics, without being bothered by the fact that different physicists subscribe to different interpretations of superposition.
I don’t think we’re talking about an obscure concept here. What the Bible says is more or less “gays, among others cannot inherit the Kingdom.” That’s not “well I’m not an expert so…” it’s plain text, and plainer if you read Leviticus.
But even so, if a person says they believe something and try to wiggle away when the rubber meets the road, I don’t think it’s a belief they hold that strongly. If I thought that quantum theory allowed for faster computers, I might well invest in a company trying to build one. If I thought there were martians on Mars, I’d send a signal if I could. If I think history is a process then I’d be looking to find patterns that allow me to predict the future in the past.
I'm no Bible expert, but I claim that even if it's relatively starkly written, that's still not a real problem for most people. Again I think quantum mechanics is a good analogy, with all sorts of intuitively-wrong-sounding claims made by supposed experts with tons of social proof.
I agree that if you start looking for patterns on your own it's pretty clear, but I think most people are (mostly rightly) in a state of learned epistemic helplessness on most topics.
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I don't think Ehrman is a fair example. He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.
As an aside, I think it's kind of funny that Ehrman is often viewed as some kind of fire-breathing skeptic by Christian apologists (if I had a penny for every time i heard an apologist say something along the lines of "even Bart Ehrman accepts/believes/doesn't deny X") despite the fact that most of his positions are pretty middle of the road and sometimes even conservative in his field.
But a lot of the atheist/anti-Christian/anti-Fundamentalist places like presenting him as such. "Prominent Christian theologian says view of the Bible is bunk" goes over better than "Non-believer says view of the Bible is bunk".
Are you sure? I can't remember ever seeing Ehrman presented as a Christian. He's always been open about being an evangelical who lost his faith when he was pretty young. Though he says it had nothing to do with his study of the Bible and was instead related to his inability to reconcile the problem of evil.
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I would be surprised if this is true given the experience of the Christian equivalents.
To be clear, the Christian tradition is similarly clear and firm to the Islamic tradition on many hot-button issues. It isn't particularly the case that, say, Christianity was historically ambiguous about sexual morality in a way that Islam was not. Nonetheless many churches have been hollowed out, and I am unsurprised to see the same process going on in Islam. Catholicism, if anything, is more explicit about many of these laws than Islam, and yet most Catholics defy that.
My guess is that one of the key factors here is that for most people, religious identity is something more like cultural identity or community - for most Catholics, "I'm Catholic" means "I identify as part of the Catholic community" and not "I positively assent to all the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church". Likewise I suspect for many Muslims, "I'm a Muslim" is a statement about which community group they're part of, rather than what they actually believe. And the beliefs can be substantially revised as long as the sense of group membership remains intact.
Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be. Even in religions where rule-following is a huge part of daily life, those rules are followed as something more like a cultural habit than anything else.
Pro-gay Christians aren't lying. I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false. Lying involves a sort of psychic pain - people don't like do it, and if we have to lie for a very long time, we usually trade that lie for a self-delusion. Delusions are easier and more comfortable to maintain.
The few Haider-style MINOs that exist at the moment, I feel pretty confident, are not making public claims that they privately know to be false. I doubt they are very different to the Christians or Jews who went down the same path before them.
This feels ahistorical to me. See: Iconoclasm, the 30 Years War, etc... Revisionists might claim that these disputes weren't "really" about religion. But that's just cope. Before modern times, people deeply cared about religion, even the little nitpicky things, and were often willing to fight and die for it, or even spend their whole lives in a monastery praying.
Does that mean that everyone was rules adherent all the time? Of course not. But it does mean that people thought the rules mattered. Pre or extramarital sex was taboo in nearly all Christian cultures until modern times. If you were caught doing it, it could have dire consequences.
Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.
And let's not get started on Judaism, which is just nitpicky rules all the way down.
Even if we accept that the thirty years’ war and all other similar conflicts back to Martin Luther were about religious doctrine, this was a time in which the great majority of lay people could not read and in which the majority of the peasantry barely even practiced (whether Protestant or Catholic) what we would today consider those forms of Christianity - until the late 18th century Christianity as practiced in rural Europe was a weird syncretic blend of Christianity and ancient folklore / paganism.
Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.
Literacy was actually really high in some of these times and places. I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin. Side effect of the massive Puritan influence. It’s why political philosophy was so popular. Paine et al. would get so much mileage out of pamphlets because they were part of a long tradition.
The opening shots of the Reformation largely took place through pamphlet wars. Sure, the main audience was religious or academic. But that got diffused very efficiently to congregations.
You probably read that in Scott's review of Albion's Seed. The thing is that that phenomenon was a uniquely Puritan anomaly and not shared with the other English colonies, and certainly not with continental Europe until much later.
While dependent on the printing press, It was more the fact that religous arguments were being made in the vernacular languages at all that caused the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. Translations of the works of men like Luther did in the 16th century what the internet did in the 21st, bringing people face to face with value systems and beliefs sometimes fundamentally alien to their own, and causing some to embark on a century-long bloody crusade to rid Europe of all the newly-revealed heretics.
Yep, that’s it. Thanks!
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I think this assumption might be wrong. I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, but my understanding is that common people of the time were interested in doctrinal disputes to a surprising degree.
A good analogy would be how a person today, though scientifically illiterate, still has an opinion on the correctness of the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, etc...
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Not a secular divorce at least. The completely legitimate and not abused annulment process however...
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Oh yeah. That the Pauline prescriptions only hold about what we'd call prostitution (or if they're all sex-positive and 'sex work is real work', they go for "no no what was meant is abusive relations where there is power imbalance") and not 'loving committed same-sex relationships'. Arguing over the definition of pais and that condemnation was of paederasty or paedophilia, not homosexuality. Claims that the Centurion and his servant (see pais) were same-sex lovers and Jesus blessed or at least approved of the relationship by healing the servant (seemingly the idea that the man whom the local Jewish community praised as righteous might care about a servant if he wasn't fucking him is too extreme to hold in contemplation; no, the only reason a big-wig would care about a household slave is if the slave was his bed-warmer. That's... not really helping the cause of "gay is okay and Christian too!", guys?)
David and Jonathan as gay lovers. Naomi and Ruth for the distaff side (and never mind that they were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, what's a little intergenerational technical incest against lesbian love?)
Yes. I've seen the arguments against Romans 1:26-27 as dispositive, for instance, and they seem profoundly weak to me. It is true that for Paul same-sex relationships are not the fundamental vice, but rather a symptom of the fundamental vice of idolatry - but that hardly seems a defense of those relationships, no more than the same observation is a defense of wickedness, covetousness, gossip, foolishness, or cruelty, all of which are in the same passage. It is true that the phrase Paul uses in those verses, para physin (against nature), is used in other contexts in a positive way (e.g. in Romans 11:24), but this in no way turns the negative reference in 1:26-27 into a positive one. Likewise you sometimes run into the argument that Paul was talking about people acting 'against nature' in the sense of against the way they are created, and he didn't know what sexual orientation is - now that we do know what it is, we understand that for a homosexual person to eschew same-sex relationships would be acting against their own nature. Therefore the Pauline argument should actually be in favour!
And so on. There's a lot of very standard but also very weak argumentation along these lines - here are two examples from the Australian debate a few years ago. I do not think these need to be particularly dignified with a response - in particular I think the second piece's conclusion that we need to be "even more Pauline than Paul" is an excuse for revisionist sophistry, where as long as we can contort a 'big idea' into something that can be awkwardly construed as supporting whatever we want to do today, we're free to ignore all the details of that idea.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that, if one approaches the Christian tradition - including both the Bible and the two thousand years of interpretation and practice on top of that - with anything like a neutral gaze, the disapproval of same-sex relationships is clear and unambiguous.
Nonetheless, people who have been raised in and identify with Christianity nonetheless sometimes want to affirm same-sex relationships. Rather than face the understandable psychic pain of needing to either abandon Christianity, or abandon their convictions about sexuality, they instead go for the oh-so-much-easier approach of convincing themselves that Christianity says what they wish it said.
I think this is an instructive example not only for Christians thinking about issues to do with sexuality, but for Christians thinking about any moral issues whatsoever - because on every issue, there is a temptation like this, a temptation to disfigure the gospel and make it into whatever is convenient for one's present interests.
At any rate -
As for Christianity, so too for Islam. I don't think the clarity of Islamic teaching on this point will help it any. Christian teaching is just as clear, and yet...
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In parts of Europe one can make the case that there is a brewing culture war between a shrinking post-Christian secular majority and a growing Muslim minority descended from poor, rural immigrants from North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Levant and Somalia between ~1960 and the present.
In the US this just isn’t the case. About 20% of US immigrants are from Muslim majority countries, although some of those belong to Christian or other minorities in those countries, eg. Coptic Egyptians, Iraqi Christians and so on. A much smaller percentage of total migrants are Muslim than even a revised figure would suggest, since of course the official figure doesn’t include illegal migrants, very few of whom are Muslim. By contrast in much of Western Europe the vast majority of non-EU immigrants are Muslim. American Muslims also have modest birthrates - higher than the average (approx. 2.5 per woman) but not the very high figures one sometimes sees for some European immigrant groups (eg. Libyans in the UK have a tfr in excess of 5 iirc).
Also different socioeconomic classes of Muslims.
American Muslims (and South Asians, or any immigrant group other than Latin Americans) are from the top IQ percentiles of their homelands. Not exactly the case for the UK.
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One of the most vacuous debates I ever got into on Facebook (before I realised that debating with anyone on Facebook is almost invariably a complete waste of time) was when a friend-of-a-friend who lived in the UK shared a post on their* Facebook profile with a list of people that Pride is "for". The list included trans women, disabled people, Muslims etc. (Note that this post didn't say "LGBT Muslims" were welcome at Pride, which would certainly be commendable - just "Muslims".) Bankers and police officers, by contrast, were explicitly demarcated as persona non grata.
I pointed out, fairly politely in my view, that it seemed weird to say that Pride is "for" a particular group when half of that group think that homosexuality should be illegal - not merely societally condemned, but a criminal offense. If the point of Pride is to celebrate LGBT people, why would you make a point of inviting a specific group, a majority of which think LGBT people are sinners and should be punished for their crimes? There was certainly no concomitant effort to invite homophobic Christians.
I was immediately dogpiled, with numerous white non-Muslim Brits simply denying the claim outright and insisting that the poll on which I was basing my assertion must be faulty and have poor methodology and actually Allah is queer and so on. In unrelated contexts I've seen plenty of mental gymnastics about how homophobia wasn't a thing in the Middle East until after white Europeans got there, and actually men in the Middle East hundreds of years ago used to rape little boys in addition to little girls, so how could they possibly be homophobic?
God, the lengths some people will go to in order to quell their cognitive dissonance. It was only then that I realised that Pride was no longer about "gender and sexual minorities" at all, but a general celebration of wokeness as a concept. Funny how mission drift sneaks up on you.
*Funny the amount of people who only "realise" they're "non-binary" immediately upon starting in art school.
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There is good reason why atheism ended on garbage dump of history, why outspoken atheists are in the current year seen as racists and fascists.
Old, bolshevik style smashing religion with sledgehammer worked, but this new way, hollowing religion from the inside and dressing in its skin, works much better.
It worked on Christianity, despite many Christian religious scholars protesting that Christianity was never tolerant and LGBTQ+ affirming, and it is working on Islam now.
And it works well. 100 years ago, 50 years ago it would be unthinkable for Pope openly display and worship pagan idols in the Vatican. Today, it is just another day.
pro and contra positions on the controversy.
Pachamama happened in October 2019, and COVID possibly began October 2019. Coincidence? Or demons?
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The backlash to the current pope’s… antics… is rather intense and would likely have led to a coup attempt if he was in better health.
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To what pagan idols and idolatry are you refering here?Nevermind, the links weren't showing up properly for me.
Ordinary interfaith ecumenical ceremony, no big deal.
Except when you take Christianity even slightly seriously, then it looks like really big thing, thing from the book of Revelation.
Not many people do in this century and none of them are in position of power and influence in Vatican.
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Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions? We definitely still have those. (Or, more precisely, while there are minor textual differences between manuscripts, we can be sure of the text of the vast majority, and even more if you only care about ones where the differences are at all meaningful)
No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.
But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.
This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.
Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:
Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...
Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).
There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.
tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.
* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Interestingly, from this side of the fence, Islam was treated early on as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion of its own - see Dante putting Mohammed and Ali into the bolge of the Schismatics in the Eight Circle of Hell in the Inferno.
People of the time certainly didn't consider it original: "And when Our verses are recited to them, they say, "We have heard. If we willed, we could say [something] like this. This is not but legends of the former peoples." (Q8:31).
The modern revisionist school (people like Fred Donner and Stephen Shoemaker) sees Islam as a sort of ecumenical Abrahamic movement of "Believers" that reached out to conquer the Holy Land (which might explain the smoothness of the conquests). Later Caliphs had to construct a more exclusionary identity for "Muslims" in the wake of Mohammed's death (since most of the biographical material is relatively late by Gospel standards)
IMO Muslims early on probably didn't think of themselves as a distinct and overriding religion. Besides the reasons stated, the Quran says that it was sent so the Arabs could have their own revelation (which fits with the absence of an Arabic Bible at the time) and multiple times it speaks to insist the other groups judge by their books.
The Qur'an clearly relies on other faiths to back Islam (Q7:157) and tells them to judge by their existing books - the doctrine of corruption has done a remarkable job at obscuring that Islam can't actually be a theologically self-sustaining religion for this reason.
The book gives us a criteria to prove Islam and...it lies with other faiths. You can see why the rejection of the Qur'an by Jews prompted such issues and polemics and why Muslims today have this weird mix of token respect for the Bible as an earlier stage in the fossil record but also it's corrupt and you don't need it and maybe don't even read it cause people changed it to lie.
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If these sort of "if you just look at the material reality, you will discover you're completely wrong" arguments have been roundly dismissed in discussions about actual material reality, then why are wwe expecting anyone to take them seriously when the conversation is explicitly about religion?
Don't be so sure, at least for some the best path to atheism is autistically researching the origin of the holly books. When you see the profane and base materialness and petty power struggles of the Church's body it really sours the whole thing.
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Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following.
I read you as saying that things are hard to interpret or make sense of, and so we can't trust people to do so, religiously or in real life.
I read the post I was originally responding to as saying that things are hard to translate, and so we can't trust translations. But that particular difficulty can be overcome by not using a translation, since we have texts. So then I was expressing confusion, since I wouldn't have expected that a muslim would consider the bible safe to trust if we read it in the original greek or whatever the way they would think of the Quran.
That seems to hold independently of whether things are hard to interpret or make sense of.
No, I'm saying that even when things are easy to interpret and make sense, people are still going to reject them, if they go against someone's preconceived ideas. Even if these people swear up and down they they're unbiased, and just searching for the truth.
On the other hand, when it comes to religion, most of them openly state they're a matter of faith, so why would you be surprised that people reject things that contradict their religion?
Probably! I still appreciated the question, though. Even with religion, sometimes you can have an interesting conversation with someone who is willing to take these questions seriously.
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I guess Christianity never had much chance of becoming tied to just one language, given that it was a movement centered around Greek-language stories of a man who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew and lived in an empire controlled by Latin-speakers. But in Christianity's case this probably became one of its strengths. It is unlikely that Christianity could have taken over the Roman Empire if its leaders had been determined to focus the religion around just one language.
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As an exmoose myself, I think this is an ironic thing in Islam because, despite how much Islamic apologists hammer on this, Islam is paradoxically destroyed by this more than Christianity is.
For one: the Qur'an almost never indisputably says that the Torah and Gospel are lost. It often means that the book was covered up or misinterpreted (Gabriel Reynolds has some work on this). It does however say that Jews and Christians should judge by those books (e.g. Q5:47, Q5:68). Which implies they're extant. The doctrine of total corruption was a later necessary apologetic tactic once it was absolutely clear to everyone (there probably wasn't a written Arabic Bible to compare in Mohammed's time) that the Bible and Qur'an couldn't be reconciled (see Q7:157).
So either way, Islam is false. The Quran is the direct speech - not word - of God. And it tells Christians and Jews to either judge by a book that doesn't or never existed (the Qur'an doesn't seem to know what the Gospel is, or much about Jesus) or Christians and Jews should judge by a book that disprove Islam and/or is false.
Beyond that, the Bible is unquestionably unreliable in a dozen ways. The problem is that biblical scholarship ends up harming Islam more. We know the sources for the Qur'an and we know the ages at least of the Biblical stories. One is vastly older and more apocryphal (the story of the snake in the Garden in Islam descends from a later apocryphal story - a lot of Muslims who're ignorant of the specifics of the Bible blissfully cite similarities as proof of their faith, not knowing things like this).
As I said Muslims don't have access to the hermaneutical tactics liberal Christians have used. There's no blaming it on imperfect human messengers distorting God's message or the mores of the day that must naturally show up in any text or in the inherent, deliberate multiplicity in the viewpoints like with the Gospels. The Qur'an is said by doctrine to literally be pre-existent, an atemporal divine attribute, and to sit in heaven. It can't be gainsaid or reformed. This makes its pronouncements strong but it also makes them brittle.
Once you apply critical methods to the Qur'an (an easy trap to fall into once you see Muslims applying it to defeat the Bible) and come to the conclusion that Dhul-Qarnayn is merely the Arabized version of the Alexander Legend common at the time...there's no saving anything.
Pull on any one string...
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I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying. I think it’s extremely silly to believe Jesus was a pro-LGBT feminist socialist but I think people who say that aren’t lying they’re just acting in the venerable millennia-old tradition of interpreting the Bible to justify whatever you want to do right now whether it’s legalizing gay marriage or looting Mesoamerica.
Best I can tell reading the gospels for myself, a sincere attempt to follow the teachings and examples therein would not be at all compatible with any modern political philosophies of any significance, right or left. I wonder if it’s a similar deal with the Quran.
While the Jesus of the gospels doesn’t come off as a Republican, he definitely does come off as a moralizing leader of a strict, high commitment religion holding non-negotiable commands for followers but not pushing broader social change. This codes right in this day and age.
I guess. But "not pushing broader social change" is a pretty big deal. The entire NT assumes either implicitly or explicitly Christians will always be a powerless minority in the world, so there's tons of advice on how to navigate an unbelieving world, but nothing about how to actually run or structure society at large, since none of the authors seemed to dream that Christianity would ever become a popular, let alone state-enforced, creed. Jesus and the earliest disciples seem to have operated on the assumption that they were just going to have to "ride it out" until God came down (very soon) and set things right himself, and the (in)famous teachings urging poverty and passivity are given in light of that. Maybe such an ethos is right-wing, but it's not very attractive or useful to right-wingers today, nor has it historically been very attractive to Christian potentates, which is why so much ink has been spilled then and now to justify what boil down to the same old pagan statecraft and social mores, but with a cross on top.
Strongly disagree with this. Everything from the assertion that there's no advice on how to run a large society, to the implication that the authors were incorrect to assume that Christianity would never be popular.
As far as advice on how to run a large society, there was plenty of direction regarding church organization throughout the book. Heck, Jesus seems to spend more time criticizing the existing leadership, and showing them a better path by example, than he does doing anything else.
As far as the church never being popular:
It's easy to interpret essentially all of those teachings as more metaphorical, and I think doing so is more accurate than not. "The world" can be against Christianity even if Christianity is the dominant religion, simply by virtue of the world being worldly, or most Christians not yet being truly converted.
Also very easy to (and plenty of people do) consider Catholicism a sort of co-opted Christianity, one which at some point lost its way. Hard to argue that Christianity is a popular world religion if its two largest champion institutions (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) are not Christian.
That's very different. Most of this advice is given as just that, how to run the church as an insular community, and always defined against the larger unbelieving world. The Old Testament is full of laws, punishments, and rewards, but there's almost none of that in the NT.
This is true, but there's no indication that Jesus or anyone else thought they would ever not be in an unbelieving world, at least until the eschaton. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head I don't believe there's a single place in the NT where it's even suggested that one day Christians might be kings, or generals, or even public magistrates. That verse in Luke is, as far as I'm aware, the only spot in the whole NT that even comes close to a suggestion that Christians should ever do violence against anyone else, so it naturally comes up a lot in discussions about this. But just a few verses later when the priests and the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, and the disciples try to defend him by force, he tells them to put the swords away. Why Luke included this bit, who knows for sure, but to me it looks more like Jesus in this story wanted to make a point that swords were in fact useless because what was happening was preordained.
There are plenty of places in the NT where God does violence on behalf of Christians (the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the earthquake that frees Peter from prison) but none where Christians are encouraged to do violence against anyone else, except for the episode at Gethsemane which is not approved of by the narrative of any of the gospels.
You make good points, mainly I disagree that things like "the world will hate you" referred to political power, and I especially disagree with the implication that this means that the later political power wielded by Christianity contradicts the Bible.
I think most of the "the world will hate you" referred to spiritual hatred etc., including the hatred each of us has towards our own higher impulses. Even in very Christian society, such as Christian Rome, there were plenty of high-level leaders who weren't sold on the religion. They were wolves in sheep's clothing, so to speak. That's not to say Christianity was not politically powerful, but spiritually it had much less power than "the world" i.e. all influences other than Christianity.
I generally read the NT as an amendment to the Old Testament. If the NT doesn't contradict the OT, then the teachings of the OT are still in force. With that in mind, I think it makes sense that the NT was more focused on the higher law--the lower law (all the laws etc.) had all been given and now Jesus was attempting to teach the next step. So yes, there was very little focus on laws etc. because that had already been covered. Kings, priests, etc. already had political power in Israel and now the next step was to take some of that away from them because they were misusing it.
I suppose I'm nitpicking, especially if that implication was unintentional. I agree with your point that Jesus taught poverty and passivity which is not very appealing in today's political climate.
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1 Timothy 2:4 does:
Pauls' asking them to pray for the kings, since kings too are part of God's plan of salvation.
You're right that that is fairly implicit, and I'm not really recalling any other such passage. I suppose there were Roman centurions, if we're counting low level offices.
Romans 13 describes violence being done by men favorably, but doesn't explicitly instruct Christians to do so. In revelation, martyrs wish for violence, but no Christians are doing it, I believe.
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And that’s a pretty big difference between Christianity and Islam- the Bible has a lot about how to be ruled, but next to nothing about ruling.
This is Sam Harris' point about "render unto Caesar" having no Qur'anic equivalent.
Mohammed was Caesar
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Well, the old testament has more, but that's not enormously applicable.
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As an exmoose like @ymeskhout I am willing to give the absolutely ignorant "cultural Muslims" who literally know nothing a pass but many of the more educated types I'd say are lying or at least misleading via omission.
There's one every common example that drives me crazy: anyone who knows anything about Islam and says, in a debate with the broadly Protestant audience in the Anglosphere, "that's not in the Qur'an" is lying. Whether they set out to be malicious or not, they're exploiting the sola scriptura assumptions of their audience (it's very easy to assume Islam is the same because of its elevated view of the Qur'an, but the Five Pillars are literally impossible without the Hadith) to mislead and soothe their audience. This is especially liable to go unpunished on panel shows that don't have the time to drill into Islamic jurisprudence and the Legends EU-like hierarchy of sources.
There's no way to understand basics of Islam without understanding why this is misleading.
I've seen this on both sides. I've seen crypto-conservatives do it to defend against New Atheists, and I've especially seen progressives do it. And, imo, anyone that does this without explaining that the "Sunni" in "Sunni Muslim" that makes up 90% of the Islamic world literally means "one who follows the Sunnah, the ways of the Prophet" mainly found outside the Qur'an is a liar.
What about Quranists?
They're not insincere and they're not liars. But they're like the Mormons of Islam
In what sense? To me, from a Catholic background, what stands out the most about Mormons is the addition of the Book of Mormon to the canon. Quranists, as I understand, don't add anything, they just reject the hadiths. In this sense they are very similar to sola scriptura Protestants. Did you mean that all the other Muslims think they're weird?
In the sense that, if there was a debate about core Christian doctrine, most Christians wouldn't feel good about Mormons being the ones to represent the "Christian position".
They claim the title of Christian and many Christians (not all) may be fine not fighting them over it - now. But trinitarian Christians are the overwhelming majority and differ enough from Mormons that one side's answers not only don't count or aren't representative but may be offensive at times.
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Honestly this is the case for the vast majority of allegiances between immigrant/refugee groups and Liberalism. It is quickly forgotten by the Western Left that practically everybody from a progressive-tinged first world nation is about 5 jumps to the left socially on most issues, and that whilst the recent imports from wherever else are briefly aligned whilst it's in their financial interests to have a leg up, they are going to revert to form on social issues the second they're established.
Eh, I'm not sure it's a bad strategy to forge an alliance with the first generation and then try to assimilate the 2nd & 3rd generation who grow up on English language media.
The issue is that the most liberal migrants have 0-2 kids. They embrace the individualist culture while not having parents that help them get established in the housing market. They get their small condo in a city when they are in their 30s. The most conservative migrants have 8 kids and make due. When it comes to muslim immigrants we are selecting for religiousness at an extreme level.
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I've been waiting for a long time for the immigrant turn away from modern progressivism, preferably starting with a Hispanic/Asian coalition in California that finally sweeps away its white Democratic gerontocracy and cleans the place up, but it hasn't materialized yet.
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This is not borne out by their voting records, which remains solidly Democratic.
True.
On one hand, you have the high income Muslims who generally try to fit into upper middle-class white society, which means accepting the whole progressive stack and becoming a MINO.
On the other hand, you have the low income Muslims who stand to directly benefit from left-wing politics via either greater government handouts or better odds of bringing family members over.
But things will change. Recently the only Muslim-majority city in America voted to ban the gay pride flag. Looking at who is coming to America and who is having kids, the future looks much more conservative socially, but much more socialist economically.
Not really.
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Which groups are you using as a proxy? Every major demographic started as a downtrodden immigrant group. Practically the only lasting pro-left successful immigrant group I can think of is the Asian diaspora, though they've been psyopped into some sort of 'despite the fact that you're the most successful and affluent demographic ever, you're victims' mix
Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.
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All Hispanics with the exception of Cubans, and both south and east Asians.
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