Ever since September 11, 2001 there has been a real angst among Westerners on how to view Muslims and their religion Islam. The right generally has condemned Islam and it's adherents, Muslims, regardless of what any one individual Muslim did. The left generally took a more tolerant view, that we cannot blame every Muslim because of what SOME other Muslims do, violent acts.
I remember even President George W. Bush going out of his way to try and make sure every Muslim was not held accountable for the acts of violent Muslims and he said Islam is generally a religion of peace.
More recently we had the October 3 conversation between Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's Real Time HBO show.
Ben Affleck vs. Bill Maher
It demonstrated that even on the left there is not uniformity in belief toward how we should view Muslims and their religion Islam.
Continued after the fold...
I was horrified on September 11, 2001 as 99% of Americans were. I was devastated by the loss of innocent life and I could not understand how humans could be so evil as to have committed such a crime. Like most Americans, we flew are flag, we drove in our car with a tiny American flag flying. We were as united with our countrymen, left and right, as we could be. Our homeland had been attacked!
At the time my manager at my job was a Pakistani Muslim who resided in the United States with his family. For all I know he may have become a U.S. citizen. I also had a devout Muslim woman who worked with me and wore a head covering. I never discussed 9/11 with either of them.
I was also attending the MCC church (a gay church) in Columbus, Ohio and we had a prayer session after 9/11 and a meeting to discuss it. While most congregants did not openly condemn Muslims, there was a definite tension in the air.
My partner was and still is a flaming liberal. He had shown great liberal tolerance toward all peoples. He sympathized with the plight of the Palestinian people. But 9/11 had a deep psychic affect on him. He subsequently became a deep hater of all Muslims and their religion Islam. Even to this day he feels this way and he and I have had quite a few very heated arguments on the subject.
I am in the Ben Affleck crowd. I do feel Ben was talking over Bill and Sam and not really listening to them, but then again both Bill and Sam are biased with their strong atheist views (discloser: I am agnostic) and I know at least Bill generally speaks out against religion in general. So are Bill and Sam's views on Islam fair or are they colored by their general criticism of religion?
I was a conservative Christian and I fully understand the mindset of a conservative religious person. I know there are varying degrees of religious thought, from ultra liberal to super fundamentalist. My background is fundamentalist.
But I since left the church and I am a liberal agnostic. God may or may not exist, we cannot know.
Having lived on both sides of the isle, religious and non-religious, I understand both viewpoints. I have tried real hard not to judge any one person based on a group that person belongs to. I prefer to judge a person based not only on THAT person's beliefs, but more importantly, their actions.
That was the crux of the argument on Bill Maher's show. Do we blame individuals on the actions of other individuals in the same group? Well, actually it was more nuanced than that.
Ben was arguing against blaming individuals based on the actions of other individuals in the same group. He was also saying that the beliefs some individuals in that group had (Islam) were different than other individual's beliefs in the same group. i.e., We cannot hold one Muslim, who is peace loving, for the actions of other Muslims, who subscribe to violence. I could not agree more with this viewpoint.
But to be fair to Bill and Sam they were NOT saying we should blame Muslims, who are peace loving, for the actions of other Muslims, who subscribe to violence. They were arguing that it is Islam itself, as a religion, and as based in their holy book, the Quran, that proscribes violence to infidels, apostates and the like and as such it is Islam itself which is a dangerous philosophy regardless of how some Muslims lead a peaceful life. They did not mean to condemn individual Muslims, but rather to warn that Islamic teachings are dangerous.
Are they? Well I am hardly an Islamic scholar and I dare to comment. I have not opened a Quran. But it is my understanding there are passages in the Quran that proscribe violence for certain peoples, once again infidels, apostates, etc. There are also passages in the Quran that also proscribe peace among neighbors and even tolerance. This is also the case for the Torah and the Christian Bible.
Do we judge Jews or Christians based on the Bible's violent messages? Or do we judge individual Jews and Christians based on how they live their lives, whether peacefully or violently?
This is no small or irrelevant matter. I am sorry to say religious extremism (more accurately fundamentalism) will be with us for the foreseeable future. Religion in general will probably always be with us, at least for many more centuries.
It is very true that extremists in the Islamic faith are using actual verses in the Quran, and their interpretation of those verses, whether in context or not, to justify violent jihad. Do we ignore this? Do we fight it? We cannot ignore it and we must fight it. How we fight it is debatable. Surely we speak out against it and we encourage moderate Muslims to speak out against it (as many have). Do we commit bloodshed to fight it? Well, that is a much harder question to answer. I think President Obama has shown his own quandary on that question. He wants to not judge Islam/Muslims in mass and yet as President he cannot allow Islamic extremists to wantonly kill Americans and our allies and threaten our national security.
So this issue is very difficult and I think most have a knee jerk attitude toward it. Some say bomb the Muslims back to the stone age. Others say we must accept Islam and not paint a broad paint brush. I think both attitudes are naïve and ignorant, if not dangerous.
So the long and short of it is both Ben, Bill, and Sam have valid points to argue and we must all come together and understand both viewpoints.
Of course, my dear partner says our world will not be OK until we abolish all religions, period. Despite my agnosticism, not only is that a fantasy, but it is unrealistic. Religion is going no where and we must figure out how a multi-cultural world can live together in peace. A real challenge indeed!!