Note how this t-shirt design relates to that Buffalo television guy who chopped off his ex-wife's head. And didn't god order Abraham to gut his own son on that rock? Wow. Neat. Isn't that spectacular.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
You don't say?
Note how this t-shirt design relates to that Buffalo television guy who chopped off his ex-wife's head. And didn't god order Abraham to gut his own son on that rock? Wow. Neat. Isn't that spectacular.
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6 comments:
Except the God of The Old Testament had one very good aspect which that Buffalo guy didn't have: it was understood that we could argue back.
As an example, as a God capable of Malevolence, he clobbers Job on a sporting dare, a sort of Celestial "Trading Places", yet Job tells him to Fuck Off. God gets into a royal tussle over the mouse that roared...but in his world the mouse can roar...
In the world of Allah, anything that dares squeak, never mind roar, must be obliterated--and by no means is the Believer to be patient and let Allah do the dirty work himself. A Believer, in fact, is explicitly encouraged to do an earthly preemptive strike for Allah. And a Believer knows what he's gotta do.
Who are the most committed to "The God of the Old Testament"? Da Juice. Who are the most decentralized, splittist, unendingly in your face argumentative with each other and those outside the creed, followers of a "major" religion? Da Juice. Even the madcap variety of Christians who ain't Catholics, the other big group [outside of Islam] to owe much to The God of the Old Testament, can't compare, pound for pound, with the sheer anarchy of what is means to drink Da Juice. But the Juice have hardly an historical record, in the last couple of millenia, of treating each other. or those outside, in a way that stands outside of reasonable decency.
Islam, though, well, that is by far the least varied of the major religions. And in Shariah there is a uniform, totalitarian, ideology that was really new in major religions, and which has been a powerful agent in the advance of the creed.
An historian needs to look at the accumulation of history to see how the words in a book have been read, and what "guides to undersanding" have been set up by a religion in the cause of that reading. And there, the divide between those who demand submission and those who revel in questioning, has unfolded as an enormous difference.
To set out an "equivalence" here is, to put it mildly, fatuous.
Without question, an Islamic Believer is not supposed to question. But one wonders if Believers, across the board, are really taught by their religious leaders to question rather than smother. If we take the Bible as the beautiful tapestry of literature that it is, we get wonderful themes in its new testament about perpetual forgiveness and putting your friends ahead of the self (getting whacked up on a cross is a pretty bold exit on this theme).
As for what a historian ought to do, well, a historian has both to weigh the evidence of the past, but also be engaged in the current events of his or her present day community. So to post what I posted is to continue a pesky Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that the pesky David Hume continued himself during that pesky mid-18th century. What, now we're in 2009, and just a month ago a highschool board in Beulah, North Dakota, banned "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" for four days because a janitor and teacher whipped others into a frenzy and said the book was nothing but porn. Four days later, the embarrassed school board said, "Well, we now understand our ignorant ways, and we un-banned the book."
Again: is this 2009? Or, to quote Mencken from the outset of the Scopes Trial:
"Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge." What a doozy.
And yes, the Jews have an excellent intellectual tradition (at least not the True Believer Literalist ones), the one you speak of. You're also right to demonstrate that there's a Collingwood way of looking at the past, but there's also a Voltaire-ian way of looking at those same Dark Ages. We thank our ancestors for pushing forth, and I don't think you or I disagree that we compliment them when we find more evidence that disagrees with their previous theories and assertions.
My beef with a text — religious or non-religious — should not be confused that I have some beef with any one ethnicity more than another: right now, it is Islam Militant that is the threat. But one needs to keep the dialog going in all corners. It's the Literalists who, with a bit of irony, don't understand literature — or in this day and age, the Muslim man who literally believes his Quran, and chops off his wife's head because some Absolutist Deity told him it was alright.
right now, it is Islam Militant that is the threat.
or rather, it is the most readily identifiable threat: they're ugly, they throw firecrackers and they tell you loud and clear they want you dead. far more insidious and close to home are the evangelicals.
Pepe's bete noire.
y'all are spending plenty o'time worrying about the wacko varietal. someone has to keep an eye out on the other crazies.
we're keeping an eye on you just fine
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