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posted by n1 on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the 1+1=blasphemy dept.

Newsweek reports that ISIS has announced a new curriculum banning the study of math for students in areas of Iraq and Syria it controls. Also banned will be the teaching of music, social studies (especially anything about elections or democracy), and sports. Books cannot include any reference to evolution and teachers must say that the laws of physics and chemistry "are due to Allah's rules and laws." Students will instead learn all about "belonging to Islam," and how to "denounce infidelity and infidels." Teachers who break the rules "will be punished," according to fliers posted in ISIS-controlled territory.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by keplr on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:00PM

    by keplr (2104) on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:00PM (#95037) Journal

    The problem with fundamentalist Islam, are Islam's fundamentals. It's hard to point out exactly where these people are going astray. They are presenting and implementing a very plausible version of the faith. Their actions are easy to justify, right from reading the Qur'an. It's the problem of those who say Islam is a religion of peace, that they must bend and twist the words of their scripture to support that assertion.

    If they were Jains [wikipedia.org] acting this way, it'd be easy to point out how they're being incoherent. Muslims acting violent and intolerant are simply implementing a straightforward version of their religion.

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  • (Score: 2) by monster on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:26PM

    by monster (1260) on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:26PM (#95053) Journal

    No sacred book is a clear, coherent group of rules. Incoherences and implicit meanings are plentiful in all of them, so it's not strange that the same book can give reasons for radically different interpretations, even more if you include as canon the interpretations of "respected fathers of the church" like encyclicals, fatwas and so on. In that aspect, islam is no different than cristianism, buddhism, judaism, hinduism and the others.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 18 2014, @06:01PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 18 2014, @06:01PM (#95099) Journal

      Well, in this particular case Mohammed had to get his followers fighting against enemies while he was still alive and writing the scriptures. So it's not too surprising that they are more violent than most current religious scriptures. (Most are created by people who aren't required to fight as a religious duty during the lifetime of the prophet.) The only other case that's as violent, that I can think of, is the Biblical Old Testament...and even that has long periods of peace, or at least periods when the people grabbing up weapons weren't the Jews.) Going further field the Vedas were equally violent in origin (certainly the Bhagavad Gita is equally, or more, violent). So are the Norse Myths..at least the ones that deal with the doings of mortals more than gods. The ones that deal with gods are pretty violent too, though.

      So we've here got basically two classes:
      1) The "inspired" work of a prophet that is elaborated by generations following, but is pretty much intact, probably. Usually peaceful.
      and
      2) The mythic history of a people. Usually violent.

      The Muslim faith is an outlier, being an example of 1 that's nearly as violent as 2. This is because the prophet had to fight for his religion during his lifetime as well as write the scriptures...so the scriptures has to justify his actions.

      OTOH, it is neither true that believing a peaceful faith makes one peaceful nor that believing a violent faith makes one violent. There are entire centuries where the Muslim world has been relatively peaceful and civilized while the Christian world has been violent and barbaric. It's true, however, that since the peaceful Muslim world went down in flames under Tamerlane, the muslims have tended to be violent and barbaric. An important word here is tended. This is an artifact of history, not inherent in their religion.

      People have an extremely strong tendency to do what they want, and then justify it in terms of their religion.

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      • (Score: 2) by keplr on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:26PM

        by keplr (2104) on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:26PM (#95160) Journal

        centuries where the Muslim world has been relatively peaceful

        I'm not sure you want to commit to this statement. Peace was achieved within Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, because everyone was converted, killed, or subjugated. The borders of this vast empire were painted with the blood of Kufir, the heretics--all non-Muslims who refused to live under Islamic jurisprudence. It just happens that they went through a period of time when their internal divisions and fissures were temporarily mastered and allowed a bit of breathing room for science, art, and literature (though still stifled by the limitations imposed by Islam). Art, for example, suffered the restriction of human figures being forbidden. Although this did lead to a stunningly beautiful tradition of calligraphy and geometric art.

        A culture anchored by a violent religion will absolutely lead to violence above the human baseline. There are simply religious forms of violence which are unthinkable in a secular culture. No secular culture engages in honor killings, human sacrifices, or executions for blasphemers. These things require a religious substrate. Secular cultures can be violent also, but those types of violence just won't be found.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:32PM (#95184)

          Yay! A jihadwatch devotee comes to soylent.

          As usual over-simplification is harnessed for political ends.
          http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/figs/hd_figs.htm [metmuseum.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @01:11AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @01:11AM (#95308)

          No secular culture engages in honor killings, human sacrifices, or executions for blasphemers. These things require a religious substrate.

          Well, technically, you are correct. On the other hand, The Khmer rouge, and the NK regime come pretty darn close in spirit, if not in actual fact. But that seems to me to be a distinction with barely a hair's width of a difference.

          • (Score: 2) by keplr on Friday September 19 2014, @06:03AM

            by keplr (2104) on Friday September 19 2014, @06:03AM (#95370) Journal

            I can play that game in the other direction, and say that North Korea is actually running a state religion--making blasphemy as a crime nothing unusual. Christopher Hitchens said that DPRK was the most religious society he had ever visited, and he was no stranger to the middle East.

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 19 2014, @07:29PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 19 2014, @07:29PM (#95611) Journal

          I think, though I'm not sure, you need to check your calendar. I'm talking about the period characterized by cities like Samarkand along the silk road. Yes, there were wild people along the frontiers, like in Egypt, but the civilization was peaceful. (Yes, there was civil unrest. There nearly always is if there aren't external enemies.) These were people who made their wealth from the caravan trade along the silk route...and depended for their wealth on the caravans feeling secure within their walls, and relatively secure within the territory that they controlled.

          For that matter, the Muslim conquerors of northern Africa and into Spain were considerably less oppressive than the Christians of the same time period. Their preference was not to kill those they couldn't convert, but rather to subject them to a punitive tax rate until they changed their minds. (Not that they weren't fierce in battle, I'm talking about times where there weren't armies in collision.)

          OTOH, the Muslim countries do traditionally have a greater tolerance for slavery and physically brutal punishments for religious infractions than do modern Christian nations. (Do note the change in time.) The problem here is that the physically brutal punishments are written into Muslim tradition, where the Christians were always conflicted about this, and Jesus is essentially explicit in denouncing it. Mohamed, in contrast, considered it reasonable and proper. This makes it difficult for the adherents to his scripture to adapt to the changed circumstances. (Though one should note that the "followers" of Jesus have often been quite willing to claim religious sanction for brutality and violence, no matter what the words of their "Savior" say.)

          So while I will agree that the fanatical followers of a religion may well have attitudes towards violence that are different from the human baseline, I'm not at all convinced that this is true for the ordinary adherents of that religion. (And I'm not certain how well founded in the Koran is Sharia Law, though it is clearly a strong part of existing Muslim culture. It's amazing how different people are willing to make different generalizations from the same facts.)

          Also consider that many of the Catholic inquisitors may have both read the Bible and yet believed that what they were doing was sanctioned by Jesus. Verbal beliefs don't necessarily have much to do with belief motivated actions. Often the later verbalizations sound more like justifications only constructed after the fact, but then believed.

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      • (Score: 2) by monster on Friday September 19 2014, @07:41AM

        by monster (1260) on Friday September 19 2014, @07:41AM (#95388) Journal

        Quran is quite clear about allowing "peoples of the book" (christians and jews) to keep their faiths and customs unmolested, as long as they don't proselitize on the faithful. What is punished is converting to islam and then abandoning it, or falsely converting. In the first century of its existence, there were a lot of conversions, but they also conquered a lot of countries where the people who decided to keep their faiths could do so without problems, like with Armenia, Syria or Al-Andalus. That part of the book was respected, no matter what. However, there was also a non-religious reason to convert: Quran forbids taxing their believers, taxes can only be applied to peoples of other religions, so by converting people gained a "tax free" status and (later*) also better options to achieve social status.

        That people can choose to ignore certain parts of a doctrine to achieve their goals is neither new nor exclusive to islam. How can christians find compatible the mandate to "put the other cheek" with warring and crusading is shocking. Same with judaism and "Thou shall not kill".

        *For some generations, administrative and gubernative posts in islam were exclusively for arabs.