starburst:
I appreciate your contextualization of this, Davoud, so hopefully you
will appreciate mine. While it is clear that the original sense of the
laws in Judaism were capricious, there were around sixteen hundred years
between the Torah and the Q'uran. Sixteen hundred years. Roughly the
same amount of time as between Constantine and us.

Smack in the middle, and well known to the prophet, was the life of
Jesus. It is instructive to consider that his interpretation of the law
was infinitely more gentle than the guidelines given through Mohammed.
He protects a woman from the death penalty for adultery, he states that
love and brotherhood are the intent and spirit of the law and are more
important than the rituals and strictures. Most importantly, he said to
turn the other cheek. This was not Jericho. This was not Judah. This was
new and radical. Jesus was a pacifist who believed, at least to some
extent, in separating religion and politics. Early christianity was
docile enough for the Romans to find it contemptible - it needed
Augustine's brilliance to find a way to reconcile it to a theory of just
war. It was a difficult fit then and remains so today.

In contrast, Mohammed's behavior after Khyber was hideous - cruel,
brutal and revolting. Q'uran justifies his actions, and Hadith lauds them.

How do you feel about it? Do you see no fundamental difference between
him and Jesus?

As for secular humanism, your version of it rests heavily on 3000 years
of religious tradition. Having seen as much of the world as you, and
perhaps knowing a bit more about the past, I am deeply sceptical of
humanity's ability to define morality outside of any religious context.
Most who tried to do so were unpopular or brutal. Take your pick.

I do appreciate your point of view. I understand why your beliefs make
it difficult for you to conceive of a morality outside of a theistic
(or other religious) framework. So be it. My life experience and the
experiences of my circle of friends and acquaintances tells me
otherwise.

I'll have to leave the evolutionary argument for morality to the
geneticists and the anthropologists; suffice it to say that I believe
that my secular humanism is informed more by millions of years of
primate evolution than it is by 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian
teaching.

As for Jesus, I can't make any logical leap from his imputed teachings
and any religion I have seen. If he is in fact a historical figure he
is not the first to say that we ought to be nice to each other; not
even the first to be martyred for saying that. I know nothing of what
he said or thought; I know only what others have imputed to him. I
would have to question him personally, ask him to examine for himself
the religion that took his name, the acts that adherents of that
religion have done in his name, and see if he would endorse it. If he
is a deity and a pacifist, I would like to ask him why he told George
Bush to invade Iraq, but did not tell him to rush to the aid of Katrina
victims. Indeed, I would like to ask him why there were Katrina
victims. Of course I am being facetious; Jesus didn't tell Bush to
invade Iraq (unless Cheney is the crypto-Second-Coming) and hurricanes
have natural, not supernatural, causes. No, I think Jesus must have
been a secular humanist; his imputed teachings on moral issues is too
close to the view held by secular humanists for him to have been
anything else.

Of course I see a difference between Muhammad and Jesus. One is held to
be god's prophet, the other a manifestation of god himself. I don't
believe any of it. One made up a religion, the other had a religion
made up in his name. The vast majority of adherents to both religions
do not practice very strictly the teachings of the respective
religions. In some cases that's called hypocrisy (the Saudi and Kuwaiti
royal families riddled with alcoholics and heroin addicts, e.g. Also
child-molesting clerics, gay gay bashers, all gay bashers, and on and
on).

Aside: my most memorable "Islamic moment" was when I lived in the Yemen
Arab Republic, also known at that time as North Yemen. Yemen -- "the
ancestral home of Usama bin Laden" as it is said, is almost always
described as an ultra conservative Islamic society. Yet the standing
joke among my Yemeni friends was that the national beverage is not the
bitter brown concoction that takes one of its names from the Yemeni
seaport of Mukka (Mocha), but Johnny Walker Red. When we would get
together socially, as soon as someone suggested cocktails, they would
say "Bis'millah" -- in the name of Allah. This is blasphemy of the
highest order, but a popular joke in Islamic Yemen.

(I don't fault anyone for the way they spell Muhammad, but I haven't
been able to spell it "Mohammed" since I learned Arabic, because
applying English pronunciation rules to that spelling leads to a
pronunciation that is just a bit too far from the Arabic pronunciation
for an Arabist. Don't attribute that to snobbery; attribute it to the
fact that when one learns a language one is not only blessed by the
beauty of that language, which is a gift for a lifetime, but also
cursed for a lifetime by the difficulty one has in mispronouncing words
of that language after struggling to pronounce them correctly,
especially when those words are common in one's native language, but
with a different pronunciation.)

³The world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious
belief.² -- Steven Weinberg

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil
things, that takes religion." -- ibidem

Davoud

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usenet *at* davidillig dawt com