I found an incredibly interesting article to read....
Bangor Daily News - 11/14/09
Extremism goes beyond religion
Here's some interesting excerpts...
"Of all the charges levied against religion in general, none sticks more than the accusation that it foments violence. U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan provided an all too vivid reminder of that last week, when he killed 13 of his fellow soldiers in a horrific shooting spree at Fort Hood. Hasan is a Muslim, and though he appears to have acted on his own and without any real intent of making a specific political or religious statement, it seems quite clear that his religion played a part in motivating his actions.
Events such as this raise difficult questions about the connection between violence and religion, while offering very little in the way of solutions.
Hasan’s is an isolated case, and, to a very real extent, it has no meaning. To try to extract traditional lessons from Hasan’s actions likely would prove futile, just as previous shooting sprees carried out by disturbed individuals provided no easy morals."
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"Muslims everywhere must have felt a pang of misery when it became clear Hasan’s religion was so clearly a motivating factor."
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"But it would be too easy for people of other religions to view religiously motivated violence as merely an “Islam problem.” Too often I have heard Christians argue that Islam is an inherently violent religion compared with other world religions, specifically Christianity. This simply isn’t the case, and such claims ignore the fact that while there may be a relatively large number of Muslim extremists right now, it is still very, very small compared to the larger Muslim population."
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"The vast majority of Muslims are every bit as peaceable as the vast majority of Christians, and that’s even more true if we’re comparing American Muslims to American Christians. Wouldn’t it be odd for an innately violent religion to produce so many perfectly nice people?"
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"No, the abnormally large slice of extremism that the Muslim community must deal with now has been faced by virtually every other religion at various points in their histories. Indeed, though a smaller section of the community, Christian extremists exist. After all, it was just this past spring that anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder shot George Tiller to death at his church. The existence of Christians like Roeder no more makes Christianity an inherently violent religion than does the existence of Hasan make Islam one."
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"The results of the study indicated that those who believed the story came from the Bible were more aggressive than those who believed it was extra-biblical, and those who believed that God explicitly sanctioned the war were more aggressive still. While this was true of both Christians and non-Christians alike, the effect was more pronounced for Christians."
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"So what are the religious to do when someone claims that religion promotes violence? Surely we can’t be held responsible for the Nidal Malik Hasans and Scott Roeders of the world. Were we to somehow do the impossible and purge the world of all religion, various other ideologies would remain, be they cultural or political. And extremism is something any ideology can foment. Just as it would be wrong to view extremism as purely an “Islam problem,” it likewise would be wrong to view it as purely a “religion problem.”" (atheists are still in the same boat....like I said)-----------
This guy makes so many of the same points that I tried to get across in this thread.
If we just left it at Islam is dangerous none of these points would have been made.
Here's the
article again.
