Bible Misogyny - Twice as Violent as the Koran

With Donald Trump whipping up hysteria among the bigoted and racist Republican Party base, a much needed column in the New York Times raises the issue of the ignorance of most Americans on issues of religion, especially the violence and misogyny advocated in the Bible.  The "good book" can be downright ugly and, as noted in the column, the Bible is twice as violent as the Koran.  And, I would add that, if we are going to label some Muslims as extremists and terrorists, then the same standard needs to be applied to Christofascist extremists and Christians who commit murder and mayhem.  Here are some column highlights and I would urge readers to take the test set out in the column.  The Bible and the Koran can both be used to justify evil and Republicans busy prostituting themselves to the Christofascists need to look at the ugliness that Christianity more often than not has brought to the world and the evil the Bible would justify:

Donald Trump's proposal to bar Muslims from America may be a gift to ISIS recruitment and a grotesque echo of the sentiment behind the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese-Americans. But, like those earlier spasms of exclusion, the Trump proposal has plenty of supporters.

In one recent poll, more than three-quarters of Republicans said that Islam was incompatible with life in the United States. There’s a widespread perception in America that Islam is rooted in misogyny and violence, incorrigible because it is rooted in a holy text that is fundamentally different from others.

So here’s my quiz on religion. Some questions have more than one correct answer.

Q. Which holy book limits polygamy? ANSWER: The Quran limits a man to four wives; neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament explicitly prohibits polygamy, although Paul says that church officials should have but one wife.

Q. Which religious leader massacred an entire city, including “men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys,” saving only one prostitute and her family?  ANSWER: Bible, Joshua 6:21

Q. Who is said to have ordered a massacre of heretics and innocents alike with the explanation: “Kill them all. God will know his own”?  ANSWER: A Christian abbot in the Albigensian Crusade.

In fact, religion is invariably a tangle of contradictory teachings — in the Bible, the difference between the harshness of Deuteronomy and the warmth of Isaiah or Luke is striking — and it’s always easy to perceive something threatening in another tradition. Yet analysts who have tallied the number of violent or cruel passages in the Quran and the Bible count more than twice as many in the Bible.

There’s a profound human tendency, rooted in evolutionary biology, to “otherize” people who don’t belong to our race, our ethnic group, our religion. That’s particularly true when we’re scared. It’s difficult to conceive now that a 1944 poll found that 13 percent of Americans favored “killing all Japanese,” and that the head of a United States government commission in 1945 urged “the extermination of the Japanese in toto.”
It’s true that terrorism in the 21st century is disproportionately rooted in the Islamic world. And it’s legitimate to criticize the violence, mistreatment of women or oppression of religious minorities that some Muslims justify by citing passages in the Quran. But let’s not stereotype 1.6 billion Muslims because of their faith. What counts most is not the content of holy books, but the content of our hearts.

When I hear Americans stereotype Muslims, when they don’t actually know any Muslims, it seems to me an odd echo of anti-Semitic comments I sometimes hear in Muslim societies.

Trump’s bluster reinforces the Islamic State narrative of a clash of civilizations, and undercuts moderates. In my travels in Muslim countries, I’m sometimes asked about Islamophobia. In the past, I’ve been able to say something like: Well, the Rev. Terry Jones may be planning to burn Qurans, but he’s a fringe figure. Alas, Trump can’t be explained away as a fringe figure.

In international relations, extremists on one side empower extremists on the other side. ISIS empowers Trump, who inadvertently empowers ISIS. He’s not confronting a national security threat; he’s creating one.

More than 1,000 American rabbis have signed a joint letter welcoming refugees and noting a parallel to the late 1930s, when the United States barred most Jewish refugees. The letter noted that refugees are fleeing persecution, not committing it.

“In 1939, our country could not tell the difference between an actual enemy and the victims of an enemy,” the rabbis wrote. “In 2015, let us not make the same mistake.”

It may be human nature to fear what we don’t understand, to allow apprehension to override compassion. But this is a time that tests our fundamental values, and let’s not surrender to base impulses.

Hallucination and Insanity or Divine Revelation?

If one looks at Islam and the so-called prophet Mohamed and many of the early saints of the Catholic Church they share something in common.  All claimed to hear God (or Allah) speaking to them.  Nowadays, most medical and mental health experts would describe such people as suffering from mental health issues, yet far too many across the world continue to allow their lives to be controlled by the words and writings of what I increasingly view as the mentally ill.  And mental illness surely seems to be what plagues Pat Robertson and so many of the professional Christian set - and a very large percentage of Republican politicians.   Yes, as a piece in The Atlantic notes, there was a time when "hearing voices"- think Joan of Arc and Mohamed - or "hearing God speak" were thought to be signs of holiness or divine inspiration, but with what we know now in the realm of mental health, why do we continue to give deference to such people?  Here are highlights from The Atlantic:

What is the difference between a homeless man who claims to speak to God and a saint who says the same? When I posed this question to Andrew Scull, the author of the recent book Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, he chuckled and cited a quip by the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.”

When Russell said it, it was an atheist’s diss against mystical visions, and against religion generally. Coming from Scull, it’s more of an invitation to explore the complicated relationship between religion and madness over thousands of years of cultural history. Scull argues that stories of the supernatural—often paired with stories of madness—have long been a source of power for religious organizations, proof of their authority to interpret the presence of the divine—and evil—on earth.

For a long time, the influence of God or Satan was a sufficient explanation for all sorts of phenomena, from so-called possessions to the kinds of visions supposedly experienced by Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila. Now, those who decode visions and possessions are psychiatrists, not priests, and explanations are rooted in the individual mind, not the interference of God or the devil.

In the deserts of ancient Israel, a homeless man who was said to have visions and perform miracles was revered by some as the son of God. Which leaves two questions: How should claims of divine encounters be interpreted in the modern world? And if a homeless man on the street were actually the messiah, would he be recognized?

Throughout biblical times, apparent mental disturbances were often seen as divine punishments or demonic possessions. Rarely, they were understood as heavenly visions. But even this boundary was fluid. “Saul is seen at one point as behaving like a prophet, then later on people see him as not entirely right in the head, attributing that to God punishing him for not slaughtering everybody when he was supposed to,” Scull said.

Divine visions were also an important part of how Christians proved their spiritual authority and claimed to distinguish their religion from that of pagans (although the legitimacy of the visions depended heavily on who was having them, and who was interpreting them). “The presence of miracles and saints was an important calling card of Christians—that’s the way they converted pagan Europe,” Scull said. 

In Europe, things started to change in the 16th century. These were the first days of the Scientific Revolution and the so-called Age of Reason, marked by the rise of rational philosophy and scientific invention. The Catholic Church was still an incredibly powerful force in European culture, but it also wasn’t the same institution as 10 centuries prior. Powerful challenges to the Church’s authority had spread through Western Europe.

By the 19th century, particularly in Western Europe, many doctors who studied mental illness began to push back against divine interpretations of visions. A famous French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, claimed that all Christian saints were hysterics, experiencing mystical visions that were really just signs of underlying pathology. This, Scull said, was part of a deeper polemical argument against religion’s power in society. By that time, “most hospitals in France, and most of those ministering to the mentally ill, were the religious orders,” he said. 

In early Islam, for example, prophetic healings for insanity included prayers, bloodletting, and “cauterization of the head with hot irons.” This last technique was used, Scull writes, because demons and spirits were believed to be afraid of iron. Not coincidentally, the Arabic word for “genie” or “spirit” is jinn—the word from which majnoon, or “crazy,” is derived.

In the decades following World War II, the focus of psychiatry shifted away from the psychoanalytic techniques advocated by Freud and his followers and toward biological factors and causes. As Steven Sharfstein, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, put it, public discourse around mental illness transformed from “the biopsychosocial model” to “the bio-bio-bio model.” This shift matters for the relationship between religion and madness. Even those who remain deeply religious in the U.S. or other developed countries likely accept some version of the biological view of mental illness.

As “madness” became “mental illness,” the role of religion in explaining out-of-the-ordinary behavior has faded significantly, and medicine has taken its place. 

Which brings back the initial question: In a time of prescriptions and psychiatry and an ever-increasing focus on the brain, what’s the difference between a homeless man who talks to God and a saint who does the same? To a skeptic, the question is irrelevant; both are equally insane.

But for the faithful, the difference between the homeless man and the saint may be one of history, more than anything; the homeless man suffers the distinct disadvantage of talking to God today, rather than 10 centuries ago. Stories of visions and possessions seem to be of an earlier time, when madness was seen as just another manifestation of the power of God, and the devil.

Again, why do we give deference to religious faiths founded by those who nowadays would be viewed as mentally ill?   Crazy then or now, is still crazy.  If science and objective reality show that ancient myths are wrong (e.g., the Adam and Eve myth), continuing to believe in them does nothing but give comfort to those suffering from their own psychiatric issues.

ISIS Barbarians Throw Two Gay Men to Their Deaths

ISIS continues to underscore the toxicity of religion and fundamentalist religion in particular as it murders two more gays, all to uphold the writings of Mohammad who claimed the angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to him.  Nowadays someone like Mohammed would be residing in a mental institution, yet a billion plus Muslims continue to allow their lives to be controlled by the writings of a likely deranged madman.  Blogger friend John Becker has the horrible details at The Bilerico Project.  Here are highlights:

The jihadist barbarians of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have executed two more gay men -- this time in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, located in the Nineveh province.

And unlike two earlier executions, where a total of three men were stoned to death by ISIS militants in Syria for alleged homosexuality, these latest killings were carried out by throwing the victims off the roof of a tall building. Graphic photos of the executions were then uploaded to Twitter.
Radio Free Europe reports:

The Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq has published photographs that appear to show a man being thrown from the roof of a tall building apparently in Mosul, as punishment for being gay...

One photograph, taken from the top of the building from where the man was apparently pushed to his death, shows a large crowd gathered in the public square below.

Another image shows a man with his face covered by a black balaclava, reading out the sentence imposed on the man under the IS group's version of Shari'a law. The caption to the photograph says that the verdict was issued by a Shari'a court in "Wilayat Nineveh," IS's name for Mosul and its environs.

A graphic image shows the man being pushed to his death. Another image shows what appears to be the man's body on the ground.

The Daily Beast puts the images in context:

Death is shown in high resolution--the killing carefully composed inside the frame. These images belong to a deliberate social media and information strategy. Like all good Internet propaganda the images are made to be readily "shareable" and appear to have been released with the intent that they travel to a broader audience. It worked. Obscene and merciless, it's a reflection of the state of life under ISIS rule.

The situation for LGBT people living in areas controlled by ISIS extremists could not be more bleak: international human rights groups say they are "at imminent risk of death."

The next time someone tells you how offensive images depicting the prophet Muhammad are, show them these images instead.

Religion is an evil that needs to be eradicated.

Muslim Scholars Must Break the Theological Claims of Extremism

In follow up to a topic that was mentioned in a post yesterday about the toxicity of some forms of Islam, the New York Times has provided room for debate on whether and how Muslims need to respond to extremists groups within the faith that seek to use the Koran to justify horrors and persecute non-believers and stifle any form of dissent.  Some say that Muslims do not need to justify themselves or directly confront extremist elements who they dismiss as "not real Muslims."  This mindset is, to me, akin to the "good Christians" in this nation that remain focused in their only faith world and refuse to confront Christofascists who are steadily killing the Christian brand.  Sticking one's head in the sand doesn't provide a solution.  Rather, it allows evil to metastasize.   A second argument, which I believe to be a better solution makes the case that the "good Muslims" must tear down the theology used by extremist to justify atrocities and contempt for others.  Here are highlights of that argument:

Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic State – there can be no doubt that Muslims have an extremism problem. Its causes are many, including failure of governance, absence of democracy, a culture of intolerance and geopolitics.

Muslim states are either unable to combat violent extremists or recognize them as threats. Some countries view them as assets to be used for their own geopolitical purposes and actually nurture them. This geopolitical blind spot is a key problem.

Muslim scholars have tried to counteract their threat but their biggest error in doing so is that they limit their condemnation to political extremism without also condemning the theological extremism that underpins it.

For example, when Islamic leaders condemn acts of violence against intellectuals or minorities after accusations of blasphemy, they do not condemn the scholars who give fatwas of blasphemy or takfir (excommunication). They also do not refute the theology that supports use of such vigilantism.

Many Islamic groups condemned both Boko Haram and ISIS as un-Islamic. This is a welcome development. But they did not also condemn the Salafi theology that underpins the literal and shallow understanding of Islamic principles that inform groups such as ISIS. It is like trying to treat the symptoms while allowing the cause to metastasize.  

Muslim scholars must not only counter the worldview that makes Islam, a religion of peace, into an ideology of violence theologically, but must also develop programs to educate their communities about the dangers of nurturing narrow and intolerant interpretations of Islamic scriptures. This must be done systematically in schools, at Friday sermons and at Islamic conferences. 

But most important, mosques and Islamic schools must initiate programs that encourage young Muslims to work with and in other religious communities.  

To be clear, I am not anti-Muslim.  I am against fundamental religions of all faiths.  Fundamentalism history is one of murder, mayhem and toxic evil.  We need to see "good Christians" and "good Muslims" stand up to extremists within their faiths.  One can only hope that Muslims can ultimately rise to this challenge better than most "good Christians" do in this country.

Is ISIS a Faith-Based Terrorist Group?

A piece at Columbia Journalism Review looks at a question that can elicit very different answers, namely, whether or not ISIS is a faith-based terrorist group.  Personally, I find myself falling on the side of those who would answer the question in the affirmative.  The rape murder and attempted genocide against those who don't hold to the extreme fundamentalist Islamic beliefs of ISIS is one strong indicator that such is the case.  And, just like far right Christians in America, the followers of ISIS claim to have god on their side even as they commit the most horrific acts.  Far right religious belief seems to always hold that those who believe differently should be stripped of their rights or, worse yet, exterminated.  Sadly, journalist remain too reluctant to call out the evils wrought by religion both in the case of ISIS and home grown Christofascists.  Like the Bible, the Koran has passages that can be used to justify any number of horrors.  The real burden rests on non-extremists of both faiths to stand up to extremists.  Unfortunately, too often they stand by quietly like the "good Germans" who allowed Hitler's rise to power.  Here are highlights from the article:

The idea that the press has not done a good job of explaining the role of religion in Islamic extremism is not by itself controversial. Murtaza Hussain, a writer at The Intercept, spoke for journalists and scholars of otherwise radically divergent worldviews when he told me, “The media doesn’t know how to cover this issue.” But ask those same journalists and scholars why, and in what ways, the media have failed to explain the role that Islamic faith plays in motivating the terrorism committed in its name, and you will get irreconcilable answers.

Some, like Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, say that a fear of being perceived as anti-Muslim inhibits journalists from linking extremism to the faith. “I believe that since 9/11 the journalism community in the West has been walking on eggshells figuring out how to cover Islam,” she says. But now, due to the heavily covered ascent of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), she thinks that “people are having to confront this 5,000-pound elephant that’s been sitting in the room—an interpretation of Islam that believes in beheadings, an Islamic state, and an end-times victory of Muslims over the world.”

Others, like Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in near Eastern and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, contend that the media predominantly view “terrorist actions and criminal activities committed by Muslims” through the lens of the terrorists’ religious faith.

Their analysis may well be correct, but it also seems like an attempt to counter an idea that they never explicitly address: that most ISIS fighters join because they are religious zealots. The governor of an Iraqi province now mostly occupied by ISIS is quoted as saying of the Baathist officers, “All of these guys got religious after 2003.” The piece’s final line, a quote from an Iraqi researcher, states, “There is no one in Baghdadi’s state who is not a believer,” implying that adherence to the ideology of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is mainly a survival strategy.

[T]here are journalists and scholars who present compelling cases that ISIS’s actions are at least partly grounded in the teachings of Islam. In a September 1 story in The New Republic, Graeme Wood traced al-Baghdadi’s appointment of himself as caliph, as well as the group’s “taste for beheadings, stonings, crucifixions, slavery, and dhimmitude, the practice of taxing those who refuse to convert to Islam,” to its “almost pedantic adherence to its own interpretation of Islamic law.” In an interview, Wood said that while he considers the political factors behind the group’s ascent “at least as important,” it is clear that “their beliefs are central to their self-conception” and are therefore vital to grasping the differences between ISIS and other jihadist groups. He observed that journalists who do not understand the way ISIS thinks “are missing a part of the story.”

David Cook, an associate professor at Rice University who studies Islam, is more emphatic: “To say that ISIS doesn’t have anything to do with Islam is just the statement of an ignoramus or an apologist. There is support for the things that ISIS does inside the Koran. There’s support for things like beheading and different exemplary punishments that you can easily find.”

ISIS’s eagerness to advertise its scriptural credentials suggests one possible explanation for the infrequency with which journalists mention the connection: a reluctance to be seen as legitimizing terrorist propaganda. As Quartz’s Ghosh argues, “When terrorists cite the Koran or the hadith, they do so selectively, choosing only those passages that can be interpreted to suit their perverse view of the world.

The real problem is that nobody can precisely calculate the aggregation of factors that have produced the modern phenomenon of Islamic extremism. And so the claims of people who cite religious causes cannot be dismissed any more than the claims of people who cite political ones.

In judging ISIS, we also need to keep in mind that a number of :godly Christians" believe the Bible justifies murdering abortion providers - and gays.   Again, when are moderates going to stand up and stop the extremists of their own faith?

Religious Debate Rages Over Homosexuality

The Los Angeles Times has an article today that looks at the debate between Christianists and other religious conservatives on the one side and moderates who do not seek to use the Bible and Koran as abasis for demonizing gays. I guess what gets me personally is that Christ had a very much affirming message and in the Gospels ministered to and socialized with those marginalized by the legalistic and santimonious religious leaders of His day. Yet this fact utterly escapes the hate merchant element of today's Christian denominations. Rather than look at this broader message, they seek out isolated passages to condemn gays. Not surprsingly, many of their forebears also used the Bible to justify slavery, segregation and the subordination of women. If one takes the selective passage approach that these less than Christian individuals apply to gays, then using their analysis, slavery should still be permissible today. As would the application of the death penalty to all sorts of ridiculous infractions. Here are some story highlights:

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With same-sex marriage now legal in California, people of faith are renewing a passionate debate over whether homosexuality is sanctioned by God. Christians, Jews and Muslims on both sides of the issue cite the holy writings of their religions. Some note that the Bible depicts man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," while others say it speaks of God's love for all people created in his image. Both sides defend their positions with the zeal of the biblical warriors who inhabit their scriptures.

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"Homosexual intimacy is out of bounds. It's not what God created us for," said Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.Mouw cites Romans 1 in the New Testament that decries men and women abandoning "natural relations" and men "inflamed with lust for one another" committing "indecent acts with other men" -- behavior that carried death as punishment."Sexuality within the context of marriage is the order of creation," he said.

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Nonsense, says the Rev. Mel White, a former Fuller professor and evangelical author who married his partner of 27 years in a ceremony Wednesday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. White calls the Bible a living document that must be understood in its historical context -- a view shared by reform-minded clergy and theologians from other faiths.

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Perhaps the most frequently cited is Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman: It is an abomination."The passage from the Torah is repeated, with slight variations, in Christian scripture, which, like the Jewish text, orders death for violators. The Koran also denounces homosexuality, in Chapter 7, Verse 81: "For you practice your lust on men in preference to women: You are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds."

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But other clergy criticize what they see as a selective analysis of the texts. Jesus condemned divorce and remarriage, they point out, but that hasn't stopped many Christians from splitting and remarrying. The Old Testament not only denounces adulterers and children who curse their parents, it demands the death penalty for both. It prohibits sex between husbands and wives during menstruation, even though theologians acknowledge the practice occurs without any formal reprimands.

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One small Muslim group voiced objections, calling on the faithful to embrace a more pluralistic view of gays and lesbians."We're not reinventing the faith," Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, which claims about 1,500 members nationwide. "The Koran says that it is a book for all times and all generations. It is not a stagnant text."If Muslims cannot interpret the Koran, she said, "then it is irrelevant to how we live our lives today."