Monday, 1 October 2007
At War With Reality
 by Rebecca Bynum
Religion in its deepest sense, meaning the human perception of spiritual reality, is pre-cultural and not culturally dependant. The form culture takes is rather dependent upon the common characterization of that primary human perception of spiritual reality known as religion. The question, what is the nature of God, is the same as, what is the nature of reality? If God is perceived primarily as love and the reality we inhabit as benevolent then man’s reaction to the spiritual impulse is channeled toward being loving and gentle toward his neighbors and he seeks wise stewardship and is caring toward nature. If, on the other hand, God is perceived primarily as harsh and judgmental, then the human religious impulse will be channeled toward societal control and the domination of nature. We observe both these strains in varying degrees in Christianity. Some, most notably Richard Weaver, have even made the claim that Western man’s drive to subdue and dominate nature has grown directly from Puritan Protestantism. Christianity as a whole, however, has fostered curiosity about the world (the truth of reality) and Christian investigation into the past has generally been impartial. more...
Posted on 10/01/2007 7:13 AM by NER
Comments
1 Oct 2007
Uncle Kenny
"spiritual reality"
oxymoron 1 Oct 2007
 Rebecca Bynum
Update on the Swat Buddhas:
PESHAWAR: A seventh-century Buddhist relic in Pakistan was damaged when Islamic militants blasted it with dynamite, police said on Saturday.
They said that the militants used home-made bombs to try to blow up the mountainside engraving, a Buddhist pilgrimage site, and fired at it using automatic weapons.
"Late on Friday, militants attempted to blow up the engraving but they could only damage it partially," local police official Masood Khan said, adding it was the second attempt to destroy the relic, in Swat in northwest Pakistan.
3 Oct 2007
emmanuelgoldstein
[what is the nature of God, is the same as, what is the nature of reality?]
Assuming the world is real, the claim above appears to be a long-winded way of affirming pantheism.
To your point, viz. Muslims are unusually prone to destroy the artefacts and culture of other cultures (because, apparently, they have a singularly harsh conception of God).
(1) To justify the claim, you need to do some comparative work. You need to show that Islam is significantly more likely to encourage the destruction of other cultures and their artefacts. The historical record is such that this is not promising claim (The doings of the early Spanish colonists - ostensibly Christian - may be of interest.)
3 Oct 2007
Rebecca Bynum
No, I'm afraid you missed my point which was that culture shapes and directs the innate religious impulse. In the case of Islam, that impulse is directed toward destroying any reality that may intrude and threaten the doctrine by contradicting it. You may say, as does Bill Warner, that Islam is actually defined by the non-resolution of contradiction, but there remains a fear of too much reality, too much contradiction. The religious impluse in Islam is dominated and directed by fear. I would go further and say that because God is not loved, he is not known. God is reality. Reality is feared in Islam. 5 Oct 2007
Sergey
There is a problem in comparing Spanish onslaught on Inka or Maya art and systematic destroying of classic and Christian art by Islamic conquerors. First, it reeks of foul doctrine of moral equivalence which, as usual, cherry-peeking superficial similarities out of historical context and completely ignores much more deep discrepancies. Christianity of 15 century Spain was very obsolete, parochial and rigid even by European standards of this period (in comparison to Italy or France, where the Renaissance was already under way, or Germany with its universities, humanism and classic philosophy studies). Second, it is easy to find examples of vandalism and obscurancy of Christian zealots - iconoclasts in Byzantium, Savanarola in Florence and so on. But all this were heresies, not mainstream or orthodox Christianity. They originated in the East and were defeated in the West. Some heretical doctrines, arisen in Christian world, like Manichean and gnostic cults, or Calvinism, closely resemble Muslim attitude to life, art and personal freedom - but they are antithetical to the message of Church. And, at last, all this was before Reformation and Enlightenment. Christianity was able to overcome its historical defects, but Islam failed at this: what was anomaly in Christianity, became mainstream in Islam. And these destructive, hateful and aggresive tendencies in it not only were conserved, but aggravated and turned into outright insanity in nowdays Islamism. 5 Oct 2007
Sergey
Comparing the three main belief systems originating from the Bible, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we can easily deduce their attitude to foreign art from their attitude to foreign cultures at large. Judaism historically was the most tolerant in the sence it never had any impulse for expansion outside Jewish population or its homeland: no missionaries, no prozelitism. There are, of course, universalist aspirations, but only in eschatogical perspective, and only by moral example and divine interference, not by persuasion or coercion here and now.
Christianity after Paul was openly expansionist, but coercion, at least in doctrine, was not allowed, only persuasion. It is possible, of course, to cite a lot of examples of coercion as well, but mainly by Spanish and Portugal Catholicism in New World or Africa, and they came against original teaching of Paul.
Islam, as it own name indicate (meaning "submission"), is a religion of world dominance by military conquest, and this is openly declared in Koran and shared by all known schools of Islam thought. So only from this short resume of the central theological doctrines one can see why Muslim attitude to everything extrangeous to Islam is the most intolerant and aggressive.
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