8 May 2008
Rebecca Bynum
The reasoning system of Islam is based on a different set of principles than ours. Bill Warner is right about this - contradictions in Islam are not resolved, but nevertheless, reason still functions. Trying to make Muslims see or admit that Islam is not reasonable won't work because it is reasonable within the Islamic context. They literally think within a different paradigm.
9 May 2008
Special Guest
In classical Boolean logic, a proposition is either true or false. On the other hand, SQL logic is often trinary, not binary; the additional state being "NULL", or not known, but not true and not false.
Islamic logic is similarly non-binary, but in a different way. A proposition can be false, and also true, with no sense of inconsistency. One can argue that OBL had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and yet laud OBL for bringing the Great Satan to her knees, without any need to reconcile the two statements. One can claim that the holy, holy Qur'an is the perfect and immutable word of Allah, and then be required to set up rules of abrogation to explain how to resolve the many inconsistencies contained within, without even a small L.E.D. going off in the mind of the speaker.
If Allah cannot make up His mind whether Christians and Jews are protected followers of Abraham, or infidels who must be slain wherever they are found, why should mere mortals be confined to binary logic, or consistency over time?
If Pope Benedict XVI wants proof that Islam cannot agree to the conditions of the declarations to which they are signatories, one need only look back at 1400 years of history, starting with the Treaty of Huddabiyah. If the Pope is trying to entrap them in fly-paper, fly-paper is not going to do much to control a snarling rabid pitbull.
I think any attempt to use logic to entrap Muslims, or to outsmart them, is destined to end in failure. The entropy of the system far outweighs whatever complexity one can build into one's best-laid plans. Taking into account the "Me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, the three of us against our tribe, our tribe against the neighbors, (and so on ad nauseum)" mindset, and the complex web of contradictory allegiances they simultaneously hold, their behavior becomes too complex to be modeled; their behavior defies predictive estimates andr stymies attempts at rational analysis. It would be easier to treat it as random behavior, and set our policy accordingly. No treaties, no interfaith dialogues. Just fences, both literal and figurative, between Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam.
