re: #1283 JasonA

Hm. Was a looser interpretation of the Bible a result of secular gov’t or one of the causes of it? My Enlightenment history’s a little rusty so it’s a serious question.

re: #1280 Jaerik

Can we at least agree that the principle problem does not appear to be any innate, inherent difference in the content or teachings of each religion, but rather in their real-world relationships with government?

I am no religious scholar, but I can rattle off a number of instances in my head from the Old Testament condoning infanticide, genocide, and a whole host of very nasty things. Easily comparable to any of the darker parts of the Qur’an.

The difference is, the rise of largely secular government in the West has forced the dominant religion (Christianity) to paper over the older, perhaps nastier parts of the religion and instead focus on the good parts. By and large, Islam is currently situated primarily in a part of the world which, for various historical reasons, never made the Enlightenment transition to secular government.

Divisive politics is a very lucrative game. There’s a lot of money and power at stake, not just internationally but domestically as well. If you have this political systems where there’s no separation of church and state, the religion will inevitably be brought into the fight, and you end up breeding a feedback loop where the nastier the interpretation, the more politically pointed and useful it can be to those in power.

Exactly. To go looking for the root sources of differential religious violence in the religious texts is a red herring.

My personal theory of religion is summarized in 1259 - essentially, it claims that Zeus rules.