November 16, 2015
Word: Muslim violence
Historian Reza Aslan - Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion and like every religion in the world it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is gonna be violent. There are marauding Buddhist monks in Myanmar slaughtering women and children. Does Buddhism promote violence? Of course not. People are violent or peaceful and that depends on their politics, their social world, the ways that they see their communities.
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here are marauding Buddhist monks in Myanmar slaughtering women and children. Does Buddhism promote violence? Of course not.
I have to strongly disagree that they are Buddhist monks. They're violent individuals in Buddhist-monk costumes. The individual in the cop suit who shoots dead an unarmed man who's fleeing is not a cop, even if he's being paid as one. That's because it's no part of a cop's role to intentionally kill harmless people any more than it's part of a Buddhist monk's role.
In both cases, they are criminals in costume who've managed to sucker people into appointing them to a role whose benefits they accept while at the same time they refuse to perform the duties.
The quicker we understand that, the better.
Most major religions are based on sacred texts that suffer from several defects. These texts almost always contain contradictory orders. And words being the slippery creatures that they are, people are perfectly capable of coming up with radically different interpretations of the same passage. All of which is to say, that claiming that a given religion is a religion of "peace" or a religion of "violence" is a complete waste of time. Religions have been deeply intertwined with some of history's worst outbreaks of mass violence and killings, which is reason enough for being highly skeptical of any political movement that comes draped in religious cloaks. But religion is only one source of human violence. There has been plenty of killing over the centuries where religion was not the primary motivator.
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