"Second of all the "I HAVE READ THE QURAN" thing followed by "nothing of any moral value" is a pretty big red flag that you actually haven't read it. I mean come on lol. Right off the top of my head I can think of Zakat, which is...charity. Half the shit is really super banal Abrahamic morality, with some old testament looking cray cray in there too yeah. Wow, what a typical religion!"
Except Zakat includes giving money to support Islam's armies... and even when talking of charity, it is used as a legal commandment, not a moral imperative. There is no "love thy neighbor" in the Quran, you give zakat not because there is moral to help others, but because it is a Muslim's duty, like the pilgrimage to Mecca. It strikes me more as a system to maintain in-group cohesion than anything else.
Most of the Quran is basically reminding believers that if they don't obey, they will burn in hell, and that non-believers should be hated and will go to hell.
"That view is widespread in conservative Christianity as well. In fact you can use the scripture to directly support this, but that doesn't stop people from questioning that. Nothing unique to Islam here."
Not as widespread as you think. And Christian theologies do not make that claim, because since the Bible contradicts itself many times, it is an untenable position for a coherent theology. There is indeed something unique to Islam, the Quran is written in the first person, as if Allah himself was speaking through Muhammad. The Quran also claims to be the final revelation, nothing can ever contradict it anymore.
The basis of Muslim faith is "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet". The Quran is the word-for-word transcription of the messages Muhammad claimed came directly from Allah, through the archangel Gabriel. The Quran is crystal-clear that it comes directly from God, and so no part of it can be doubted or ignored by Muslims, for to do so would mean either that you doubt Muhammad's claim to prophethood, or God's perfection, both of which are heretical beliefs. And Islam is very clear about apostates.... "whoever changes his islamic religion, kill him" (not in the Quran but in many hadiths).
"As opposed to the peaceful history of other religions such as ______"
Christianism was largely peaceful for the first 1000 years of its existence. There was repression, but not done at the behest of the religion but from secular authorities wishing to preserve unity in their people's faith. Jainism is perfectly peaceful. Buddhism has very few wars I know of in its name. Hinduism is pretty insular, as its belief system doesn't necessarily claim other religions must be false.
Islam on the other hand was violent right from the start. Muhammad was a caravan raider, a warlord and a slaver. These are not debatable points, these are facts recorded by historians both in and out of Islam. The history of Islam is an almost unbroken series of holy wars. If you look at Christianity, crusades occurred largely in a 300 years period and sprang up as a reaction to Muslim aggression on the Christian world. The entire Mediterranean, in the 7th century, was Christian, Islam spread there not through peace or missionaries, but by the sword, with Muslim armies invading most of Spain, Sicily and even raiding France. As late as the 19th centuries, Muslim pirates were still raiding coastal European towns to gather slaves, justifying this by the Quran and Allah, as the Barbary State's ambassador said, which was reported by Thomas Jefferson.
"Man if you think Islam is totalitarian I'd hate to hear what you think about Catholicism. Do you pity the Papists?"
Catholicism recognizes the separation of Church and State, based upon "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's". Nice try, better luck next time. The worst thing that the Catholic Church can do to you in Canon Law is excommunication. The Church itself never executed anyone, heretics found by the Inquisition were given over to secular authorities, to be judged by secular law.
"Gonna have to explain that golden age they had real early on then where lots of those things happened. "
The golden age is a myth. Considering the stability of the region and its centrality to the known world, the actual contribution of the Islamic world to world knowledge is amazingly small. Most of what is attributed to it is actual just translating texts from other cultures and helping spread knowledge from the East to the West. Meanwhile, the Islamic invasion of India ended a real golden age, that of India, and plunged the subcontinent into dark ages it is barely recovering from.
To be fair, Islam's strict laws were indeed better than the chaos of "might makes right" tribal warfare that preceded it in many places. It is also superior to corrupt arbitrary rules by conquering monarchs, because there is a set of predictable laws by which it rules societies. But the problem is that the laws are stuck in the 7th century and cannot be changed because of their foundation in the holy texts of Islam. Islamic societies are thus frozen in time, never to progress, wasting their most brilliant minds into studying the same old moldy texts rather than doing innovative thinking of their own. After all, if you have to believe God himself gave you those texts, why would you need anything else?
As the Caliph Umar is reported saying regarding the great Persian library of Ctesiphon "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed, as for us Qur'an is sufficient".
A huge impact of these beliefs is that the Islamic world is very, very insular intellectually. A UN report in 2002 noted that Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years. Again, if you believe God gave you all the answers in the 7th century, why bother studying any other text?
30
@sagas
"Second of all the "I HAVE READ THE QURAN" thing followed by "nothing of any moral value" is a pretty big red flag that you actually haven't read it. I mean come on lol. Right off the top of my head I can think of Zakat, which is...charity. Half the shit is really super banal Abrahamic morality, with some old testament looking cray cray in there too yeah. Wow, what a typical religion!"
Except Zakat includes giving money to support Islam's armies... and even when talking of charity, it is used as a legal commandment, not a moral imperative. There is no "love thy neighbor" in the Quran, you give zakat not because there is moral to help others, but because it is a Muslim's duty, like the pilgrimage to Mecca. It strikes me more as a system to maintain in-group cohesion than anything else.
Most of the Quran is basically reminding believers that if they don't obey, they will burn in hell, and that non-believers should be hated and will go to hell.
"That view is widespread in conservative Christianity as well. In fact you can use the scripture to directly support this, but that doesn't stop people from questioning that. Nothing unique to Islam here."
Not as widespread as you think. And Christian theologies do not make that claim, because since the Bible contradicts itself many times, it is an untenable position for a coherent theology. There is indeed something unique to Islam, the Quran is written in the first person, as if Allah himself was speaking through Muhammad. The Quran also claims to be the final revelation, nothing can ever contradict it anymore.
The basis of Muslim faith is "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet". The Quran is the word-for-word transcription of the messages Muhammad claimed came directly from Allah, through the archangel Gabriel. The Quran is crystal-clear that it comes directly from God, and so no part of it can be doubted or ignored by Muslims, for to do so would mean either that you doubt Muhammad's claim to prophethood, or God's perfection, both of which are heretical beliefs. And Islam is very clear about apostates.... "whoever changes his islamic religion, kill him" (not in the Quran but in many hadiths).
"As opposed to the peaceful history of other religions such as ______"
Christianism was largely peaceful for the first 1000 years of its existence. There was repression, but not done at the behest of the religion but from secular authorities wishing to preserve unity in their people's faith. Jainism is perfectly peaceful. Buddhism has very few wars I know of in its name. Hinduism is pretty insular, as its belief system doesn't necessarily claim other religions must be false.
Islam on the other hand was violent right from the start. Muhammad was a caravan raider, a warlord and a slaver. These are not debatable points, these are facts recorded by historians both in and out of Islam. The history of Islam is an almost unbroken series of holy wars. If you look at Christianity, crusades occurred largely in a 300 years period and sprang up as a reaction to Muslim aggression on the Christian world. The entire Mediterranean, in the 7th century, was Christian, Islam spread there not through peace or missionaries, but by the sword, with Muslim armies invading most of Spain, Sicily and even raiding France. As late as the 19th centuries, Muslim pirates were still raiding coastal European towns to gather slaves, justifying this by the Quran and Allah, as the Barbary State's ambassador said, which was reported by Thomas Jefferson.
"Man if you think Islam is totalitarian I'd hate to hear what you think about Catholicism. Do you pity the Papists?"
Catholicism recognizes the separation of Church and State, based upon "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's". Nice try, better luck next time. The worst thing that the Catholic Church can do to you in Canon Law is excommunication. The Church itself never executed anyone, heretics found by the Inquisition were given over to secular authorities, to be judged by secular law.
"Gonna have to explain that golden age they had real early on then where lots of those things happened. "
The golden age is a myth. Considering the stability of the region and its centrality to the known world, the actual contribution of the Islamic world to world knowledge is amazingly small. Most of what is attributed to it is actual just translating texts from other cultures and helping spread knowledge from the East to the West. Meanwhile, the Islamic invasion of India ended a real golden age, that of India, and plunged the subcontinent into dark ages it is barely recovering from.
To be fair, Islam's strict laws were indeed better than the chaos of "might makes right" tribal warfare that preceded it in many places. It is also superior to corrupt arbitrary rules by conquering monarchs, because there is a set of predictable laws by which it rules societies. But the problem is that the laws are stuck in the 7th century and cannot be changed because of their foundation in the holy texts of Islam. Islamic societies are thus frozen in time, never to progress, wasting their most brilliant minds into studying the same old moldy texts rather than doing innovative thinking of their own. After all, if you have to believe God himself gave you those texts, why would you need anything else?
As the Caliph Umar is reported saying regarding the great Persian library of Ctesiphon "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed, as for us Qur'an is sufficient".
A huge impact of these beliefs is that the Islamic world is very, very insular intellectually. A UN report in 2002 noted that Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years. Again, if you believe God gave you all the answers in the 7th century, why bother studying any other text?