Cyberyeti, on 2012-October-09, 10:55, said:
Where I struggle with mainstream Islam is the inability to depict/satirise/criticise the prophet, that to me is the hallmark of a cult not a religion.
A religion, imo, is merely a cult that has gained a certain critical mass.
I like the concept of the meme: a meme as an idea or system of ideas that is capable of evolving and propagating, but in the human mind rather than the physical environment.
Religions struggle to infect as many hosts as possible. The rules internal to a religion therefore evolve to maximize the chances of success....but old, established religions are always going to be handicapped precisely because religion, at least ostensibly, relies upon revealed truths. Now, humans are remarkably adept at changing their view of the same facts while claiming to be true to ancient beliefs, but there can be little doubt but that a relatively young religion will likely, to be successful, have traits that make it more efficient in capturing and retaining believers.
A very common device employed by religions is to confer a state of certainty and privilege upon the believers....and a sense of community. That sense of community not only enhances and preserves, through constant immersion and repetition, the particular delusions/teachings of the religion but also makes non-believers become 'other', and we, as a species, tend to be suspicious and distrustful of the 'other'.
Making it a crime to draw an image of the prophet is a means of societal control. Just as is the rule that an apostate must be killed......which was certainly a common aspect of Christian thinking in earlier centuries.
Islam, having been invented far more recently than was Christianity, owes its success to precisely those traits that allow it to maximize the control it exerts upon believers.
By outlawing apostasy, it makes it virtually impossible for any believer to express doubt. By suppressing the expression of doubt, and by mandating a regular public display of submission in prayer, individual thought is kept controlled...critical thinking is in fact effectively extinguished. Much the same happens in bible camps or on the fundie campuses in the US, tho the Xian fundies won't (can't) see it that way.
By preventing the depiction of the prophet, and here I feel less secure in my opinion, it seems to me that Islam reduces the temptation to think about the prophet as a real human, and thus suscpetible to human failings. It also ensures that the 'image' of the prophet is conveyed, to the extent that it is, in words, controlled by the imans and other clergy.
In short, for a religion to be successful, it must develop or possess a means of limiting the ability of its followers to think independently or to even consider alternatives to the beliefs being promulgated by the clergy.
As for the original post, it is perhaps useful to bear in mind that illiterate people under the control of power-hungry zealots have always been capable of outrageous barbarism. The Salem Witch trials are examples from the historically-recent past. The literal extinction of entire communities as part of religious cleansing features in early and medieval Christanity.
In Afghanistan, islamists are having to deal with an abrupt and forceful imposition upon them of ideas foreign to their view of the world, including ideas of gender equality as alien to them as such ideas would have been alien to the early Puritan settlers in the New World. Women didn't go to school in the West until recently, in historical terms. There are people still alive today who were born at a time when women couldn't vote, and it wasn't that long ago that a married woman couldn't own real estate in her own name. The traditional christian marriage still has the father 'giving away' the bride, which has its origins in the understanding that women were, legally, chattels...and thus the actual property of the father until married, at which time she belonged to the husband.
Western powers are thus attacking core values by which these people have lived for centuries, and this is being imposed upon them rather than representing an internal evolutionary change. This directly threatens the power of the local religious leaders by calling into question the correctness of their way of life.
I am not, for one moment, defending the acts of the taliban or other religious extremists. I do, however, condemn those who say that such acts are unique to any particular set of delusional rules. Those who make such statements seem, at least to me, almost always to be members of any religious (and thus deluded) group, which group either still does or in relatively recent times did acts equivalent to those they now criticize.
Oh....did I hurt anyone's feelings by calling their religious beliefs delusional? If so, let me just suggest that such a person list all of the key elements of a major religion other than theirs; identify those they consider to be absurd or delusional, and then compare them to the tenets of their own belief. As long as they are capable of intellectual honesty (which religion does its very best to prevent, in the case of the religion in question) then maybe they'll get the joke.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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