From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Sep 18 2001 - 13:50:19 MDT
Greg Burch wrote:
>
> Like the rest of the U.S. press corps, Mr. Moon has passed on without
> question the statements by moderate Muslims that "Islam does not endorse
> violence." We will not as a nation come to understand how and why the
> events of September 11 occurred until we take the time to study Islam and
> develop an understanding of how a large number of people in the world use
> religion to justify violence. The simple and undisputable fact is that
> there is clear and explicit language in the Koran that...
Another simple and undisputable fact is that people who believe in a Book
will usually just ignore aspects of the Book that conflict with their
actual philosophies. Try asking some professional, educated Jewish women
whether the Old Testament is a male chauvinist document.
The Koran may endorse violence against unbelievers, but it is quite
possible that modern Islam does not. I doubt if many modern Jews would
endorse genocide, for all that they were instructed to erase the memory of
Amalek from beneath the heavens.
Now we can, of course, regard this as an opportunity to point out once
again that religion is not rational. But the more important point
currently is that the loose logical structure of religion means that
religionists have a culture which is quite separate from their books. It
is quite possible that mainstream modern-day Islam does not tolerate
violence regardless of what the Koran says - although I know too little
about Islam to say so one way or the other, and the little I do know seems
to indicate that Islam is a modern-day warrior religion in the same way
that Orthodox Judaism is a modern-day scholarly religion.
Anyway, arguing about Islam from the Koran may be as specious as supposing
that Jewish rabbis bear some resemblance to the characters or authors in
the Old Testament.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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