ISIS and Islam - A Case Study of the Evils of Religion

As regular readers know, I am no fiend to religion, and fundamentalist religion in particular.  Our the centuries, religion has brought untold needless wars and deaths and countless ruined lives.  Coupled with this is the reality that time and time again we see fundamentalist Christians and Muslims rebelling against knowledge, education and modernity.  Why?  Because they all call into question the myths found in the Bible and the Koran.  They also encourage a debate about the meaning and binding authority of both of these supposed "holy books," something that is anathema to fundamentalists.  With the horrors now being perpetrated by ISIS, it is only natural that Islam is being given harsh scrutiny.  Some apologists for Islam are trying to make the case that the followers of ISIS are not "real Muslims."  That's akin to saying that foul far right Christians in America aren't "real Christians."  Andrew Sullivan has followed the debate and has some dead on reflections (most are also applicable to America's far right Christofascists).  Here are some excerpts:

Hitch’s arguments about what must follow from a religious text still regarded as perfect and pristine and utterly unquestionable, and a caliph or Shi’a theocrat regarded as a “supreme leader”, and a politics saturated in apocalypticism, and a culture marinated in absurd levels of sexual repression, and an endemic suppression of blasphemy and apostasy as unthinkable offenses, stand the test of time.

The totalism of Islam is as dangerous as any other totalism – and liberals better understand that about it.

Yes, it is vital to make distinctions between the various ways in which Islam is practised across the world – which reveals some potential for reform, in the way that Christianity and Judaism have reformed and examined themselves over the past century. But the resilient absence of a collective understanding that religious violence simply is not worth it. . . . is a real problem. 

Until the Shi’a and Sunni love the future more than they hate each other, until the Koran can be discussed and debated there and around the world the way any other religious text is discussed, until apostasy is respected and not criminalized, we will have more trouble in store.

Does this explain everything? Of course not. Culture, history, politics matter just as powerfully and can lead to different manifestations in time and place. Certainly there was a time in which Islam was far more tolerant than Christianity; and in the Middle East too. But that is no more, and central elements in the doctrine of Islam are all too easily compatible with its modern intolerance, and now post-modern virulence.

In another post, Andrew also notes as follows:

What percentage of Muslims across the diverse Muslim world favor Sharia law? The key graph from Pew on executing apostates is on the right. And when you do the math (and yes, fair warning that I usually do it wrong), you find that 63 percent of Egypt’s Muslims, 58 percent of Jordanian Muslims, 78 percent of Pakistani Muslims, and 53 percent of Malaysian Muslims believe that if you decide you don’t believe in Islam any more, you should be executed. Think about that for a minute.

How this disastrous situation can be cured is hard to say.  Education, of course is essential, yet most of these countries will not allow education policies or curricula that challenges a fundamentalist approach to Islam.  While Americans ponder the evils of religion as embodied by ISIS, they need to also recognize that we have our own virulent evil at home: fundamentalist Christianity  which seeks to deprive others of their civil rights and which now ,in the wake of same sex marriage rulings,is calling for "civil disobedience" and a subversion of the rule of law.