Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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Not all Islam is the same. Indonesian islamic culture is not the same as Turkish, or Arabian. It's way too simplistic to lump the situation of every country together.

Are a minority of the people of Xinjiang committing violent acts because they want a Caliphate and to convert Han chinese, or are they doing it because the Uighurs are treated very badly by the Chinese government and they want autonomy and rallying around a common religious identity is their own recourse, especially if they want help from overseas?

Why do we not treat the Northern Irish who rallied around their religious identity and attracted the sympathies and support of American Irish?

Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?

When people are abused, tribes develop and they rally around whatever they have left: skin color, language, religion. While I have problems with Islam's doctrine, and religion in general (especially Abrahamic religions), it's extremely simplistic to attribute everyone's motivations and actions to the doctrine and not look at what drove individuals to commit acts against the state.

"...Why do we not treat the Northern Irish who rallied around their religious identity and attracted the sympathies and support of American Irish?

Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?..."

To be perfectly frank, a large part of the reason is just propaganda.

For instance, are Buddhists slaughtering muslims in Myanmar? Yes, without question. But a lot of our policymakers probably are thinking, "Man, we invested a whole lot in the Buddhists against the military government over there." (You know, Ang sang suu kyi and all that.) We, kind of, can't go back now. Maybe it's a lot like the sunk cost fallacy. But on a geopolitical scale? You're only willing to fold when the whole thing just collapses. And it hasn't, yet. So we keep trying to make it work.

The reason we don't accuse Buddhism when a Buddhist commits violence is because very rarely do they explicitly say they're committing whatever they're doing in the name of their religion, nor in anyway to propagate their religion. That is to say, you don't have a doctrinal, linear, absolute, form of religiosity that demands conversion, demands superiority, demands singularity as is fundamental to Islam. Muhammad and his Quran is supreme, whereas in Buddhism you kill Buddha, and Sutras while important are not absolute.

The Quran is equal parts a political construct, religion, and a sociological text that covers everything from spirituality, to the idea of man, to how to wage proper war. Whereas a Buddhist text is not, but rather simply a constellation of philosophical conjectures, and assertions that mostly pertain to one's own consciousness.

The question is simple. Does ideology, and in extension religion, motivate people to be violent? I dare you to actually bring and propose to reinterpret the Quran. It simply won't happen, and until and unless Muslims in majority seek to reform/reinterpret the Quran, like it has been done in Christianity, you cannot progress Islam.

I mean if we're going to be entirely reductive then I think we can also say that ALL ideologies are also the same. The Allies, and Axis powers were in essence both the same thing, and either party weren't in any way morally superior. The Nazis were the same thing as Americans, and whoever won the war is simply a mere coincidence.

In a similar sense not all religions are the same.

Are you seriously suggesting that Nationalism itself can't be a violent religion?

> In a similar sense not all religions are the same.

This is the one single point that is very hard to accept by the mainstream. Currently, the doctrine of all cultures being equal is something universal. If we accept the opposite view, there are many dangers on the way. Who is going to decide which culture/religion is better? By what criteria? What are the consequences? It's safer to declare equality, and this is what happened in the West - and any attempt to question that is perceived as a regressive view.

Well, it's quite clear they are not the same. But it's also clear that organized violence often arises out of tribalism and the devaluing of the out-group, and that our tendency towards tribalism can be extracted out of nearly anything we share in common, including religious doctrine even if that religious doctrine teaches peace or tolerance Buddhism isn't universally non-violent although Orientalism usually perceives it that way, and branches of it have become militaristic, on the flip side, branches of Islam like Sufi Islam, are perceived as more pacifist.

You're making the argument that cultural relativism is wrong. I'm making the argument that cultural supremacy often leads you to wrong reasoning about causes and effects, and ergo, bad policies. Are the Palestinians committing terrorist acts because they're Islamic? They're relatively more secular and cosmopolitan than some other Muslim communities, and Palestinian Christians also commit violence. If you ascribe their violence to religious grievances alone, then you are in a quandary. There's no way to solve the current situation without changing their religion. But if you recognize it as nationalistic and a response to geo-political grievances, then there is a political solution that may not require millions of people to be reprogrammed to a different religion.

Imagine if we ignored the Holocaust, and simply ascribed Jewish terrorism in the British Palestinian territories in the 1940s as a manifestation of Judaism -- that God gave them this land? Under that interpretation, it's scripture, and not the reaction to historic persecution, that drives the motivation to carve out a Jewish state. And yes, some far-right Jewish extremists believe this, but that's not the majority, and so you can't paint all of Judaism in this way, and we don't.

But we do paint all of Islam this way, and as a result, we engage in bad, immoral foreign policy.

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