November 2007 Archives

You can't use a religous text to make predictions about a religious group's behavior, yet atheists often refer to the Christian Bible or the Muslem Quran when they describe how "real" Christians or "real" Muslems are.

A Danish scholar, Tina Maagard, who focuses on text analysis and interpretation nonetheless extends her interpretation of the texts to make predictions about existing groups of Muslems. A few years ago she concluded that because the Quran contains more hostile phrases against other people than the Bible, Muslems can therefore be considered more war-like.

For obvious reasons this conclusion was welcome among right-wing politicians who now had "proof" that Muslems have higher potential for being terrorists than anyone else.

There are just a few devils in the details. Most importantly, it is not possible to compare the "raw" scripture in the Quran with the "raw" scripture in the Bible if one wants to draw an objective conclusion. The aforementioned politicians and "Islam critics" have such a literal belief in the influence of the Quran that it beats several Muslem fundamentalists, and one must suspect that they have forgotten that religion is man-made and therefore must be studied by looking at mankind rather than its books.

Q: But the two religions view the Quran and the Bible as their respective foundations, don't they?

It is true that the religions consider these religious scriptures central for the religions. Unfortunately, this will not make you any wiser, because the Christian Bible has prompted interpretations ranging from fire-and-brimstone preachings from paranoid, Christian fundamentalists to abstract, "godless" traditions where "god" is merely seen as a symbol. You cannot determine which interpretation is the "correct" one, because that would require you to know what the Christian god meant—and in that case you believe in the Christian god, and are making a theological interpretation that is neither scientific nor objective.

You can conclude that the Christian Bible has a prominent place in the Christian religion but the interpretation of the book is so open that in practice its place in the religion is only symbolic. This is of course also true about the Quran of Islam. When Christians and Muslems refer to their books, they are interpreting their scriptures. They may be citing literal scripture when they quote their scriptures, but when and what they quote are not arbitrary. Their choices of when and what to quote are also interpretations of the scriptures.

The two books thus have a place in the religions via the interpretations of the books made by the religions. Few Christians and Muslems would admit this, however, because that would require them to accept that their interpretation is just one among many possible and equally valid, and therefore not necessarily the "truth."

Q: So what is it that creates the religion if not the religious scripture?

Sociologists currently tend towards an explanation of religion as society's worship of its ideal selfimage. Society's values, morals, attitudes, etc. are measured according to an ideal image which, like society itself, changes over time. The ideal is seen as the final goal of the society, and is expressed in a more or less symbolic form. The ideal image typically involves the absence of all non-ideal things in society such as violence, oppression, frustration, etc. The thought of this ideal leads to religions that incorporate this ideal image into their visions. Religion is this an expression of what society thinks about itself at any given time, and how society would prefer to be.

Q: So you're saying that if Muslems included more hostility in the Quran than the Christians included in the Bible, then this actually means that the Muslem cultures are more war-prone than the Christian cultures (hah, gotcha!)?

No, this only reflects the circumstances in the times when the two books were written. It is fair to conclude based on the Bible and the Quran that the first Muslems were probably more hostile than the first Christians. However, it is 1,900 years since the first authors began to write the Bible, and it is about 1,500 years since the Quran was written. Christianity as of today cannot be compared with Christianity as of back then (how many Christians today believe that they are the "true Jews," for example, and that Messiah came back as a traditional, human king while the first Christians were still alive?); Islam as of today cannot be compared with Islam as of back then; and Islam as of back then cannot be compared with Christianity as of back then, more than 400 years later.

Today, both Islam and Christianity are so different from the Islam and Christianity that were found 1,500 and 2,000 years ago that it does not make any sense to use ancient, culturally inspired scriptures as references for those cultures today.

No-one would be stupid enough to claim that Europe is still stuck in the Germanic iron age culture 1,500 years ago, and it would be equally stupid to claim that the Muslem culture had not developed during the same 1,500 years unless one would argue that the culture was exceptionally strong and one was rather ignorant on History.

Conclusion: one cannot use the contents of the Quran and the Bible to determine which one of the two religions today is, say, the most war-prone. Firstly, the relevance of the two is restricted to the interpretations of the books that the religions make (not vice versa); secondly, the "raw" content of the books must be viewed in the context of the time when the books were written.

The grandmaster of a martial arts branch once remarked that the head only takes up one eighth of the entire body proper. Anyone that uses only his head to think with is seven-eights paralyzed.

Yet often I hear atheists cry: "rationality!," "logic!," "reason!", etc. when they argue that religious people are separating themselves from the real world. They cling to the intellectual and the abstract. Apparently their real world is restricted to the upper one-eighth of the body.

The last seven-eights of the body does not think in the intellectual sense of the word. However, the body feels and senses. Dr. Antonio Damasio explains in his book, Descartes' Error, that it is not the human brain that controls a human being's rationality. It is instead the body that creates what Damasio named "somatic markers," or bodily points of reference, that direct the brain. Body and brain join in a reciprocal, closed-loop action where the brain is just one of many organs that together spark reason.

Damasio experimented with patients suffering from a brain damage that prevented them from applying their somatic markers. To his surprise, Damasio discovered that these people were just as intelligent as other people, only were these people controlled exclusively by their intelligence, that is, by their brain's reasoning alone. Yet it was as if their goal had changed. Deprived of the use of their somatic markers the actions of the patients showed that the patients unconsciously—but apparently very deliberately—attempted to create problems for themselves, financially as well as socially. Denying their bodily feelings and relying on their reasoning alone the patients had become self-destructive.