Violence is more common in the Bible than the Quran text analysis reveals

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Gloria Emeagwali

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Aug 21, 2021, 11:10:06 PM8/21/21
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Aug 22, 2021, 8:33:11 AM8/22/21
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Thanks.

Which of the two religions is associated with violence and terrorism today?

What is the reason for the answer to that question, an answer we all know?

A question vital for Muslims, Christians and everyone.

Thanks

Toyin 

Thanks

Toyin

On Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 04:10 Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Aug 22, 2021, 1:08:14 PM8/22/21
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toyin,
there is a literal reading of the scriptures which is often the way it is presented to children.
if we are able to perform acts of interpretation--which is what all commentary does--then we can make useful readings of the texts. otherwise, i suggest they remain nice coffee table books, chosen for their decor, and not the contents.
i can't think of anything less useful, intellectually, than to take the biblical or qur'anic accounts literally. i mean, ...

ok, one trivial example. it is not unreasonable to take the sacrifice of isaac as the central account for all three religions.
in judaism it is called the akedah, the binding of isaac, and it will be read and commented on in synagogues around the world in a couple of weeks.
to remind you all, it is the story of abraham's sacrifice of isaac., i recommend everyone go and google the rembrandt painting, or etching, of it. really striking.
how could anyone take seriously this notion of a father killing his son, the son he loves, the son whose progeny were supposed to carry on the generations as numerous as the stars etc etc.
anyway, kierkegaard wrote a whole book on faith and its contradictions, so it must be more complicated that a simple story of a father deciding to kill his son as a sacrifice to his god.

i would wish to argue that if we wanted to found judaism on that act, literally, the religion should be left aside as an interesting artifact of history, not as anything to be taken seriously.

a few years after this, we have another father deciding to sacrifice his son. same story: the son will be left to suffer and die, and then go to heaven, and take with him the sins of ordinary people. that's it. he cried out, my father, why have you abandoned me, and afterwards will have made it possible for sinful people to be saved by believing in him.
do you really want to take that story literally? isn't it possible to give a transcendental reading that gets us beyond the immediate physicality of crucifixion, death, resurrection? is this the best we can do to found christian values, or can we not get to love and care by a more compelling way of reading that story?
children want angels to fly; we are adults in the room, and need to read more deeply.

wait a couple more days. now the father is back, ready to sacrifice his son, who this time has changed his name to that of the older boy, ishmael. again the knife, again the terror, again the sheep in substitution of the boy. seem familiar? seem again to invite readings of all these elements, the person of the father, the person of the son, the person of the ram, the role of the angel, the repetition of the acts every year, bringing the ram under the knife, the memory of the ritual and salvation it enables? can't we actually read this as more than simply some abhorrent act of violence?

on the level of reading that we must, all, insist upon, it is not violence as in the commonly used meaning of the word. It entails a transcendence of the physical realm in every case, the intervention of a magical moment that takes the act outside the realm of the normal or ordinary.  for kierkegaard we cannot understand it, so it becomes foundational for faith.
for those who insist upon taking it literally--the fundamentalists of all these religions--the violence has no meaning beyond the bodies, and they would take a sword or hammer or gun, and say, take this religion my way or the highway. but for every act of commentary--which forms the true core of the religion--it is necessary to read the accounts hermeneutically, for meaning, not for reportage.

that is all the world of difference between a study that counts acts like these as violence and one that claims we are not talking about violence in any ordinary sense of the word at all, but something that transcends it. you don't have to believe it, but you do have to think.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2021 4:30 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Violence is more common in the Bible than the Quran text analysis reveals
 

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Aug 22, 2021, 2:10:19 PM8/22/21
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thanks ken.

i was thinking about the abraham/isaac sacrifice and the jesus sacrifice too.

bizarre stories.

some elements of religion are anti-human.

these anti-human quality emerges in levels of subjugation  of the well being of the human to the spiritual.

this subjugation becomes antihuman when it is carried out against the will of the human victim or when its presented in terms that glorify values that have little place in human well being-a tautological definition, granted.

the abraham/isaac story i see as another example of this subjugation. I understand any elevated reading of it as trying to rescue something inherently barbaric in the first place.

things we humans cannot imagine ourselves doing we attribute to God. what father would sacrifice their child for any reason or pretend to sacrifice the child who believes the plan is real?

yet, these abominable orientations are attributed to God.

as for the Christian story, how is it different from pre-Christian narratives of divine sacrifice, stories taken these days as myth?

i get the impression the abraham/isaac story and the jesus sacrifice story are fabrications of religious writers trying to craft an ideology.

the jesus sacrifice story is itself based on the garden of eden story which itself is best understood as myth.

i think jesus is better appreciated as a great spiritual figure, born like anyone else, demonstrating great wisdom and possibly great powers of healing and exorcism who was executed and died like anyone else.

did he rise from the dead? perhaps, if he was not dead but only exhausted or unconscious on the cross.

yogis  are described as being able to survive burial for days through techniques of breathing and body control.

was he the son of God, an aspect of God?

i dont know if God exists but the idea of a son of God looks to me like almost a contradiction in logic.

yet, i pray to God. i pray to Jesus.

i believe in God without knowing if God exists. its inspiring and central to my life.

 i pray to Jesus bcs i find it inspiring and effective. 

i also pray to my departed father, olabisi silva, pius adesanmi, and other departed humans whom i find inspiring. i have also had inspiring dreams of these people.

i meditate on kant in the same way as i meditate on the buddhist saint milarepa. exemplary inspirational figures.

i have practised and practise different kinds of spirituality, western, african, asian, self created. i have experienced something unique from each of them. the spiritual world is real but deeply mysterious. 

all the more reason why i take all spirituality including mine, with critical appreciation. 

we humans are like blind people in a vast arena where very important things are happening but which we cannot see, only sense, and experience in flashes of light on our eyelids.

some people occasionally experience a little more of these realities than the rest of us and become founders of religions. 

but these realities cannot be grasped except subjectively and so these accounts are not universally convincing.

if God exists, that reality may be closer to the human being than his jugular vein, as I understand the Koran states, but that reality is farther away in discernment from the human being than the human being is from an ant.

yet we pontificate on what God thinks. 

an intelligence of unimaginable depth, capable of enabling the existence of life and the cosmos and we presume we can make conclusive statements on the perspectives of such an identity.

what can an ant know of the human mind?

  yet ants and humans are biological creatures existing within the same ontological spectrum.

what of that which enables the existence of the ant, the human, the grain of sand, the stars, if such a one exists as an awareness?

if such an identity genuinely  shares its awareness with a human being, how well can the human person grasp it?

in a garbled, confused manner, distorted by the narrowness of even the most exalted human mind, shot through with some flashes of illumination?

please forgive my taking this opportunity to express my own philosophy of religion/theology.

thanks

toyin


















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Cornelius Hamelberg

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Aug 23, 2021, 6:09:07 PM8/23/21
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Some of these topics that come up for discussion in this forum, are so familiar and have been discussed previously and beaten to death in the world's podiums, ad nauseam. So, what are we supposed to do here? Pray to Kant? Edward Said? Regurgitate some of the strongest pro and con arguments that have been advanced by stronger minds? Overwhelm the feeble-minded with strong arguments? Who should be the judge?

Have you read ( or heard about) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' “Not in God's Name”?

I don't understand all this yada-yada about violence in God's name. Read all the scriptures as hermeneutically as you like, but doesn't the Bhagavad Gita start with the Kurukshetra War? Does that mean that Hinduism does not espouse the high ethical ideal of ahimsa? Of course, the religiously Hindu Warrior goes into battle armed with the faith preached in the Gita, that the soul is immortal. The continuation of the soul's life, after the body's death. Ditto Christianity and Islam (at least 72 Virgins to console your soul) both preaching paradise or hell. Judaism on the other hand guarantees that every Jew is assured of a good place in the Hereafter, the Olam Ha-ba

Concerning violence in Holy Bible versus violence according to Holy Quran Quran, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju's rhetorical question is “Which of the two religions is associated with violence and terrorism today? “

A good place to begin a common-sense understanding is by coming to terms with the fact Rasulullah Sallallahu alaihi wa salaam accomplished his mission in the twenty-three years during which the Quran was revealed, and then blessed the hereafter at sixty-two years of age, on June 6, in the year 632. During those twenty-three years – the entire length of his prophetic mission, there were times when the nascent Muslim community had to defend themselves, and the Prophet of Islam himself fought a total of 28 (twenty-eight) battles – out of a total of 95 ( ninety-five) military expeditions undertaken by the Muslims during his lifetime.

About the historicity of Islam's prophet, at least we have the Charter of Medina

“Which of the two religions is associated with violence and terrorism today? “

It's a matter of common sense really.We must explain that it's not the religions per se, but the adherents with varying degrees of commitment to their religion's recommendations on when the use of lethal force is necessary – or indeed a commandment that should be obeyed.

As dear Omowale / Malcolm X / El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz made so reasonably clear, “There is nothing in our book the Quran that teaches us to suffer peacefully” - or to be shuffering and shmiling - under any kind of oppression. Why do you think the so-called Afghanistan National Army that was pay-rolled and massively equipped by the United States for almost two decades deserted and joined forces with their Taliban Brethren even before Uncle Sam had left town?

If it's evidence that you want, O infinitely less than omniscient and less than omnipresent one, then all you have to do is to click here

segun...@gmail.com

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Aug 23, 2021, 10:34:54 PM8/23/21
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It is so because a lot of materials of Quran came from the Bible. It could be the case that Muhammad could not memorize a number of Old Testament passages where violence had been recorded or those passages were not of spiritual importance to him. 
Segun 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 22, 2021, at 12:08 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



Cornelius Hamelberg

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Aug 23, 2021, 10:35:34 PM8/23/21
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Re - “the abraham/isaac sacrifice and the jesus sacrifice” ( Adepoju)

One of the lessons derived from the Akedah - at the very last minute a ram being sacrificed in lieu of Isaac - is that the Almighty thereby effectively put an end to the idea of human sacrifice, once and for all, the type of human sacrifice was very prevalent in the surrounding, neighbourhood cultures in Aba Abraham's day...

The idea of Jesus as “ son of God” crucified as human sacrifice is quite another matter. To date, I have only read about a third of the New Testament and will suspend asking Samuel, my foremost teacher about this until when I have looked through all the letters and Revelations – in the belief that I must know what I'm talking about when asking my silly questions. For instance, I should have read Kant,  if not all of him at least a great good chunk of him before passing judgement, pontificating, arguing about him or “meditating” on him.

In relation to all this the importance of Torah Study cannot be overemphasised 

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Aug 24, 2021, 8:58:22 AM8/24/21
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Ken.

After what we have said over the years in this forum, there are still those who prefer to pluck Christianity and Islam out of the legitimate contexts of their origins and the interlapping origins of their scriptural texts and subtexts and want thereby to be regarded as ( political?) scholars waxing serious in their views.


We have noted both principal figures themselves Jesus and Prophet Muhamned were considered illiterate yet stood at the cusp of the people of the Book.

We have drawn attention to the dovetailed events of the book by order of antecedent copying of one another and gratuitous interpretations.

We have noted the importance of geographical contiguity and the borrowing of stock themes which should be of interest to genuine literary scholars to alert them to the unlikelihood of the pristine nature of each religions.

We have drawn attention to the sojourn of the eponym  of Christianity in Egypt and the influence of the the Egyptian polytheistic concept of the Trinity on the cardinal eschatology of Christianity when the Bible was eventually written as a homogenous text circa 4 CE.

Yet people want us to believe entirely different concepts of religions have been presented in the leading monotheisms.



OAA



Let those who believe in majority rule ensure its practice at the centre in Nigeria come 2023.



Sent from my Galaxy



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Date: 22/08/2021 18:36 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Violence is more common in the Biblethan the Quran text analysis reveals

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Aug 24, 2021, 11:40:42 AM8/24/21
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dear olayinka
i'm not 100% sure of the point of our list focusing so much on religious questions. if it is a question of the reality of religious figures, we need real historians of the topic, and i don't know if we have such scholars. if it is a question of the theology, there are some who are conversant in the religions, or one religion, and who can point to text, which we can all look at. and the minute we start a debate about the religious meaning, which we all impose individually, i suppose we can have a friendly discussion, without trying to imagine we are serious scholars.

i am maybe too much of a servant to the notion of specialists who devote their lives to topics, and can speak with authority. i love it when specialists confess their humility, and don't say, this is who jesus or mohammad or moses were, but this is the evidence we have of such and such, and let us be persuaded by the evidence.
and i think discussions between friends has to entail disagreements that are respectful, or else they are too painful to have.
it is a question of being safe, in a sense. i can voice an opinion without fearing that i'll be attacked for it. attack my views an uninformed, and explain why, and maybe i'll learn something; and vice versa.
but we don't want to be argument about the religions of others in ways that make them feel attacked.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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