> No xtian puts his Bible on par with the Quaran or Vedas as texts
> written by men on their own
Actually, some do -- a lot of Unitarians, etc. Of course, one can always argue that they really aren't "Christians," but then it's just an argument about who has the "right" definition of "Christian."
> Both have plenty of violence and advocate retribution but the xtian
> bible has the "love thy neighbor" stuff that is simply absent from the
> Quran. The tolerance for stoning adulteresses is phenomenally higher
> for muslims than xtians. You can argue the cultural differences all
> you want but at their core is the religious edicts. Islam is
> inherently more violent than xtianity for the reason given above.
I haven't read enough of the Quran to know if this is true or not. Have you, or are you just going by what conventional opinion in this part of the world believes about the book? At any rate, I think the important thing is what people do in real life, not what is in the books that they think are "sacred." And as far as I can see, most actual Muslims are no more or less violent than most Christians, or secularists, or any other human beings. The "violent Muslims" we keep hearing about are only a very small proportion. (Of course, in some places, like Palestine, they are more concentrated, but that's a special historically generated situation, and even there I'd bet that over time the influence of the violent Muslims, as well as the violent Israelis, is decreasing. Until the last few weeks, I never thought that I would see a resolution of that conflict in my lifetime, but some interesting things seem to be going on. Though I'm still about 97.5% pessimistic.)
> Xtians have peaceful tenets in their nonsensical tracts that are
> absent from muslim tracts.
As I say, I don't know much about the Quran, but I have seen Muslims quote very peaceful stuff from it. I don't have any references handy, but some Googling should turn them up soon enough.
> This is incorrect in that none of the things you list require religion
> to exist. The fact that you can find psychological theories in
> religions does not mean the religion is about them or necessary for
> them. All of those things exist for non-religious individuals and are
> not about attainment of an afterlife. There is no doubt that religious
> beliefs are complex and in order to understand them you need to
> analyze them but you cannot stop there. Most xtians claim to believe
> one thing but when questioned thoroughly you will find they actually
> believe something else. Studying the religion itself will not explain
> the behaviors of its followers by itself.
> The exercise of trying to pull a handful of "good" things out of mixed
> bag of religious tenets is a pointless exercise. We have no need of
> religion to have these good things and trying to find them in religion
> still ties them to that rest of the baggage whatever attempts anyone
> makes to prevent that.
I certainly agree that none of these things require religion to exist. But to understand religion and religious people, I think you need to break this complex social phenomenon down into its components, which do include these things. That is, for people of religion X, their way of understanding psychology, morality, etc., the language in which they think and talk about them, is what is contained in religion X. Doing this analysis, I think, is the first step in getting to a place where people of different religions and no religion can talk sensibly with each other (if that's at all possible).
For example, the "Golden Rule," as Christians call it, is found in some form or other in just about every culture. It's just a common-sense principle for people to live together in communities. But a lot of Christians would say that it is a valid moral principle because Jesus said so. The rest of us can say, "Well, we accept basically the same principle, but for other reasons than yours. But as long as we can all agree that that is a good way to behave, why worry about the disagreement over the reasons for it?" Then we can go on to discuss other moral questions where there are more disagreement on the actual principles, such as abortion, gay rights, etc. But now we are discussing them on a more neutral, culture/worldview-independent, basis.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ The mass of man[sic]kind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. -- George Santayana (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion)