Hank Williams, Jr.'s public comparison of Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler has been all the news.
Nashville, in spite of her southern gentility, is not unfamiliar with such strong language, evidenced by the likes of Toby Keith, the country artist who equated the way of America with kicking someone's ass following the September 11 attacks.
Belligerent and blanket demonization has found pointed expression here of late in the Bible Belt. In response to a plan to construct a new mosque in middle Tennessee, one opponent publicly stereotyped Muslims as "these people who want to kill us."
The so-called "clash of civilizations" thesis is another expression of the blanket "us versus them" approach. Mark Gabriel claims for example that "the war today is between 7th century Islamic culture and 21st century modern culture. These cultures are incompatible. They cannot coexist because the values of one violate the values of the other."
While demonizing speech-acts may work well at galvanizing a given constituency for a short-burst of fear-driven action, they do little to make space for the possibility of peaceable co-existence.
In Who Is My Enemy? Questions American Christians Must Face About Islam, and Themselves, I suggest we take seriously the approach attributed to Francis of Assisi, who called us to "seek first to understand, then to be understood." It is in this way, he said, we may become a "channel of peace."
In doing so, we may also be able to see things we could not possibly see otherwise.
This does not mean that we should ever ignore oppression or violence, and it most certainly does not mean that we should somehow rationalize away the injustice of another. It means simply to begin with a posture that seeks first to understand.
But when demonizing and war-mongering talk is employed -- when the pundits and artists use language of "treason" and "Hitler" and "ass-kicking" -- it is simply impossible to clear a space to facilitate peaceable co-existence. This sort of language continues to dominate much discussion around co-existence between Muslims and Christians, between East and West. Such language also continues, in a frightening way, to dominate the polarization between left and right, and liberal and conservative.
But such talk fails to understand the way civilizations and cultures work.
Consider Southern culture, for example. When my Midwestern graduate school colleagues got to looking down their nose at things Southern, I had to remind them that the South actually means all the things that make America interesting, like rock, country, and jazz music; Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway; barbeque and fried chicken. "The South" also means NASCAR and dirt-track car racing, Gulf Coast beaches and the tail end of the Appalachians, Bible Belt civil religion and low-ranking public school systems, the KKK and a racism that is at once strangely polite and simultaneously ruthless.
But even my description of the South is itself an interpretation. Any description of any thing or culture is necessarily selective. Southern blacks describe the South differently than do Southern whites, than do newly arrived Hispanics. Hollywood, in all its self-righteous glory, inevitably portrays Southern culture in a manner that any self-respecting Southerner finds utterly and ironically intolerant. Daisy Duke and Boss Hogg do not the South make. I prefer Atticus Finch, myself, without any delusion that we do not have plenty of Southern shortcomings.
If a "culture" cannot be rejected as a whole, then why the widespread popularity of the "clash of civilizations" thesis? Talal Asad has claimed, "It was only with the Crusades that the papacy promoted the ideology of a unified Christendom at war with a unified Islam."
This is a deeply ironic observation. If it is true, then the "clash of civilizations" thesis, in which Western Christians often claim that they have moved beyond thinking about Crusades while Muslims have not -- is premised upon Crusader logic itself.
Francis of Assisi -- seeking first to understand, then to be understood -- is reported to have traveled, unarmed and in his poverty, to visit the sultan in the midst of one of the Crusades. When Francis left the sultan, he was showered with many gifts, treated as a friend.
Perhaps Francis's seeking-first-to-understand-medieval-approach is preferable to the Crusader-and-demonizing-medieval-approach. I have recently found, as I sought out the opportunity to share a table or drink tea with Muslims in Jerusalem and Hebron, Istanbul and Nashville, that I can indeed learn things about myself to which I was blind otherwise. And I discovered that there is much more space for peaceable and productive co-existence -- with those with whom I have substantive and terribly important disagreements -- than I could have known otherwise.
Consequently, I have the strong suspicion that genuine freedom will not be facilitated by demonizing and ass-kicking, but the hard and dangerous work of "seeking first to understand, then to be understood."
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Do we accept western (educated) Islamic apologists arguments: that Islam is a peaceful religion? And what of the moderate Muslims who live, work and raised their families here in the West, are they actually obeying the Koran, while the Jihadists extremists are an exception?
It would be utterly insane for the West to ignore so-called moderate Muslims claims, certainly if you use Islamic law as a basis of criterion to measure legitimacy and illegitimacy.
Because, on the basis of Islamic Law, you can't show that the moderate Muslims have a doctrinal basis for the position which they claim to hold, and you can't show, that on the basis of Islamic law, the extremist Jihadists are wrong.
Westerners, lulled into complacency by the civilized notions of honor and trust between two parties to an agreements, are coming to recognize to our utter dismay that Islam is the one exception to this universal rule of peacemaking and negociations, as we come to learn the real meaning of Ketman and Satiyya: the deliberate mis-portrayal of one's beliefs to others, non-Muslims, and obsfucation and deliberate deception towards those you are making agreements with, as taught in the Koran, as well as its many Hadiths.
So, if the Moderates are not actually arguing on the basis of Islamic law., how can we accept their argument that Islam is a Peaceful religion?”
And it seems to me, that as a professor of theology, he can actually show from the Bible itself, where does it say that God encourages free sovereign nations that they ought to make it their nation policy to live in "peaceful co-existence" with other hostile regimes whose existential intent is to enslave, conquer and overthrow them as Islam so plainly declares to do to the West?
Well, I suggest "the approach attributed to Francis of Assisi", is not biblical. The admirable aceticism he practiced as a Catholic, was Platonic, not Christian, as the so-called Christian fathers had turn Christianity into a Aristotelian religion.
yet, when the Lord Jesus said that we ought to "turn the other cheek" to our enemies, He was speaking of other family members who had made themselves our "adversaries", not to other sovereign states seeking to destroy us.
As names go, that's sort of ironic.
In this time Muslims are the vehicle used to vent the ensuing frustrations.
When hate groups are called hate groups (and not protected under the guise of religious tolerance), then we can end a clash of the uncivil. When a person can say - look the bible says god hates and it is wrong - we will build tolerance. When a person can say - look the koran says god hates and it is wrong - we will build tolerance. When a person can say - look the power elites are coercive jerks and it is wrong - we will build tolerance. Tolerance will be built when intolerance is not tolerated and much intolerance is tolerated in churches and mosques.
hariaum
Do you know there is no such thing as "hate groups": a cohort of individuals who's sole aim is to hate others.
This severely cheapens an important and vital human emotion such as anger. And hate too, is an extremely valuable emotional reaction, to such things as injustice, cruelty and every other condition and cause of human suffering.
I personally hate Western arrogance and shallowness. The result, I hope, is that I am, or at least, try to be less of these things myself.
If the god Allah of Islam was the same God Yahweh of Christians, why is Islam trying to overthrow Christianity in the West? Of course, this is impossible, which is just why there really is a authentic clash of civilizations between the sons of Allah and Christianity in the West. There is also a [cosmic] war between a fallen angel call Lucifer and Almighty God.
These two clashes are actually one and the same. Once upon a time Europeans used to know this, when for a thousands years Islam fought bloody agressive wars against them here. And, what is more, then very nearly succeeded, and had they, you'd today be speaking Arabic and worshiping Allah yourself
In my belief, Brahman never justifies hate. Hate does rise from anger, and anger rises from a egoist base of desire. And the ego base for desire is a part of who we are. But just as the sun can burn and enlighten, our ego base can be turned to hate or to love. It is our ego's choice. But to hate is to have already moved down the path of a ego based false reality. Of all the ideologies I have read, it is only the bible and koran that support the ideology of a hateful god.
In my belief, you have the right to believe your ideology of god's war is somehow peaceful. The clash of cultures comes when an ideology says the other does not have the right to believe what they want - monoideological hate.
hariaum
But, there is a clash of the un-civilized!
My only criticism of this post is that I've always preferred "barbecue" over "barbeque." It makes more phonetic sense, especially if you know Spanish or appreciate baroque music and architecture.
And have a bit more fun at life as well, because like the great American comedian Bill Hicks said, "Life is a ride".
From atoms to antelopes, from a child's crying to stellar explosions, these all happen according to habits or laws (or even 'behaviours'). If you can find out these habits, you can predict. Atomic behaviour is relatively easy to predict. Human behaviour is relatively more difficult :3
We seem to operate on 'autopilot' most of the time; most of the processes that go on in our bodies are unconscious & automatic -- things like digestion, oxygen transfer, nerve transmission. When we learn something new, we are learning a new habit and it takes a while for it to become a habit and when it does, we really don't need to think aboot it anymore. Just think of tying your shoelace.
Now, the way our neurology is set up is that we don't really see the world as it is, but as we believe it is. Our neurology builds up a model of reality and then projects it 'out there' and call it 'the real world'. Thus, different people can have differing worlds. We have differing things that we like, dislike, that we find blasphemous, that we find sacred.
There are groups and organizations who know how all this works and who are really good at manufacturing consent, for good or ill. There are various jihadist groups who are really good at this and have been trying to manipulate everyone to get their way. There are right wing groups in the US that are good at this