Standing Up ...

The topic in "Standing Up..." here is Islam and what we can understand of it in the world today.   

 

More specifically, this topic began as the problem of the superficially "missing" moderate Muslims.  It's a common American prejudice nowadays that no one can be Muslim AND be a decent person at the same time; that the religious primacy of God and the Quran universally subverts Reason in Muslims and converts them all into passive or active supporters of Radical Muslim terror.  This isn't true, per se, but there have been more than enough murders committed in the name of Islam by fanatics and punks that the notion keeps presenting itself. 

But it behooves us to get "relative" about it.  (Yes, one can "get relative" without becoming a moron.  But if you're a dyed-in-the-wool absolutist anti-relativist for whom the world is always morally black and white, where only "we" are good and all others are bad, then you can just ignore what follows.)  While an exception may disprove the absoluteness of a rule, the exception is NOT the rule: the real world is infinitely complex and composed of endless Individuals.  Only bigots accept and apply pejorative "rules" to the exclusion of facts. 

My little investigation into the topic of moderate Muslims seems to show me (so far) four political and religious classes of Muslims:

• Atheists who are, technically, 'Muslim' (like the many technical Christians and Jews and so on);
• Moral Believers, people who are Muslim but judge others as people and not by labels; 
• Overly Devout folks who are extra-religious or even fundamentalist Muslims who are, nonetheless, horrified and saddened by Radical Islamic terror; and -
• of course - the Radical (Fundamentalist) Muslims who either support or perform acts of terror. 

I expect the same sorts of division apply to any group of a collective religious or political identity.  My point is that American and other reactionaries fail to appreciate the variance in Muslim attitudes and conditions, and instead lump every Muslim in the same trash bin with the Radical Muslims.  (The American Left makes the same mistake with Republicans and Christians and so on.)  They justify this by the murderous extent of Radical Islam's terror-movement, and its inhuman proclamations.  But the excesses of a few are still not the customs of the many. 

 

There are lots of modern Muslims who, in their own lives, can integrate God, the Quran, AND human decency, just as there are such people in any religious group.  We can pin a violent past (or present) on any of these other groups as well, whether Puritanical Christians, Communists, CEO's and "working men", Populists, et cetera; but that doesn't automatically make all the members of such groups murderers and rapists.  

 

I want to mention one author who speaks to the whole question of the "missing" moderates:  Ranya Tabari Idliby, author of two books:

• The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew - Three Women Search for Understanding (ISBN 978-0743290487)
• Burqas, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Being Muslim in America (ISBN 978-0-230-34184-5)

I am reading the second of these.  Ranya is decidedly Muslim; but she is also decidedly American.  She is heroic enough to condemn the murderers and criminals who slaughter and claim it as a service to God; and she is reasoning enough to have a commitment to Freedom and Goodwill - which makes her like a lot of un-sung decent Muslim folk who have not been interviewed or printed or otherwise published.  I hope to get back and sum up more of what I get from her book later. 

 

So, again, for people who think they're People of Good Will, don't condemn all Muslims for the actions of a few angry, crazy macho-types; but do read Ranya's book - very timely reading for all of us non-Muslims (Stoic, Baptist, Atheist, Catholic, Buddhist, whatever). 

 

February Thunder

(This is an old entry I never actually published.  Found it today and - some five months or so late - decided to put it up.) 

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Salvete, qui legentes - 

Which at this point probably just means ME! 

So is this a blog or a diary?  Nescio quid, sed Deo gratias quod hoc in loco nil Flammarum Belli pati debeo!  Quod sive totus mundus blogum meum frequentarent, nec mihi grave. 

Februarius is with us, and last night gave us some REAL WEATHER: thunderstorms, rain-drops big as marbles, a near-horizontal wind up to I-don't-know-how-many miles per hour.  It was a full-blown bluster, a soaker of a storm!  And it renewed itself again come midnight or so; the thunder was so continuous, extended and crescent; it mounted and mounted in volume -- I thought an airliner was crashing on our house. 

Actual thunder.  Still something of a novelty for us in the Eastern San Francisco Bay Area. 

Valete. 

Some More about God and Men

From an earlier note, a week or so ago, that I made to myself.  Why I need to try to figure out all these metaphysical maybe's is attributable to Human Nature, and to the subject matter of my studies this term. 

Epicurus* asked:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not all-powerful.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?　 Then why call him God?　

 

God exists as something real – the micro-, macro- and astro-scopic Universe itself – huge, infinitely complex, beyond men’s ability to control or comprehend. This is "the Creation", whether it was something created or remains perpetual or whatever its ultimate nature may prove to be. This God can be seen, analyzed, and learned from. Whether it is, as the Stoics claimed, a"providential" one depends on your definition of 'providential', and then upon your experience and your bent in life.

God also exists – subsists, perhaps? – as a feeling, as the experiences of thinking and of conscience – whether these come from the otherwise fanciful pneuma deduced by the Stoics, or from some sort of organic neural feedback, or from whatever.  We (at least most of us) carry these and participate in them, and we get the feeling that – well – there's something going on that’s not just material.　 We can call it soul, pneuma, Daimon, Guardian Angel, Christ-in-us, Reason, moral sense, or even numina that lace the land about us.　 This God cannot be seen, cannot be proven to be material, remains both hard to pin down but also remains self-evident to us.

Whether you claim a Single God (combining all divine attributes), or Two Gods (as I have crudely laid out above), or Three Gods (as in the Christian Trinity, united as One), or a full Pantheon (as in the many and endlessly various Pagan traditions), what we do know is that we are, for the most part, dealing with an Idea whose manifestation is both our whole physical world – the "works" of God – and also our own inner selves.　 But there’s no other hard evidence, just "hearsay", as Thomas Paine put it.　 And this evidence that we do have available – that we and the world ARE -- does not have a simple, intelligible signature that quiets all controversy.　 It is much more complex than that.

The only honest notion about God or the Gods, I am convinced, is the Agnostic One – as in, "I don’t know, but I think … !"　 The actions of worship (on one hand) and reasoning (on the other) are both indications of God, in us, at work.　

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*   The only authority for this being Epicurus's argument is Lactantius, the only ancient source to quote it.  He may have been wrong about having Epicure as the author; in fact, Epicurus's notions of the Gods seem to run counter to the notions inherent in the quote.