E.R. Campbell said:
I'm just being pedantic because it seems to me that we ought not to compare religions (outside of a classroom, anyway) when we are, really, talking culture. I think pbi is correct: the values and actions that we often ascribe to Islam are, very often (most often?) really well entrenched cultural values from various regions where Islam happens to dominate ~ North Africa, the Middle East, South West Asia and so on.
More on this notion in a (CNN) interview with
Prof Reza Aslan,
here ... it's worth the 10 minutes.
Prof Aslan is
not lacking critics, but, on a personal level I found
Zealot, his 'biography' of Jesus interesting and well written and, I would say, a generally positive addition to the study of the origins of Christianity.
I agree with Prof Aslan that
some Muslim states ~ Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc ~ are in great need of religious
reformation and socio-cutural
enlightenment, not because they are Muslim, per se, but rather because they use Islam to perpetuate abhorrent, medieval social customs. Other Muslim countries, Indonesia and Malaysia, both of which are already at least as socially
enlightened as America, for example, just need to rid themselves of the socially retarded influence of the Middle Easterner religious fundamentalists.
The problem isn't Islam, it is some, really just, relatively, a few, Muslims who happen to have the backing of some culturally retarded governments: change those governments, through, for example, a long, bloody set of revolutions and civil wars, which may be underway, right now, and the 'problem' may (or may not) solve itself.
