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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I don't think the words that appear in holy texts matter nearly as much as many here are suggesting. The people who are vulnerable to falling into literalist, fundamentalist religious movements aren't scholars who carefully parse every word for it's significances - they're a dangerous combination of angry, vulnerable, dumb, and credulous.
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This is a pretty ignorant assertion. You clearly have very limited experience with Evangelical Christianity, which accounts for the vast majority of biblicists in North America.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
...Words in a book don't make them that way.
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What way is that? My argument here has been that literalism produces as a by product the sort of blind commitment to text and doctrine that is characteristic of so-called fundamentalist religious movements. Literalism does not occur because of a text, it is applied to a text, but is produced by a much more complex religious history.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Cults aren't dangerous because of the tennets of the cult (which in their substance are remarkably similar from cult to cult). They're dangerous because there are people out there vulnerable enough to get sucked into them.
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So, what are you implying here? Do you consider ISIL a "cult"? Fundamentalist Christianity? By what definition?
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Would these young and angry men raised in the West stop flocking to the Middle East to become martyrs if a few words in the Koran were different? Would they suddenly became healthy, productive people integrated into the world around them?
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These are senseless questions that effectively trivialise the religious underpinnings and history in the ISIL crisis.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
...Which tells me it was never really about the words in the texts, but the conditions that make those words appealing to so many disturbed and angry young men.
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In that instance, yes. But you cannot draw the analogy from what happened in twentieth century anarchism to what is going on with ISIL. The religious roots of the conflict, and yes, the literalistic application of the Quran are absolutely integral to the conflict in Iraq and Syria.