Respect: A History of Violence

There is a religion whose holy book records its God commanding human sacrifice and large scale genocide. These are hardly isolated incidents but part of a pattern of intolerance and violence. So do we owe the adherents respect and toleration?

Whether we do or not, we have little choice, since this religion with its multiple branches forms the largest community of believers in the World. Although those acting in its name still perpetrate the occasional mass murder, for the most part its worst deeds seem to be behind it, at least for the moment. That said, some of its fringe elements continue to whip up interreligious hatred and violence.

I am referring, of course, to Judaism and its Christian offshoot. Of course some other religions have similarly violent histories and traditions. Notable among them is the "cousin" religion of Islam. Like the JC religions, Islam centers its faith on a Holy book and claims descent from Abraham. Like them, it has a tradition of inter and intra religious violence.

None of these religions has a great history of tolerance, but each of them has had successful episodes of it. In the West, science and democracy have promoted a secular tradition that manages a certain amount of even-handedness in its relations with various religions. That becomes impossible if the partisans of the various religions insist on stirring up anger and the public responds.

We know a lot about how such anger can be stirred. The basic formula could be printed on the religious fanatic's cereal box: Insult or attack the other, wait for retaliation in threat or attack, and respond with outrage, extend the guilt for any act of insult or violence to every member of the associated group, and finally, lie and distort like crazy.

Thus it was that some relatively innocent cartoons by a Danish guy were supplemented by some truly insulting forgeries to still up anger against the cartoonist, and most importantly, everyone in the West. That said, what about the motives of the cartoonist? Was he picking on an oppressed minority, or did he think he had a higher moral purpose.

Most of the Muslim world has found itself dragged rather abruptly from the 12th century into the 21st. Because of their numerical strength and fortuitous control of much of the World's energy supplies, they arrived not as helpless savages on the fringe of civilization but more like the suddenly rich but still ungentrified country cousins. Their 12th century customs frquently seem barbaric to us, but they probably would have looked much less so to our own ancestors.

I'm not arguing that we should tolerate practices that we consider barbaric, but I will argue that we need to adopt the reformers creed: target the behavior, not the people. A singer named Morrissey recently created a scandal by labelling "Chinese people a sub-species" over an animal cruelty scandal. While I object to animal cruelty in all forms, and find the subject cruelty particularly repellent, Morrissey is nuts. In the first place, it's possible to find plenty of animal cruelty closer to home. In the second, Chinese attitudes are changing too, and the route to aligning their attitudes more toward his is through persuasion, not insult. Finally, I don't think sub-species means what he thinks it does.

The supposed point of this long digression is that if we object to some Muslim practices (many of which are not sanctioned by the Koran), protest them. Be outraged that the Iranians stone people to death, that people have their hands cut off, or are murdered for educating women. Burning Korans or publishing cartoons won't help.

I agree with many of the points Prothero and Kristof make in their respective columns.