From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 16:32:37 MDT
Date sent: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 16:06:05 -0600
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Re:Shifting Ideological Sands
From: "Kharin" <hidden@lucifer.com>
Send reply to: virus@lucifer.com
>
> "Most telling. It would seem that most (religious) Americans find it
> impossible to accept that they might have given offence to God. "
>
> While I suspect admission of offence to be generally difficult to
> accept, it does seem to me that religions do tend to explain
> misfortune in terms of retribution. As I recall, some American
> fundamentalists did indeed react to September 11th by asserting that
> god had lifted his veil of protection from America for its immorality
> and lack of faith. Not really any different from explaining the plague
> as a divine visitation, or to any of the examples Frazier furnished in
> The Golden Bough. For their part, the mullahs explain the decline of
> Islamic society as being attributable to a failure to adhere properly
> to the Koran and to the introduction of Western immorality.
>
The difference that I see between the cases has to do with the
separation of church and state, which exists in the US but not in Muslim
nations. Due to this difference, the religious authorities who make such
pronouncements in many Muslim countries have the force of the
government behind them, while those in the US do not. This, of course,
makes public dissent against such pronoujncements much easier in the
US than it is in most Muslim countries, where such criticisms of religious
pronoiuncements can be (and frequently are) prosecuted.
> ----
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