There were several smaller Crusades, such as the one against the Cathars (who are an interesting, interesting group, and one of my reasons for reading up on all this history), but they amounted to (from what I've learned so far) some really nasty religious persecution. Don't ask me about the "Children's Crusade." Not to belittle what happened to the Cathars, but that Crusade looks like it was called a Crusade just because they could call it that.

I don't doubt there was animosity before the Crusades. If there wasn't, why would anyone care that Muslims ruled all these lands? My point was that the Crusades may have created a much more massive gulf between the two.

So here are these lands that Christianity wants, and they're ruled by Muslims. Again, I wonder if this didn't create a psychological barrier between the two religions. Not only was Islam not a part of Christianity, but it was an active occupier in the eyes of much of Europe.

I said that most of 0-1492 was not really covered; I did have the opportunity in high school to take an elective on Islam. Again, the Crusades weren't really covered, just the origins and beliefs of the religion, and comparisons to Christianity and Judaism. I did get to help the teacher organize a field trip to a local mosque in LA. When some of the men sitting outside found out some of us were Jewish, they actually seemed happy, smiling and telling us we had "so much in common."

So why is Goth/Punk "alternative" and not mainstream?

I think this is related to my point about religion not having a role in public life in the West, which I make in reply to a post by wchurchill below.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

Interestingly, given the topic of this diary, Orthodox Judaism and Islam are tied at 22 and 23 (26%).

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

1.     Unitarian Universalism  (100%)
   
2.     Secular Humanism (98%)
   
3.     Theravada Buddhism (95%)
   
4.     Liberal Quakers  (84%)
   
5.     Neo-Pagan (77%)
   
6.     Nontheist (73%)

I can relate to that thought, but not with respect to Islam, since I really don't know anything about its organizational structure.

Looking at churches as organizations that receive funding and pay people provides part of the explanation for why Christian fundamentalism flourishes in the United States but not countries like Germany. (The other part is that the Scottish Enlightenment claimed that nothing sensible can be said about religious questions, while the German Enlightenment accepted that religion can be rational.) In Germany, theologians are university professors. That has two implications. 1) German theologians are civil servants, so they have lifetime employment. That means that they have the luxury of intellectual honesty, and giving a problem the time it needs to be resolved properly. 2) German theologians are going to worry about what their colleagues think about their work, and that means that they will want to be taken seriously by philosophers, historians, and scientists.

The people who set the agenda for religion in America face different conditions in both respects. They do not have lifetime employments, so that they must tailor their message to the market, to get as high a demand as possible. In other words, they must preach to the lowest common denominator: in America, religion is a market, like anything else. And since anyone can be a preacher in America—all you need to do is to get a following sufficient enough to pay your bills—the people who create theology in America do not need to be concerned about whether educated people will take them seriously.

So your question about where the money comes from sheds light on why fundamentalism flourishes in America but not in (continental) Europe. But I don't know if it helps us to understand the difference between Christianity and Islam.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

According to reality.

Are you aware that there has been an evolution in Christian thought over the last two thousand years? During the Middle Ages, people had a coherent, unified world view based on the Bible. With the advent of the scientific revolution, it was understood that the Bible doesn't really describe or explain nature, as had been previously believed. With the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, it was understood that people need to interpret the Bible for themselves, individually, instead of relying upon the Church hierarchy. With the development of critical textual methods at the end of the nineteenth century and more recent historical and archaeological scholarship, it has become possible to understand the Bible not as the word of God, but as the product of a historical process.

After the Bible lost its monopoly on dictating what is true during the Enlightenment, people in the West have lived with a fragmented world view, with science determining how we understand nature and Christianity determining how we understand much of the rest. But since the nineteenth century, this fragmentation has been overcome, and a unified world view is once more possible. Everything is described and understood by science and reason, and this includes religion—and Christianity in particular—itself.

Contrary to Pope Benedict's claims, reason leads to the conclusion that there is no God. The God concept cannot answer fundamental questions like how was the world created or why are we here, because when you introduce the God concept, you get a new question—why is there God—which cannot be answered. But it is very easy to answer the question: Why did people invent the God concept? It was to deal with certain existential problems.

Once the process of what Max Weber called disenchantment becomes complete, the problem arises of what are we to do with Christianity? Do we throw it away into the trash bin? To do that would be destroy a significant part of ourselves. So instead of throwing it away, we construct a rational interpretation of it. That is what I did in the post you were responding to.

Think of it this way. As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in Childhood's End I think, there are many religions in the world, and they cannot all be right. When you look at Christianity itself, there are many conflicting theologies, only one of which can be right. Now, can we construct a unique theology for which a good case can be made that it is correct? Yes, very easily. There is no God. All theological problems disappear. And Christianity has worked its way to that resolution, with Hegel's interpretation of it, according to which God is the whole that comprises nature and ourselves.

So Christianity turns out to be the true religion. But as I wrote in my previous post, if one considers Spinoza, then one can say that Judaism is true too. In the Buddhist tradition, one speaks of "high" and "low" Buddhism. Perhaps we should start to do the same with Judaism and Christianity as well. According to low Judaism and Christianity, there is a personal God, that is, a God who is a person. According to the high Judaism of Spinoza and the high Christianity of Hegel, God is just ourselves and nature.

If one considers high Judaism and Christianity, Judaism and Christianity line up on one side, and Islam on the other. But if one considers low Judaism and Christianity, it is Christianity that stands by itself. The problem with Islam seems to be that no "high" Islam is possible. That is because of Islam's tenet that humans cannot know God. That tenet prevents Islam from developing an exit strategy from superstition.

You write that "The Muslim relationship with God is personal." That is an absurd claim, because there is no God: there is just ourselves. Muslims worship an idol—Islamic law. By claiming that for Muslims, "all actions are in the service of God", you are in effect denying Muslims' humanity, by taking the position that they are not under the obligation, as all human beings are, to try to rid themselves of ignorance and error.

In this age of rampant religious fundamentalism, it is not enough for liberals and secular humanists to say that their religious beliefs are personal and subjective. The fundamentalists claim that their beliefs are objectively valid. We must do the same.

In the Booman Tribune today, there is a diary which gives the following quotation:

There are two things which can stop this slide into barbarism and death: the conquest of the west by people who believe in something, or the revival of a west which has returned to its moral and intellectual roots. Those are the choices - be conquered by Moslems (who at least believe in something higher than themselves and their personal pleasures), or become Judeo-Christian. Death or conversion, take your pick.

You note that "Christianity has been called a series of separate religions." That rings true to me. For instance, Christian fundamentalism, with its dispensational premillenialism and its emphasizing of the Old Testament over the New, seems like a separate religion to me. I suppose that I showed hubris by in effect speaking for all of Christianity. But doesn't the Pope do the same? And in the Protestant tradition (which I was not raised in; I was raised Russian Orthodox), does not everyone have the role of the Pope?

I understand that I have a particular interpretation of the Bible/Christianity, which is Hegel's. (By the way, I noted in another post that I do not think that Christian fundamentalists think much about Christ's divinity.) I am an atheist, but tradition is important to me. Thus, if in our modern age one can demonstrate that, given all we know, Christianity can be given a rational interpretation, I believe that should be done. I believe that is a better approach for liberals and secular humanists to take than treating religion as ignorance and superstition, thus ceding it to the fundamentalists.

Why Hegel believed that the divinity of Christ is the truth of Christianity is that according to Hegel, the idea of God is just a projection of ourselves, taken as a community with a shared morality. Once you get a religion that claims that God became a man, you are halfway to the complete truth, which is that we are all divine, that is, it is we who are the source of fundamental values and meaning.

The usual approach of agnostics or atheists who wish to belong to a church is to say to themselves that they are non-believers. That is an unsatisfactory solution for me. I believe that it is better to redefine what it is that should be believed. I believe that the interpretation of Christianity I have been presenting is completely consistent with Christ's real teaching, while requiring us to believe nothing that is not recognized by natural science. (It does require believing that people have consciousness, something that was denied by American psychology until recently.)

Christian fundamentalists accuse liberals of "not believing in anything". And indeed, when it comes to religion, liberals do have to say that religion is a personal matter, in other words, there is no objective truth. But fundamentalists do think that there is objective truth, even when it comes to religion. This puts liberals at a severe disadvantage. The religious position I am advocating can claim, with good justification I think, that it is objectively true.

There is popular interest in the line of thought I have been advocating, the best example being perhaps Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels (2003).

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns