Debating religious viewpoints

Dear editor:

I'll pass on Julie Tietz's invitation (9/20) to "learn more about what I don't understand" by tuning in some dubious Web site or other. I'm content with books; and I'll venture I've read far, far more of them on Islam (including the Koran, several translations, every word) than she.

I'd have gladly read up on Moslem theology, if there were any.

Yes, there are "many similarities between Islam and Christianity." But there are also fundamental differences.

Christians believe in free will; Moslems are determinists. In Christian eyes, God created a world governed by knowable laws. Allah's miraculous will, by contrast, takes the place of laws. Extremist Moslems "condemn all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah's freedom to act." Such fatalism, as the ever-fair Will Durant concludes, produces "a pessimistic inertia" in Islamic thought. Is it any wonder science developed within Christianity and still rests on its worldview? I'm not much of a Christian, but I appreciate the boon Christianity, and it alone, bequeathed to the world. Like others, Moslems eagerly embrace the fruits of Western science but refuse to embrace, indeed even denounce, the mentality that alone makes them possible. Theology, "queen of the sciences," is "formal reasoning about God." The early church debated whether it was permissible to reason about God, and by extension about His creation. Obscurantists fought them at every step; but invariably reason won out.

Islam early on faced the same question. But within Islam, at every turn, obscurantism prevailed, as it officially prevails today in many countries. Islamic scripture is not to be reasoned about, only blindly believed, in its simplest, most literal sense.

Perhaps there's a grain of truth in the fashionable excuse that "the few sensational examples of acts committed by religious extremists" are indeed not "typical of all Moslems" but derive from "a nationality or ethnicity." But isn't it odd that Islam seems hospitable, to say the least, to such nationalities or ethnicities, far more than other faiths? Moslems in many countries, e.g. India, the Philippines, are of the same "nationality or ethnicity" as their non-Moslem countrymen. Are the Indian or Philippine Moslem extremists, then, fighting for their nationality or ethnicity, not their religion? If such backward barbarisms as female genital mutilation are "not condoned by Islam" why does Islam make no noticeable effort to eradicate them?

Christian clergymen led the fight to rid Christianity of its moral shortcomings, e.g. slavery.

Where did I say Christians "would never do such things?" Surely it's enough to say they haven't done them, in any real sense, for more than 300 years. Organized Christianity managed to put violent extremism behind it. Islam hasn't. Indeed, violent extremism, absent from Christianity since the 1600s, seems resurgent in today's Islam.

From the characterizations in a dozen recent books, I don't know what else you'd call the European Moslems but bigots. Granted it's more typical of Moslems, if hardly exclusive to them, to throw that accusation "bigot" in like a monkey wrench to try and stop the reasoning process when its conclusions become uncomfortable.

What are Moslems afraid of, that makes them so unwilling to have their faith reasoned about?

Patrick Brophy

Nevada