>>2943
Hey man, we had this discussion before. A lot has been written about it. So let us get some things clear. I am pasting a few things from Incerto, because you have a reductionist way of looking at things and lack any other perspective on everything (except maybe Islamic, but Islam is also reductionist)
Different people rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion,” nor do they realize it. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals—the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist it had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East. Throughout the ancient world, law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing. Early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its origins, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court formally handled final sentencing. Further, Theodosius’s code (compiled in the fifth century to unify Roman law) was “Christianized” with a short introduction, a blessing of sorts—the rest remained identical to pagan Roman legal reasoning as expounded in Constantinople and (mostly) Berytus. The code remained dominated by the Phoenician legal scholars Ulpian and Papinian, who were pagan: contrary to theories by geopoliticalists, the Roman school of law of Berytus (Beirut) was not shut down by Christianity, but by an earthquake.
Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor. As an illustration of the symbolic separation between church and state, the title Pontifex Maximus (head priest), taken by the Roman emperors after Augustus, reverted after Theodosius, in the late fourth century, to the bishop of Rome, and later, more or less informally, to the Catholic Pope.
For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law—and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.
When the nation-state dream came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab used to say “Jew” he largely referred to a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew was no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew was simply defined as someone whose mother was a Jew. But Judaism somewhat merged into nation-state and now, for many, indicates belonging to a nation.
In Serbia, Croatia, and Lebanon, religion means one thing at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.
When someone discusses the “Christian minority” in the Levant, it doesn’t amount to (as Arabs tend to think) promoting a Christian theocracy (full theocracies were rare in Christian history, just Byzantium and a short attempt by Calvin). He just means “secular,” or wants a marked separation of church and state. Same for the gnostics (Druids, Druze, Mandeans, Alawis, Alevis) who have a religion largely unknown by its members, lest they leak and get persecuted by the dominant majority.
The problem with the European Union is that naive bureaucrats (those fellows who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism, say, as just a religion—with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and rejects the institutions of the West—those very institutions that allow them to operate. We saw with the minority rule that the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer must be stopped before it becomes metastatic.
Salafism is very similar to atheistic Soviet Communism in its heyday: both have all-embracing control over all of human activity and thought, which makes discussions about whether religion or atheistic regimes are more murderous lacking in pertinence, precision, and realism.
> Picrel -- All religions are the same man.