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Showing posts from April, 2008

Is Islam inherently violent?

There's been a lot of talk, both on the conservative and the liberal side, about this movie " Fitna " that has just come out. It's a short movie with a clear ideological purpose: to show that Islam is an inherently violent religion. I'm reminded of the Jon Krakauer book a couple years back Under the Banner of Heaven , which was about these Mormon guys who killed their sister-in-law and baby niece and claimed that God had told them to do it. According to Krakauer, these guys were supposedly influenced by the peculiar Mormon doctrine of revelation to commit this crime. Mormonism does have this rather ridiculous history of disavowing bits of its dogma that become politically inconvenient--it was only when the US threatened war that they had a revelation and gave up polygamy, and it was 1979 that they allowed blacks to become full members in the same way. Thus the argument went that this history uniquely prepared these men to believe that God was talking to them