Jai, first off, nothing you said is offensive in the way I found Jenkins and Hagerty. So thank you for registering your opinion in such a clear and non-threatening way.
There's nothing wrong with comparing the tradition of violent action in Christian and Muslim law, but there is something wrong if your goal is to determine a clear 'winner' and 'loser'. Violence in religion is something that a survey would show waxes and wanes over the course of history- I'm in the middle of a really scholarly book about Islam that suggests that Islam's violent movements have a history of becoming powerful for a couple of generations and then moderating or becoming marginalized. If you go into the exercise trying to show that one religion is 'more violent' than the other, you're going to produce an answer that offends people. No matter what your result, no matter what your methodology, because it is inherently a bad question. That's why I went into their report looking to tear into them, because I knew they were starting off with a scary-bad premise. If you looked at the online comments on the report, it was a flamewar about whether Islam or Christianity was more violent. Because the report was flamebait, and nothing more sophisticated than that.
And look, hearing a so-called religious historian admit that his fundamental knowledge of the Holy Scriptures of the largest religions in the world was inadequate before he started writing this book is always a red flag. When I want to learn about Jewish history, I hunt down the religious scholar who's been studying the subject the last thirty years. When I want to learn about Islamic history, I hunt down the scholar who's devoted their life to the subject. I don't want a johnny-come-lately popping in from the Christian world with biases and the belief that if he reads the book a couple times he'll be as qualified to comment as anybody. The Koran is a complicated text that I can't claim to be an expert on, which is why I completely left my critique of his discussion of the Koran out of the post, but suffice to say that to my inexpert eye there were plenty of problems there, too.
The pronunciation thing is a minor point. The big point is that Hagerty only cited Old Testament verses in proving that Christianity's Holy Scripture is violent, yet never consulted a Rabbi or Jewish religious scholar to provide context. Her only sources in this report were Muslim and Christian, as if Jews couldn't provide insight into their holy books. As if our ownership of our holy books has been appropriated by the Christians. Also, as if the New Testament didn't have any violent passages that could have been cited.
And my point with regard to the genocide in the Bible wasn't to try to diminish the act of genocide, and if I did that I'm sorry. I was saying that this is a passage with which all Jews struggle, it's a passage that Jews have struggled with for the past 2000+ years (as far back at least as the Talmud), and to just say "Oh, look, genocidal Jews" without exploring any of the approaches we've developed to the textual problem, without giving us a chance to defend our religious texts, is to erase our relevance from the story. And that's offensive.
I linked in one of the above comments to a post about the stereotype of the Vengeful Old Testament God and the bloody, violent Old Testament. It's a stereotype that's formulated by focusing intently on specific Old Testament passages while ignoring the ones that advocate social justice, divine mercy, and related to this point, RULES OF WAR. Fighting just wars is an important religious tenet for Jews that is missed if you focus on the concept of cherem. We have lengthy passages about the proper, moral treatment of prisoners, about who is and isn't allowed to be killed, about how one goes about declaring war responsibly. And this violent Old Testament stereotype is a stereotype which is dangerous because it has fostered anti-semitism for the past two thousand years. "How can you worship that vengeful Old Testament God when Jesus is pure mercy? I think I will torture you until you find Jesus."
And lastly, your gloss on Jenkins's 'holy amnesia' does not seem accurate, because it suggests that what happens isn't holy amnesia at all, but just liberalizing of a portion of the members of the religion. If it's the case that traditional observers of a faith still remember its core violence, where is the amnesia involved? I can't believe that's what he's trying to say. And as sanguinity says above, calling the habit of Christians forgetting the atrocities they committed in the name of their Church 'holy amnesia' is phenomenally offensive to all of their victims, like the Native Americans, Arabs, Jews, Indians etc. who were put to the sword if they wouldn't convert. It is not holy to forget about this violence. Even assuming Jenkins's hypothesis were true, he needs to spend some more time thinking about the way he uses this vocabulary.
Moreover, my hypothesis isn't at all that there's been no erosion in awareness. Rather, as I briefly mentioned above, this is something which has been demonstrably cyclical over history, and to try to make it teleological is kind of loony.
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Date: 2010-03-26 04:27 pm (UTC)There's nothing wrong with comparing the tradition of violent action in Christian and Muslim law, but there is something wrong if your goal is to determine a clear 'winner' and 'loser'. Violence in religion is something that a survey would show waxes and wanes over the course of history- I'm in the middle of a really scholarly book about Islam that suggests that Islam's violent movements have a history of becoming powerful for a couple of generations and then moderating or becoming marginalized. If you go into the exercise trying to show that one religion is 'more violent' than the other, you're going to produce an answer that offends people. No matter what your result, no matter what your methodology, because it is inherently a bad question. That's why I went into their report looking to tear into them, because I knew they were starting off with a scary-bad premise. If you looked at the online comments on the report, it was a flamewar about whether Islam or Christianity was more violent. Because the report was flamebait, and nothing more sophisticated than that.
And look, hearing a so-called religious historian admit that his fundamental knowledge of the Holy Scriptures of the largest religions in the world was inadequate before he started writing this book is always a red flag. When I want to learn about Jewish history, I hunt down the religious scholar who's been studying the subject the last thirty years. When I want to learn about Islamic history, I hunt down the scholar who's devoted their life to the subject. I don't want a johnny-come-lately popping in from the Christian world with biases and the belief that if he reads the book a couple times he'll be as qualified to comment as anybody. The Koran is a complicated text that I can't claim to be an expert on, which is why I completely left my critique of his discussion of the Koran out of the post, but suffice to say that to my inexpert eye there were plenty of problems there, too.
The pronunciation thing is a minor point. The big point is that Hagerty only cited Old Testament verses in proving that Christianity's Holy Scripture is violent, yet never consulted a Rabbi or Jewish religious scholar to provide context. Her only sources in this report were Muslim and Christian, as if Jews couldn't provide insight into their holy books. As if our ownership of our holy books has been appropriated by the Christians. Also, as if the New Testament didn't have any violent passages that could have been cited.
And my point with regard to the genocide in the Bible wasn't to try to diminish the act of genocide, and if I did that I'm sorry. I was saying that this is a passage with which all Jews struggle, it's a passage that Jews have struggled with for the past 2000+ years (as far back at least as the Talmud), and to just say "Oh, look, genocidal Jews" without exploring any of the approaches we've developed to the textual problem, without giving us a chance to defend our religious texts, is to erase our relevance from the story. And that's offensive.
I linked in one of the above comments to a post about the stereotype of the Vengeful Old Testament God and the bloody, violent Old Testament. It's a stereotype that's formulated by focusing intently on specific Old Testament passages while ignoring the ones that advocate social justice, divine mercy, and related to this point, RULES OF WAR. Fighting just wars is an important religious tenet for Jews that is missed if you focus on the concept of cherem. We have lengthy passages about the proper, moral treatment of prisoners, about who is and isn't allowed to be killed, about how one goes about declaring war responsibly. And this violent Old Testament stereotype is a stereotype which is dangerous because it has fostered anti-semitism for the past two thousand years. "How can you worship that vengeful Old Testament God when Jesus is pure mercy? I think I will torture you until you find Jesus."
And lastly, your gloss on Jenkins's 'holy amnesia' does not seem accurate, because it suggests that what happens isn't holy amnesia at all, but just liberalizing of a portion of the members of the religion. If it's the case that traditional observers of a faith still remember its core violence, where is the amnesia involved? I can't believe that's what he's trying to say. And as
Moreover, my hypothesis isn't at all that there's been no erosion in awareness. Rather, as I briefly mentioned above, this is something which has been demonstrably cyclical over history, and to try to make it teleological is kind of loony.