The Watcher’s Council has announced its picks for the most outstanding posts of the preceding week. The winning Council post was Bookworm Room’s post, “Judeo-Christian Doctrine and Moral Freedomâ€. I didn’t care much for this post and a little quotation from the Qur’an might suggest why:
“O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, though it may be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for God can best protect both. Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest ye swerve, and if ye distort justice or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that ye do.†(Qur’an 4:135)
Comparing religious traditions, especially the formal teachings of different traditions, isn’t a task for amateurs and one should take care in contrasting the formal tenets of one tradition with the folk religion of another. Second place honors went to Done With Mirrors’s post, “ Ron Paul” and Soccer Dad’s “First Let the Lawyers Kill Us All”, a post on lawfare in Israel. So far I have found that reasoning with Ron Paul fans is a completely thankless task so I’ve avoided even mentioning the man’s name. The posts for which I voted, Rhymes With Right’s and Big Lizards’s, fared less well.
The winning non-Council post was Silver Bullets’s “Fearâ€. I thought this was a well-articulated post and I voted for it.. Second place honors went to Eternity Road’s “Laughter and Tearsâ€.
The complete results are here.
I don’t disagree with you that the Koran has some rather broadly expressed principles about being good, kind and fair. However, as I’ve detailed in a couple of posts to which I linked in the winning post, the Koran’s main point seems to be to aggrandize people who sign on to Mohammad’s agenda. In the Bible, people do bad things, but the values advanced are universal values applicable to all mankind. (I’m thinking mostly of the Ten Commandments, of course.) In the Koran, however, a lot of the book is taken over with Mohammad giving religious justification for killing and robbing. From my point of view — and the way in which Islamist’s seem to view things — the Koran expects first the advancement of Islam, and only second everything else. And to the extent that the advancement of Islam is a very political ideology, I have problems finding a moral center.
Also, as I tried to explain in the post itself, I believe that the way in which the religion is practiced — an approach I believe denies elements of free will that we recognize in the Judeo-Christian culture — also speaks to a values vacuum. The religion’s adherents don’t expect its practitioners to have a moral compass, and instead rely on pretty heavy duty rules, many of which seem to deny the choice that I think comes with a values-based system.
But that’s my point of view and, as I said at the start of this comment, I can certainly see where you’d differ. I also appreciate how politely you expressed your difference — something that I think is the essence of civilized discourse. So — thank you!