Here’s what I think about #Muslims #religion #dogmatic

I want to say something about Muslims. Well, to be honest, I want to say something about dogmatic religions. Did you think that is the same? Well of course it is not. Perhaps it is in fact the case that Islam, on the whole, for most people, in most places, on most occasions, tends to be quite dogmatic, as a religion. I do not know. Thing is, I don’t know the first thing about Islam. And I certainly could not tell you what Islam is like for most people in most places on most occasions. Neither do you, I assume. Or perhaps you can, perhaps you’re the expert. Regardless of whether you are a leading expert on Islam, or not, and regardless of whether it is a fact, or a fiction, that Islam – as a whole – is a dogmatic religion, my opinion, would still be an opinion about dogmatic religions and not an opinion about Islam. It would, for example, include dogmatic Christianity. It is not until quite recently that, on the whole, Christianity was quite dogmatic, that is, for most people, in most places, and in all the official communication going out from the church. Most people that actively go to church may still be a bit dogmatic here and there, even if they don’t realize it themselves. And there are at least significant minorities in Christian religion today, that are really, really dogmatic. So what I have to say about dogmatic Muslims, goes just as well for dogmatic Christians, or Jews. I won’t say anything about other religions, like Hinduism, simply because I know even less about these. But it may very well be the case that my thoughts apply to all religions, if they are dogmatic in the way they exercise it.

What I don’t like about dogmatic religions is the fact that dogmatic religions ground their basic values and commitments, their aspirations, hopes, dreams and opinions, and so on, in a faith, which itself we cannot access publicly, because it is the word of a higher divinity, and we cannot find or relate to this divinity anywhere, if it is not either an inner revelation that is purely individual, or if the Word of God gets translated by people, priests, ministers, monks, theologicans, into tangible artifacts and practices (holy books, church buildings, ceremonies, sacraments) that we can find and relate to as a social community. I wouldn’t even have real issues with God himself (or her, for that matter), I guess, and that is also why the kinds of religious people that ‘keep it all to themselves’, that quietly contemplate their faith and take strength in believing that God is with them, will never annoy me. Simply because they would never get in anyone’s way with it – their religion is a purely personal matter. For all I know I’m religious in that sense. I probably have my own ways of dealing with my inner thoughts and fears that are, somewhere down the line, based on a kind of faith. I may explain it psycho-analytically, or I may shout very hard that it’s all just brain activation, but it wouldn’t be very different from what people are doing that call this inner activity believing and the experience of it an experience of their love for a God. That is all fine with me. What I have issues with is the public part – the part of religion that messes with our lives in the social, public sense. In particular, I have a deep mistrust of the people that claim to voice His Word. Where, for God’s sake, do they get their information from? Well, I can tell you where they get their information from and it isn’t God. That is just something that I do not believe in. Take any real, alive, human being, and put him in so much power that he could rule over people and make them do what he wants – will he continue voicing the true word of God? Or will he make use of his power in a way that suits him better? We all know what human beings are like. Even God tells us (that is, they tell us themselves) that human beings are weak, and susceptible to the temptations of power, wealth, control, and violence. So I simply don’t trust these ‘channels’.

If only it would be that our religious shepherds would have a positive story to tell. I would still not believe it came from a Divine Lord, but it would at least be the right story. But these people, the priests, the pope, the elderly, your parents, reading the bible to you before dinner, they all tend to have quite conservative ideas about life and how we should live it. Here’s also where the difference between dogmatic and progressive religion comes in. I’m talking about dogmatic religion. I’ve seen no Western religion of that kind happily promoting abortion, gay marriage, equality of men and women, etc…, it’s always the same story, and it’s always about telling specific groups of people (children, women, African savages) what they should do, what the cannot do, and what their place is, and how this place is never a powerful place. So it’s always the white male person in power that is using religion to tell other people that they can’t have what he has, that they should to what he tells them to do, that they should shut up and accept their fate and stick to the rules of their faith. And that story, is really not my story at all. I don’t like the story, I don’t like the implications of it, I don’t like where it’s coming from.

Now, why is my little analysis here at the same time superficially similar to what populist right-wing anti-Islam parties are saying when they oppose some assumed Muslim practices, and at the same time, it is so utterly different? If a Muslim man degrades his wife, if she cannot make her own decisions, if she cannot do what he can do, and if he bashes a homosexual on the street with his friends – then I am strongly opposed to that. We should all fight against it. And it is true, that these things happen. And it is important, that we should fight it. Like, I should add, we should oppose to all injustice being served to women and gay people, by many, many men, all over the world. It seems a strange and troubling ‘feature’ of being male that you should be inclined to try and dominate women and hate gays, amongst a number of other strange and troubling features that many men all around the world apparently have. I’ve never had it and so I fail to be able to relate to it. And I want it banned from this world – even if it means we have to sterilize every last one of those depressing male chauvinist pigs. So again – the whole thing has little to do with Muslims – it has largely to do with men. But there’s more to it. Because if an immigrant from Africa comes to our country, he’s readily despised and spit on, and this is, in the end, because he is basically considered to be a lower form of life – a non-human a sentiment that traces back to the times when black slaves were not considered to be real human beings but a kind of middle category between people and cattle – then I am equally against that. Now, and here’s where the right-wing populists and I care to differ – the roots of being racist and the roots of thinking that women are subordinate to men, are the same roots. Both of these ideas have their roots in Western religion. Or perhaps they just have their roots in male brains – and I wouldn’t be surprised – but even so, it’s religion that has cultivated these ideas for millennia, and while the rest of human kind has moved on, to embrace science, progressive thought, humanism, the whole Love Piece and Understanding thing – religion is stuck in its conservative commitments, and that is exactly what is the meaning of the word dogmatic in the first place. The whole populist rant against Islam is based on two rhetorical moves 1) We should be allowed to ‘finally say the truth’ about Muslims and 2) Western culture is superior to non-western Culture. But what the populists are forgetting is that the political left has always opposed to the conservative perspective dictated by the church. And so, although you would perhaps not believe it, left-wing progressive thinkers would always be opposed to Muslims that beat up their women or spit on homosexuals. But the problem for left wing thinkers is that they had two issues to deal with. Because the Muslim immigrants were also the people that were being treated quite unfair as immigrants: they received a lot of racism that was not at all a reaction to the purported dogmatic, conservative Muslim culture at all – it was in fact fueled by a dogmatic conservative Christian culture: the culture that says that we are superior to people coming from Africa or Asia.

I don’t believe that we are superior to other people, and the superiority idea in and of itself is to be rejected. I also don’t think there should be any ‘finally saying the truth about Muslims’ because there is no truth specific to Muslims. There’s a truth specific to dogmatic, conservative religions, that center on men being a separate category of people that should be and should stay in power, dominating other ‘kinds’ of people, such as women, ‘homosexuals’, or ‘savages’. That is something we should finally say, as it has been said many times, and we should continue saying it. Donald Trump – who I tried to keep out of this text but who has just creeped in nevertheless, is the best example of this double standard, in which Muslims are being treated as vicious criminals, while most of what his enemy muslims are accused of, is nothing short of what he does and believes himself. I despise them both.