R. Joseph Hoffmann is a historian whose work has focused on the early social and intellectual development of Christianity. As a senior vice president for the Center for Inquiry, he chaired the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, CSER, where he initiated the Jesus Project, a scholarly investigation into the historicity of Jesus. Hoffmann has described himself as an unbeliever with a soft spot for religion. ----- “There is NO NEED for an al Qaeda to ensure the dominance of this [black & white] model of Islam. It thrives on intellectual laziness, poverty, lack of opportunity, and a sense of being cut off from a world it suspects of being dark and satanic.” “Frankly I have ceased to care what devout Muslims mean by Un-Islamic. The phrase no longer means anything at all. It is absurd beyond absurdity. In many Islamic countries, the imams and mullahs use it when they talk about the education of women; liberal Muslims use it when they disagree with extremists, American and European Muslims when they are trying to establish their liberal ‘democratic’ credentials over and against the patterns of the Islamic world. “Un-Islamic” means what the last charismatic preacher says it means, what the imam with a sixth grade education tells you it means, what a professor at SOAS tells you it means when he tries to discredit the imam with a sixth grade education. Nothing.” “The educational standard of the Islamic world in general is a scandal, a joke, a laboratory culture for unhappy young men and compliant young women who would prefer to blame the rest of the world for problems they cannot solve because the self-referential myopia of their religion is not designed to solve them. The illiteracy problem in Islam is first Islam itself, not the West, not infidelity, modernity or secularism, and second those who defend its cure as Unislamic. It is not a good place. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 20:33:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015