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Stephen Prothero

Stephen Prothero Biography

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“One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—"Do not kill yourselves" (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants.”

ReligionEvil
Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.”

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Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war.”

WarReligionChristianityEthicsIslamScripture
Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.”

ReligionChristianityBibleIslamHinduismHoly WarMahabharata
Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.”

ReligionChristianityHistory
Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorifying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as "slaves" of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. "The idol of yourself," writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, "is the mother of (all) idols." Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a "soul at peace" (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.”

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Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“All too often world history is told as if religion did not matter. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world.”

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Book:God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
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“Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.”

HumansWarOpportunityNamesSpeakSidesHuman BeingsCasesAtheistCertaintyConvinceRighteousnessBehalfBlasphemyProletariat
Book:God Is Not One
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