venividivici, it seems that you’re hostile to faith in general. If someone lives by an interpretation that is personal and mainly spiritual
You couldn’t be more wrong. I’m hostile to Islam, due to its specific “rendition” of the godhead and the qualities of the prophet it venerates. The fact that it has only one prophet also bothers me, but I’ll leave that to the side for the moment.
I’m enough of an armchair anthropologist to know that humanity and religion are linked together throughout history, probably inescapably. That doesn’t mean that each religion has the same value or even that there’s such a thing as “religion in general”. If there is such a thing, I’m not hostile to it, at least insofar as the things I am hostile to in Islam (such as the division of the world into the “land of the faithful” and “the land of war”) are attenuated or spiritualized in this abstract “religion in general” amalgamation of all known religions.
The founders of religions, being guided by a superior level of insight regarding human nature, knew, among other things, that people cooperating in a shared venture accomplish more than one individual. Thus, all religions start with a community, e.g., the Islamic ummah, the Jewish nation of “Israel”(in the Biblical sense). So, your idea that religion can be “mainly personal and spiritual” is actually not in keeping with the intent of any religion’s founder. I would argue that it is also unsustainable over time and that religions will inevitably (to the extent that they even survive the “personal and spiritual” phase) go back to the original intent, which was to form a community under the banner of a specific interpretation of The Divine.
This, arguably, is the intention of those groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The fact that of the four main trends I can discern in Islam (those who want to have some kind of separation of religion and politics, those who want secularism, those leaving Islam, and those who want what the Muslim Brotherhood wants) the Muslim Brotherhood is the one gaining the most ground means I must plan for a future in which the Muslim Brotherhood is the “outward” and “political” face of the countries in which Islam is predominant. Thus, as a non-Muslim, I have to be prepared to deal with Muslim polities whose policy toward my polity can be encapsulated in Koran verse 9:29, as quoted in my post above. Now, I would love it if the Muslim Brotherhood (and its analogues in the Sudan) were “reasonable” people, but to the extent that they aren’t, that isn’t my fault and it is going to have to factor into the specific means I advocate to deal with the inevitable friction that will result between us.
Given my belief that all of the good things about Islam can be found in other religions and/or modern social philosophies such as classical liberalism, and all of the bad things about Islam aren’t found in any other extant religions (although Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on them, it’s just that the religions that held to simplistic social philosophies similar to Islam’s died out, for the most part, prior to the modern age), or any extant religion with Islam’s “numbers”, what do you think my opinion on the response to the Islamic challenge will be? Islam creates nothing but “costs” for me, without any attendant “benefits”. Seriously, can you name one benefit for me, a non-Muslim who doesn’t want to be a Muslim, that Islam creates or even could create in a best case scenario? That’s the difference between it and other religions. Christian fundamentalists create no costs or benefits for me, nor do Orthodox Jews or Hindus. And I’m sure there are millions of people in the West who have that very same experience and, as productive and law-abiding citizens ourselves, we’re getting just about completely fed up with everything Muslim. All these costs and no benefits. Hmmm, what to do about that? I know what happens in the business world when a product is all cost and no benefit.
