A CATHOLIC ANGLICAN RULE OF FAITH

So there shouldn’t be rules because people might disobey them? That’s where the logic of your argument leads. More importantly, it overlooks the amount of ill will that did exist within or toward Judaic and Islamic society during their most formative years.

 

It’s not a matter of disobedience. External agreed-upon rules or laws can never counteract an altered heart. If you don’t believe, you don’t believe.

As for Judaism or Islam, you may be romanticizing them here. As recently as the last century Islam was in a great upheaval, as the battles between the liberals and the conservative strands of Islam battled it out and liberalism was very much on the ascendant. The Young Turks in Turkey, etc. To be a traditional Muslim was increasingly uncool, something only backward people did. The young Turks forced everyone to shave their beards, to wear suit and tie, to catch up to modern science. You have: Assad in Syria, Hussein in Iraq, the Shah in Iran. Quaddafi in Libya. The liberal forces were radical changes within Islam, which the more “bearded” adherents were powerless to resist; the future for Islam appeared inevitable and liberal. It’s only in living memory that we saw a radicalization of the Islamic world, mainly due to the actions of the United States, which removed all the liberal Muslim leaders while poured oil on the fire of the “bearded”. You could almost call the US actions criminal, if they weren’t so stupid.

Same with Judaism: what could the rabbis in the 19th century do when vast swathes of the adherents abandoned the Judaism of the Shtetl? There was nothing they could do to stop Reformed sects from forming. Sigmund Freud the father of sex therapy is as far from the Shul of his grandparents as two people can be from one another. And no amount of vaunted stability could prevent this disintegration of the Jewish world. That vaunted stable world only held together due to persecution, and when the persecution ended so did the stability. Now today there are as many varieties of Judaica as can be imagined. While the Hasid clans have a family resemblance due to common origins, I’ve been to Israel and to New York; all these clans are quickly growing apart. Some accept messianism, some don’t. Some even believe that THE messiah has already come (the Lubavitcher Rebbe)! Others call this heresy or proto-Christianity. Etc.

 

I agree with that 100%.

The 20th century was something of a perfect storm. The Kemalists paved the way for Turkey to ultimately take a fundamentalist turn when they abolished the Sufi orders. Sunnis in Syria felt disenfranchised being ruled by an Alawite minority. And, of course, Israel. It seems fair to blame secularism for the fundamentalist eruption as much as oil.