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I, OTOH, fall squarely into #4, with some sympathies with #6. The reason is that I've known some Western Muslims who were perfectly reasonable, rational people that were appropriately horrified at the things done by the terrorists--and I've known Arabs that were very nominally Muslim, but who could go on for hours about the crimes of Israel and the threat of World Jewry. My experience suggests that there is little correlation between religious dedication and Islamist sympathy.
I also think about the inverse case, when people examine the relationship between American politics and religion. People often assume that Christianity means the conservativism of generic Evangelicals, but as someone more acquainted with Christianity and American politics, I see Evangelical conservativism more as the result of a particular cultural-political mix, and nothing inherent in Christianity itself.
I would say #2, but with some caveats.
I would rephrase it as "The problem is not religion generally, but Islam itself, many of whose adherents have slipped back to the dark ages, after an illustrious cultural history in the middle ages. The religion seems to have a gravity field that pulls strongly in the direction of violence, even if many people, past and present, have found forms of it devoid of this."
I pick 2 because I don't think that this is merely a strange faction of Islam which produces what we see. But having said that I don't think that all Muslims are stuck in the middle ages. And I don't imagine a campaign to tell them to "change their religion" will help. (I would resent being on the receiving end of such a campaign myself. It's pretty hard to "change" a revealed religion and still believe in it.) I think that the most profitable work is going to be working on #4 even if #2 is more deeply true.
I have a quibble that T-Gash has skipped a very important position: there should be seven options, not six. The missing option should go just after #1 and before #2, although technically it cuts across #2 rather than being broader than it.
Call it the "Karen Armstrong http://www.google.com.au/search?...en+Armstrong%
22 option". This is the position that it's "fundamentalist" religion -- not all religion, but also not just Islam -- that is the problem. Those who hold this view (and I'm extremely surprised that T-Gash skipped it, since it seems very commonly held among writers and journalists) start with a genuflection towards "good" religion -- Sistine Chapel, Buddhist temples, glories of Muslim Granada, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, etc -- IOW, the whole "Bono/ Bonhoeffer" menu. Then their tone changes. The problem, they warn darkly, is when the beauty and spirituality of religion is corrupted by the fallacy of exclusivity. Islam at present is proportionately more afflicted by this problem, of course, but Christianity and Judaism have had their own share of it in the past (cue stock footage of Inquisition, West Bank settlers, Old Test. quotes, etc). What is needed is for the good, truly spiritual believers of all faiths to realise that they are really one (cue stock footage of Pope and Dalai Llama, etc).
See, eg, Ibn Warraq's book Ibn Warraq Why I am Not A Muslim (Prometheus, 1995), p 181, where he too takes this position:
"The whole notion of infallibility, whether of a ‘book’ or a group of people, is profoundly undemocratic and unscientific... [A]s TH Huxley noted... the notion of infallibility in all shapes, lay and clerical, has done endless mischief and has been responsible for bigotry, cruelty and superstition."
Tom R - I agree with you that the "Karen Armstrong" position is very widely held. But I think really it is a subset of #1 - or rather, I suspect those holding to option "#1.5" are usually really #1-ers who just want to appear more "reasonable" and "moderate". ("Anti-religious? Heavens, no. Some of my best friends are religious.")
What they mean is, "I've nothing against religion, so long as it agrees with me on everything I care about". Any point at which religion disagrees is then labelled "fundamentalist".
I think that such a use of the term "fundamentalist" commits a logical fallacy of defining something by an accidental quality.
Even historically, the fundamentalists were defined by a minimalist doctrinal stance. They would draw a big thick line, but only around primary beliefs. (Or that's what made them fundamentalists, whether or not they did so with more secondary beliefs.) So to then expand the definition to include Muslims, one probably needs to change it beyond recognition, since a fundamentalist in that older definition would likely be a moderate muslim.
No, John is right. It now means anything we happen to find distasteful.
John, I'm still not sure about that, if only because a lot of people who are undeniably religious themselves -- not merely in the Howard Dean ("My favourite New Testament book is Job") or John Kerry ("Pope Pius XXIII at the Vatican II ruled...") sense, or even Spong: I'm thinking, eg, Walter Wink, M Scott Peck, possibly Stanley Hauerwas depending how you slice him (not literally).
I mean, even I look aghast at some of the further fringes of the US Christian Right, and they'd probably consider me an atheist without the guts to say so publicly...
See this, for example: even Dawkins throws in the modifier...
"... Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place … To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used."
– Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (15 September 2001)
Tom - I'm not wildly disagreeing with you here. But even so, that Dawkins quote sounds more like what I was describing - "type 1" anti-religionists throwing in the occasional qualifier ("fundamentalist", "Abrahamic") so they sound more moderate, nuanced and sophisticated: none of which could really be applied to Prof Dawkins' views on religion.
Okay, JH, then there can be peace (or "submission", depending how you translate it) between us.
You're right about Dawkins, but I don't think ibn-Warraq is so unhinged. He is reasonably respectful, for an atheist, towards both Christianity and Buddhism (compared to Islam, his main target) and he even takes Bertrand Russell to task for criticising Jesus' ethics (for nuking the barren fig tree).
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