Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Toxic Instruction Manuals

​You can argue, with little exaggeration I believe, that the distinguishing feature of the Quran compared to the other holy texts of the Abbrahamic desert delusion, is that it functions more or less explicitly as an instruction manual, at the collective level.

Within its pages are precepts relating to the aggressive treatment of non-believing communities.

Christian imperialism, by contrast, is firstly rooted in the adoption of the faith as official religion by an actual pre-existing empire. But then we can see that the Spanish and Portuguese urge to conquer in the name of their faith was also partly an inversion of the stalled Jihad on their peninsula, a 'Reconquista' which sought to turn the tables and borrowed some of the Islamic fervour.

Later European imperialists tended to be Protestants, in other words, people who were determined to take the 'good' book as a private and collective instruction manual, no matter how apt it might be for such a use. 

Colonialism is not baked into Bible in the same way it is into the Quran — Jesus is on many levels an anti-violence, anti-imperialist figurehead — but there are both readings of the Old Testament — with its intimations of ethnic exclusivity — and readings of the New, that tend to map onto a more 'capitalistic' outlook, which might be said to compensate for the lack of more explicit directives to subjugate. 
 
 

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