Friday, March 4, 2022

A Matter Of Christian Or Islamic Justice

There are major differences between Sharia and Mosaic Law, but one thing that is the same in both is the prescription to execute people for murder.  In a hurry to make their condemnation of Islam or parts of Islam known, some Christians, typically the non-rationalistic and non-theonomist kinds that make up the majority of professing Christians, might denounce capital punishment called for by the Bible for specific offenses as too similar to Sharia prescriptions.  In this case and in similar contexts, it needs to be understood that even a worldview that is false and a worldview that is true, possibly true, or probably true might still have some things in common and that this does not invalidate the latter.

If Islam was true and Christianity was not (to the extent that it contradicts Quranic theology), it would not be evil to execute people for murder in and of itself, but it would be evil to do so in the name of Christianity.  If Christianity is true (Islam is demonstrably false because it contradicts the Torah it supposedly is a continuation of [1]), then the execution of people for murder is not evil, given that it does not involve an unbiblical form of torture, while executing murderers in the name of Islam would be morally false.  The fact that at least one of the two religions is false thanks to their contradicting tenets does not mean that everything in the untrue religion is erroneous.

The exact same act can be wrong when committed with a specific ideological motivation as opposed to another even when the act itself is otherwise identical.  Whether something like capital punishment is obligatory in a given case is not determined by how much it would resemble the moral teachings of a different philosophical system, but by whether or not it is actually true that people should be executed for a given offense.  This matter of justice has nothing to do with how similar or different various worldviews are and everything to do with what is true.  If there are no moral obligations, nihilism is true and both Islam and Christianity, with all of their moral prescriptions, but it does not follow from just one of them being false that a similar doctrine in the other is also false.

There are, of course, things this is true about besides issues of criminal justice.  Just because Islam affirms that God is purely monotheistic (as opposed to the irrational notion of popular Trinitarianism that does not reflect actual doctrines of the Bible) does not mean the Bible does not ultimately teach exactly the same thing.  Christians need to be careful to not let the blatant distinctions between Biblical and Quranic theology get so much of their focus that they pretend like there are not occasionally significant overlaps between the two, lest they unintentionally or irrationally object to the theology they are holding to as they denounce Islam!

Unless there is something logically impossible about a concept being true, every idea, even when it only needs to be examined in the context of a particular worldview, needs to be assessed without regard to whether it is a component of some other philosophy that has some epistemologically unknowable or metaphysically incoherent parts.  This is as true of Islam and Christianity as it is of any other pair of philosophies that have some ideas in common and some deviations, even if only some of those ideas are logically possible in the first place.  That part of Islam contradicts itself does not mean the parts of Christianity that resemble it can be sidestepped without betraying Christianity itself.


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