RE: Voltaire on Islam
June 16, 2016 at 10:20 am
(This post was last modified: June 16, 2016 at 10:23 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(June 16, 2016 at 10:02 am)Homeless Nutter Wrote: I think Voltaire was on thin ice, being a free-thinker, non-believer in a country ruled by a catholic despot, who's power and authority supposedly came from god. He obviously had to present islam in the worst possible way, using words like "satanic", in order to placate his catholic patrons, especially that his opinion of - say - christianity, or judaism wasn't really all that different from what he wrote about islam, so it would be very dangerous for him to appear objective.I don't think that he had to. He could have said nothing. Satanic had a meaning apart from catholicism (and still does..even if it might seem silly to us today to use it to describe what we might see as the pinnacle of evil). In any case, he seems to have had no trouble speaking up in the excerpt you quoted.
Quote:"The most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world" - well that seems to make christianity worse than even islam in Voltaire's mind.Maybe, I'll never know, but what's the relevance?
Quote:Don't get me wrong - I don't like islam at the best of times, but I don't see how the Voltaire quote from hundreds of years ago brings anything into the discussion about islam in particular, since he was anti-religion in general.Has islam changed, in those things he mentioned...since then?
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