Is Islam A Death Cult?

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, I've shared my thoughts.  What do you think a death cult is, Niblo?  Maybe islam isn't whatever that is and if we understood each other we'd agree?

Concerning the Characteristics of a Cult:

As suspected, you and I don't use the term to refer to the same things.  I say, "Yeah, islam is a pretty good candidate for A" and you say "No, islam is not B-Z".

I'm not sure I do agree with you on all of your B-Z, but I'm still not sure why you'd disagree with my A, either. To wit:

Death cult is a term that refers to religious groups that glorify or are obsessed with death. There are roughly 150 mentions of heaven in the quran. 500 of hell. There's an amusing relationship to christianity and islam, here, a rough inversion. 500 heaven, 50 or so hell. Old and new testaments. Warfare, ofc, throughout both sets. Death death death death killing death death...murder. On and on it goes. The whole world is flooded, cities are obliterated, brothers kill their brothers and a litany of genocides alleged, attempted, or completed play out chapter by chapter, always relayed as the heroic outcome of righteous intent. A man buys a bride with a string of philistinian dicks.

Detailed, explicit, fetishistic....pornographic, even. Calling abrahamic faith death curious would be massively underselling it. I guess people have to decide, for themselves, the line between curious and obsessed.

If it helps, my use of the term isn't pejorative, it's descriptive, so there's no real need to defend islam. To an extent, I think islam (and christianity before it, and judaism before that) flirt with and/or are death cults because of the violent circumstances of each subsects birth. Exile and diaspora, the ongoing dissolution of roman central authority, the conquest and occupation of the middle east. I think there's a tendency for religions to focus more or less on death the shittier things are in life - and in the case of religions with set establishment points and established liturgy and doctrine, we're looking at a snapshot in time of that.

As an example that may be less charged for you or between us the mesoamerican religion most closely associated with the late classical maya civilization became a death cult toward the end of mayan civilization. We're not sure exactly what caused the decline, but we have a good idea how the society and it's religious ideation responded to that collapse. The snapshot, here, is due to mayan civilization disappearing. They may have leaned out (just as they leaned in) if their situation improved. I think the same is true of islamic people and as it's still an extant religion - the final summary of islam may be more or less so, when..as every religion before it, it fades and is replaced by something new and becomes an item of historical trivia rather than living culture.

As another example, in the relatively peaceful and extremely wealthy incubator of western society from 1950 to roughly the 1990 - we see contemporary paganism arise. A deeply and genuinely pacifistic religion of life. However, from the 90's to about now - following the (real or perceived) decline of western civilization - contemporary paganism starts seeing more and more white supremacist warrior ideology - specifically focusing on a reconstruction of a valhallan cult. This goes to show that even if a religion doesn;t start out as a death cult, or as possessing a death sub-cult, we're never more than a few hairs away from creating one and it becoming a significant portion of the umbrella of faith.

Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of awful shit to say about islam. I don't just think it's a death cult (or at least death cult adjacent), I think it's one of the worst religions ever invented. These things are separate from each other. I'm persuadable as to what extent islam was formed as, or has leaned in or out of, death cult ideation. A. It would be a waste of your time and mine to try to persuade me that it isn't a shitty religion. B-Z.