From the news media:
UK Prime-Minister Theresa May says that the recent [terrorist] attacks are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division, and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.
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In essence, Theresa May makes a point that the religion has nothing to do with the ideology and that a religion cannot be wrong by definition. What Theresa May is saying is that if the devotees of some religion, in the case of Theresa May the Islam, do evil things, it is not the fault of this religion (Islam) but the fault of some evil ideology created by the evil people of this religion.
Unfortunately, that is not true. Ideology is a crucial part of any religion – without ideology a religion is a mere mirage. Trying to separate ideology from religion is self-defeating. And here is why.
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines religion and ideology in the following way:
- Religion – the expressed manifested faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.
- Ideology - the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.
So, any religion has an acknowledged ultimate realty or deity.
For the Jews it is One God with many names such as Yahweh for example; for the Christians it is the Trinity (the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in one Godhead); for the Muslims it is Allah and His messenger Mohammad.
For the Nazis, the acknowledged ultimate realty or deity was Hitler and for the Soviets, it was Stalin.
What we tend to forget is that those ultimate deities were not silent. They provided for their devotees the “socio-political programs” on how to shape up a society/nation out of the devotees. And those “socio-political programs” are ideologies by definition.
For the Jews, it is Torah-based Talmud and all its derivatives; for the Christians, it is Torah-based New Testament and all its derivatives, and for the Muslims it is not Torah-based, fundamentally different Quran-based Sharia.
For the Nazis, it was (fortunately, was!) the Mein Kampf, and for the Soviets it was (fortunately, was!) the Communist Manifesto – both certainly anti-Torah “socio-political programs”.
The “socio-political” fundamentals of the USA are based on Judeo-Christian Torah-based moral prescripts which are opposite in many fundamental beliefs to those in the “socio-political” Islamic Quran-based fundamentals prescribed by the Sharia – on family structure, on women, on individual freedoms, on the role of government, on tolerance to the beliefs of others, etc. That does not mean that Islam cannot transform itself – but until it does it, in order to be able to survive as a Judeo-Christian nation we have to fight the Islamic ideology as a part of religion of Islam. This fight shall include preventing the Muslim citizens from creating “socio-political” institutions based on the Sharia and accepting only those new Muslim immigrants who pledge to do so.
This fight shall include preventing any kind of new immigrants who are not accepting the Judeo-Christian “socio-political” fundamentals of the USA. The ongoing (cold) civil war in the USA is to a great degree a result of the influx of such immigrants in the last half-century.