First Post in a while

Sorry I haven't kept up with posting. I had a chem test this week, and we only met once this week (today). There really wasn't much to talk about, but I'll try to stretch what we did talk about to three posts over the next few days.

Today in class, we talked about the reading by Tariq Ramada. Actually, we really didn't talk about it per se. We just talked about how perceptions of religion vary with culture. Western culture has come to place more emphasis on internal rather than external expressions of religion, something that is relatively unique when considered in the broad scheme of other cultures.

Middle Eastern/Islamic culture, from what we gathered from the reading, is basically the opposite, placing more emphasis on external rather than internal expressions of faith.

In class I talked about why that might be. In the West, culture has developed a sense of tolerance in response to religious pluralism. Events such as the Reformation and periods such as the Enlightenment made tolerance a necessity if society where people hold different things to be indisputably true is to remain stable.

This is not true of Islamic culture which, while not homogeneous, has responded differently to the challenge of religious diversity.