Ali A. Rizvi

His commitment to religious freedom is sometimes interpreted as an appreciation for religion, which it really wasn’t; it was more a function of his wish to keep church and state separate, and prevent the establishment of a state religion, as was ultimately achieved with the First Amendment. Indeed, Jefferson was a key proponent not just of freedom of religion, but freedom from religion

A second upside to this was the realization that my family and friends were truly decent human beings. As much as their denialism could be frustrating in an argument, their flat-out refusal to accept that their religion prescribed bad things meant, to me anyway, that they were good people. And they weren’t good people because of their holy book; they were good people in spite of it. They were also unwilling to accept at face value any verse or passage that didn’t align with their personal ethics and morality. This was also telling: they didn’t get their morality from the Quran; they used their already-present morality to interpret it—or at least to interpret what they thought was in it. Why not cut out the middleman? I thought. You already have what you’re hoping to get from a book that tells you that you need the book in order to get what you already have without the book in the first place, right?

Was this really about extremists corrupting the religion? Or was it about moderates sanitizing it?

But if you focus on the more violent verses, the contradictions are much easier to reconcile. Here’s why: The good things in the Quran are not unique to Islam. Giving charity, being kind to others, and not stealing, for example, are values that predate the Quran by centuries. Everyone from Confucius to the Greeks wrote about them, and human beings had been working together collaboratively and treating each other well for thousands of years before Muhammad was even born

But what’s missed in these discussions is the take-home point that Hitchens articulated perfectly in response to Sullivan’s protest: “But if your belief is that Jesus [is going to come] back very soon [and] is going to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with him—how do you keep that out of politics? The belief is political.”

He was spot on. The Abrahamic religions are inherently political

What we’re talking about here are ideological belief systems that use reward and punishment, on Earth and beyond, to affect people’s individual and collective behavior. We’re talking about authoritarian dictates prescribing how to live, eat, deal with authority, form a government, have sex, raise children, and punish those who don’t comply. We’re talking about legal codes, both personal (the Ten Commandments) and societal (halakha, Shariah). We’re talking about economics, trade, and more.

To me, denying religion’s role seems to be a way to criticize the politics of these situations while remaining apologetically “respectful” of people’s religious beliefs for fear of offending them.

Those who make the “it’s culture, not religion” argument are essentially doing what the “it’s politics, not religion” crowd does: trying to find a way to criticize acts they find deplorable without being seen as disrespectful of religion, or worse, blasphemous to it.

Verse 65:4 of the Quran gives instructions on how to divorce certain women, including “those who have not yet menstruated,” a verse interpreted widely by many influential scholars in both the Sunni and Shia sects to mean that marrying young children is permissible

Cultures give rise to religions, and religions shape cultures.