A recent British survey shows that more than half of the public think Islam is not compatible with British values.
As my followers know I have been working on universalizing Jewish ethics, and this includes a value-centric view of humanity. Every person, organization, political entity and defined group of people have a value system - a set of values that is both explicit and often implicit.
- Corrigibility (Can self-correct)
- Transparency (Explainable logic)
- Dignity (Respects human worth)
- Relational Integrity (Contextually aware)
- Override Logic (Can resolve conflicts)
- Anavah (Epistemic humility)
This is a fairly high bar. But without each of these in place, any moral system can degenerate into immorality. It can be hijacked by malicious actors, minor values can be exaggerated to override major values, it can be poorly interpreted without a transparent process to keep it on course.
Christianity and Judaism as they exist today pass most of the tests, so the ethoskeleton is not biased against religion. However, Islam as institutionally practiced in much of the Sunni world, and often imported uncritically into diaspora contexts, lacks key elements of the ethoskeleton. (This does not apply universally to all expressions of Islam to my understanding.) Sharia law cannot evolve within Islam today, Islamic legal rulings are inaccessible to non-scholars so their logic is not widely available and opaque, and most flavors of Islam asserts epistemic superiority, not humility.
As examples, Islam as it exists today can assert that martyrdom is the highest purpose of man, or that honor is worth more than life itself, or that Islam's support for bigamy is a higher value than a national law against the practice. These are nor moral positions that value life and human dignity above all. They may be consistent but they cannot easily coexist with other ethical systems, and there is a straight line from Islam's ethoskeletal failures and the values going awry.
When looked from this perspective, Islam, as practiced today, cannot be guaranteed to be a moral system.
The British people's instinct that Islam is incompatible with British values seems sound. British values include celebrating satire including of religion while Islam rejects of any blasphemy, mocking prophets or drawing Mohammed. That by itself is a serious value clash.
If the Muslim community would adopt the ethoskeleton as a basis for any moral system, things would be much different. Fiery preachers could be held to account and criticized publicly, forcing them to publicly and transparently defend their positions. Value clashes like importance of human life vs. martyrdom and honor could be well defined.
I am not saying here that this proves that Islam is immoral. I am saying that it does not have the minimum requirements necessary to resist it being perverted into an immoral system.
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