Alan Jacobs


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One of the difficulties with targeting religion, as some secularists do, is that as a concept it’s incredibly fluid. What do we mean by “religion”? You often hear people saying about Muslims, “They want to have honour killings; they want to have female genital mutilation.” But that isn’t Islam. That kind of thing has happened in many cultures, some of which were Christian or pagan. Honour killings happened in ancient Greece. This is a very complex phenomenon, at the borderline of culture and religion. One of the difficulties with seeing religion as the problem is that any understanding of the relationship between culture and religion just disappears.