Video clips I: Torah, Theonomy, Sharia?
[ by Charles Cameron — religious law espoused in Judaism, Christianity and Islam ]
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I came across this first video, featuring Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron, yesterday, and thought it would be worthwhile to seek out companion pieces proposing divinely sanctioned legal systems in the two other Abrahamic traditions:
There are naturally differences as well as similarities between the three messages and the relative levels of influence of their respective messengers. A scholar of comparative religion might be concerned with their selections of canonical texts to enforce and the techniques of interpretation variously applied to them, an historian might compare our second speaker, the Chalcedon Institute’s (late) RJ Rushdoony‘s view of the applicability of Biblical law with that of Calvin in Geneva, a strategist consider the groundswells of popular opinion attaching to each of these speakers, their political and military potentials…
All three speakers claim that law should be based on a divinely authored and thus authoritative text — but the books so considered differ. Anjem Choudary, the third speaker, brings vividly to mind the impact that such doctrines can have on those who do not share his religious convictions when he proposes that Buckingham Palace could become a mosque…
I think it important to be aware that such men exist, and have followings. There are members of all three religions that I count as friends, events of horrific, divinely sanctioned violence in the histories of all three religions, and figures in the history of each religion from whom I take inspiration. I would not wish to live in a land where any one of these three men wielded power, and I do not believe that any one of them is fully representative of the grand sweep of his own tradition.
My intent in posting these three videos is to inform, not to inflame, and I invite you to view them in that spirit.