Which is the correct tree?*
One could argue that this is fallacious insofar as Judaism is the “ancestor” of both Islam and Christianity, but my own opinion is that the Jewish traditions of this day and age (including “Orthodox” Judaism) are very different from ancient Judaism (the transition from ancient to modern Judaism might be analogized to anagenesis, while the relationship between Christianity and ancient Judaism is more like cladogenesis). In the United States the term “Judeo-Christian” became popular after World War II as the “Protestant-Catholics-Jew” alignment was used to characterize the piety of the American republic (the core of the “civic religion”). But my own experience with Jews is that substantively they are skeptical of the “Judeo-Christian” concept because it is Muslims who are, unlike Christians, uncontestably monotheists. Though the contingencies of history place Judaism and Christianity in alliance, there is a tacit implication from many of my acquaintances that in many ways Judaism and Islam are far more similar.
With that, I point you to Noah Millman, a believing Jew who has his own opinions on the topic of religion, reason, and the monotheisms. I would like to highlight this point though:
It seems to me that much theology is more technical and instrumental in its reasoning than its practitioners admit, and that as a matter of history Christianity has had its partisans of unreason as well as reason. But I did want to address a common assumption, that Judaism works in some way similarly to Christianity in this regard. It does not – anyway, traditional Judaism does not.
The fundamental problem with an “axiomatic” concept of culture which abduces back aspects of a book or text as the source of an aspect of a culture is that I strongly suspect texts have within them enough texture and vagueness that a sufficiently clever theologian can “reason” to almost any position from any arbitrary textual passage. Unlike science, the “theory” of textual analysis and exegis has no empirical check, God does not descend from on high (except in Talmudic legends) to falsify and sift between correct and incorrect theories. The only judge is the social consensus of the believers. As Muhammad said, “My Ummah shall not agree upon error.”
* The analogy between culture and species fails in many areas, and the ubiquity of “horizontal transfer” among cultures is a clear difference. Nevertheless, I am less concerned with the genuine substance of the relationships (which I think can be better analyzed using a phenetic approach) than the cladistic perception in the public zeitgeist.
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