Topic: 2013-01-30 Is Bitcoin Sharia Compliant? (Read 3920 times)

Thank you for the clarification.  I had understood that but I can see how the way I wrote it could look as if I meant they decided as a collective.

Sounds like a clever comment but but I don't accept the presumption that either side are in essence hateful.  My impression from too many years following youtube theist v. atheist 'debates' is that where theists are angry they tend to talk of atheists as being evil, falsely (in almost all instances) accusing them of wanting to restrict their freedoms to practice religion.  Whereas atheist anger I think more generally is as a result of frustrations arising out of false accusations, of rewriting history and a failure to understand that demanding secular public institutions protects everyone equally.

Indeed they do but the wisdom of the reader is a prerequisite to extracting the 'good bits'.  A religious leader/manipulator can also extract the bits that suit his needs just as a rose-tinted believer only sees the bits that support their world view.  More to the point a reader with the wisdom to spot the wise bits doesn't need the 'sacred texts' - I'd venture to say he/she is equally likely to enhance his/her wisdom from reading Shakespere than any sacred text!

One of the most hateful actions of all is to threaten a child into believing a lie. How long would religions survive if they couldn't bully children into compliance?

Every scam surrounds the central lie with camouflaged truths, otherwise they aren't believable.

Maybe not to you, but the world is bigger than you.  It is a very important question to many millions of people.

Anti-religionists are just as hateful as the religionists they rail against.

There are many problems with any religious organization, but all of the sacred texts contain wisdom.

Sorry, I did provoke this but seeing as you responded I'll go with this off topic flow.

It's not the way I would put it but I can't be critical of someone drawing that conclusion from what I say.  I know many religious people whose core belief is that as humans we are inherently evil and that the good deeds they and other religious folk do (and their abstinence from evil deeds) are due to their faith.  This delusion is largely harmless but the corollary, the assumption that those who are not religious (or who are of a different religion) are also inherently evil but don't have faith to redeem themselves, is not necessarily as benign.  Mark Twain sums up where I am on the relationship between religion and human atrocities as follows: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion."

I think 'frequently' misses the immense progress on this over the last few centuries.  Historically, until relatively recently all systems of government had religious elements.  The separation of church and state, the concept of a secular government is phenomenally important.  Of course it doesn't prevent abusive rule but it takes out a whole raft of excuses for oppression. Recently, as I posted elsewhere, British secularists and Christians worked together to quash a crazy British law.  In the US I can't see this would have happened because the religious right seem to have forgotten secularism is a protector of all to practice whatever beliefs as long as they don't interfere with others.  Now they see secularism as an enemy,  as somehow an attack on their right to practice their faith.  They seem to fail to see that all the secularists want is that the religious don't get special privileges just from belonging to the dominant religion.

As for 'good reason' I'm not sure what you mean.  There are certainly fairly sound anthropological explanations (good reasons?) that explain the role of religion in human evolution and how religion persists even today.  Or are you suggesting it having been around for so long as being a good reason to believe in God? Isn't that as problematic as suggesting something must be right because a lot of people believe it?  Also the idea of someone contemplating the pros and cons, 'reasoning' out whether or not to have faith doesn't quite seem to fit my experience of how people come to believe.

Getting back to technology and the religious, in the extreme the argument is always that it's not guns that kill people but the people who shoot them.  It unfortunately takes very little imagination to envisage people who have bizarre world-views causing great harm with guns - or with planes, come to that.  Without intending to imply I have the right to prevent someone from owning guns I will admit to having a preference that some people didn't have them!  Likewise I would prefer militant Islamists didn't use internet forums to recruit, that they didn't use encrypted comms to plan and that they didn't use Bitcoin to fund their atrocities.  However, for me the overriding principle is that I neither have the right to deny, nor should I vote a representative to deny anybody other than convicted criminals the use of these technologies.

Maybe for the religiously oppressed, as for the politically oppressed, Bitcoin will be a tool that will have a part in their path to liberation (physical and mental) and for this reason I hope the imams will not deem Bitcoin to be in contravention of Sharia law.

I'm not a fan of religion, particularly Islam, and I'm even less of a fan of technology (or anything) empowering the religious.  Yet traditionally the way it works is religious leaders make rules for their followers whilst doing whatever suits them.  In the case of Bitcoin what I envisage along those lines is for example, a priest who called Bitcoin evil and banned its use then as he had his religious police out there preventing the lay people using Bitcoin he would at the same time be quietly putting some money away in Bitcoin, or using it for his nefarious purchases!

For this reason I'd prefer it to be found to be compliant with Sharia so everybody gets to use it equally without threat. 

But just as Bitcoin is designed to be immune to government intervention and interference, there's also little in practical terms that could be done by religious leaders to control it either.  They might be better versed in the tools of guilt and shame to control people than governments (who haven't really needed to due to their use of guns) but I would hope the leaders would think better than to try and use it as yet another means of control.

The criteria as presented in the blog seem conveniently vague enough for 'scholars' to come to whatever decision suits their needs so let's hope they choose wisely

I think Bitcoin is in the interest of Sharia law because it lowers interest rates to zero, making the current system untenable. Thanks to the lack of inflation, Bitcoin's oft-negative paper inflation rates would make it impractical to continue charging interest.