Yesterday I posted about a religious topic. For better or worse, some responders decided to pick up on the particular religion in question. The name of the religion doesn't matter. Quote mining is wrong for the same reason I can take any word or sentence someone has said and apply it to a different context.
Nonetheless, quote mining is powerful when it comes to debates of politics and religion because the average mind can only make direct correlations with the subject matter without properly evaluating context. Imagine for example if we are talking about nuclear bombs and someone quotes some random scientists from military projects in order to criticize the entire field of science. That wouldn't be fair right? Even so, it works and we all learned that the hard way.
Same applies for religion and everything else really. If we are trying to make a point about an entire ideology that involves sometimes billions of people then using a quote from a book, speech or paper, will make our argument weak. It is the trap of overgeneralization and supersimplifaction. We just hope the masses "bite" the bait.
In subjects of religion, the text is interpreted differently for different people and for different reasons. Heck, even in science peer-reviewers can have different opinions about the data and interpret them differently. For anyone involved with statistics, they know very well what I mean. Using statistics you can pretty much prove anything you want. The only thing one has to do is shift the target of their evaluation and move some ratios around.
Religious quotes without context can and will be perceived differently because people carry different histories, practises and ideas about the subject in question. Without proper argumentation, without rational arguments, we will be dooming the debate into an ideological war. The very thing we are trying to avoid.
Language is a very powerful tool. We all know more or less how some arguments are unfair but only when they are used against us. Interpretation is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human and that should never be used as a tool to deceive someone to accept our point of view. Let us no become like the ones we often accuse.
