Galt
I don't think the average Christian Westerner is suppressing theocratical inclinations, but even if they were it would kind of prove my point anyway.
If the theocratical tendencies of Western Christians were sublimated it would mean that they [the Christians] recognize that such oppressive beliefs are no longer socially acceptable; an attitude greatly lacking in the average Islamic society.
Are you familiar with the phrase "appearance of conflict"?
The simple fact is that people don't want to be viewed as theocratic or fascist or anything like that; they just want to be theocratic and fascist and so on.
I won't go so far as to call them liars; merely blind.
Do I think that the authors of indecent exposure laws had something Biblical on their minds at the time? Quite possibly.
Do I think that if all American Christians vanished into thin air it would suddenly become legal to run around butt naked in public? No, I don't.
But the basic reasons might have some logical foundation if they're not rooted solely in presumption. If no logical foundation can be established, then it's a pretty stupid law. In the religious sense, I just think it's hilarious how redemptive religions in general seem to think that the state in which God delivers you to the world is somehow unsatisfactory to Him. That seems to be an issue for another day.
And the point of invoking Saudi Arabia and China was to point out that laws against public nudity aren't exclusive to Christianity or predominantly Christian nations.
The Chinese reasons for not running around naked probably have nothing to do with the Christian notion of Original Sin.
Is result the only thing that matters to you? Or does method and reason (e.g. justification) have anything to do with it?
I'm not making excuses for it. I'm pointing out a fact. Christian ethics are the moral basis for most Western nations (but less so now than in the past), just as Islamic ethics are the moral basis for most predominantly Muslim nations.
Exactly. And Islam can undergo the same process. It's hard to qualify the rigidity of Islamic doctrine as wholly fixed; the historical basis for the assertion just isn't there.
In the post-Christian West, money became more important than God. In the modern era, most of the Islamic world has not had the opportunity to undergo that social process. This is why consideration of Muslims in other countries becomes important: given security and economic opportunity, Muslims prefer peaceful attainment of their goals.
Why should he? It was an article about Islamic society.
Well, if one is going to use something for a comparison, why skip the basis for comparison?
If I wrote an article about mechanical problems frequently found in a specific brand of automobile, should I have to mention the problems of every brand of car?
No. But if you're going to tell why one is superior to another, there ought to be a reason. And if that reason is just making excuses because you like Porsche better than Volvo ... well, that's all it is.
There are of course many Christians in Western nations who would like to force their religious values on others, but these people are obviously in the minority or else there would be no need to sublimate their beliefs, assuming they are doing so in the first place.
You overlook something vital about redemptive religions: even while the believers are not answering to you or I, they are answering to their conception of God. The number of conflicts that arise between principle and conduct can easily result in sublimation of the problematic aspects. It's a balance of the need to devote oneself to God and the need to be oneself. It is, in fact, a huge clusterdiddle that doesn't promise any resolution in the near future.
Western man attained this relative peace by recognizing that religion (and anti-religion) and politics don't mix.
Recognizing on paper.
"In God we Trust",
Galt. "In God we Trust."
Remember, God is on our side, and the government ought to be able to force people to acknowledge God. (Polls suggest that despite the US Constitution, as many as 90% of Americans objected to the court decision against the Pledge of Allegiance.)
The theocracy is still alive.
It is defective. Any society based strictly on religious law will be defective.
Until humans become perfect, any society period will be defective.
It's kind of like poking the baby and then complaining when she cries.
Early Christians spent their spare time being thrown to the lions by pagan Romans and later had their lands invaded by imperialist Muslims.
What a noble summary. It only leaves out several centuries, as well as the fact that many of the Christian martyrs actually looked forward to their date with the lions. (e.g. Ignatius of Antioch, Origen).
Muslims, as you pointed out, had their nations used as political pawns during the Cold War.
This as well as other issues of political and socioeconomic decline contribute to the problems of Islam. While aspects of Islam itself may complicate certain issues, the fault is no more inherently Islam itself than American belligerence is Christianity itself.
People like to excuse the more unpleasant aspects of Islam by pointing out the 600 year age gap between the two, but we must also consider the circumstances of the rest of the world. At its 1400th birthday, Christianity was just one form of dictatorship in a world where virtually every society was a dictatorship of some sort, whereas today there are plenty of relatively free societies to which Islamic nations could compare themselves and serve as models for reform.
You have a point so long as we reserve Islam to a vacuum. The modernity which has brought the peace we enjoy in much of the West has been largely at the expense of other people. Had Islam maintained its empire, we likely would have seen a similar progression. The loss of the empire tells us one thing, though: Westerners are better at war than Muslim Arabs.
The larger point is the one you seem to dislike - that the problems caused by governing a society by a 1400 year old book are not caused by something that happened 50 years ago.
I'll even do you the courtesy of correcting your mistaken notion: Your presumption that the problems caused by governing a society by a 1400 year old book does not have as solid a basis as you would like to think. Your inability to consider the relationship of what happened fifty years ago and its historical significance compared to the decades, generations, or centuries preceding lies at the heart of the failure of your larger point.
I think the lack of historical discussion in the article is due to the fact that history is not the primary cause of the problems.
Various laws from various cultures permit various killings of various people.
If the conditions of living include a lack of educational infrastructure, dubious interpretations of religious dogma occur; this is observable in history, which is conveniently irrelevant to someone like you who would like to take an immediate situation and apply it to the whole of history.
If you disagree, by all means make your case.
It's kind of hard to do so when you,
Galt, are only devoting enough time to this topic to continue to make presumptuous and bigoted affirmations. If I had some sign that you were giving greater thought to this discussion, I would have no problem whatsoever restating the whole of this topic for you. However, you refused to give it proper consideration the first time, I see no indication that a second time will bring any better result.
Shall we review? (I can no longer tell if you're genuinely confused or just being a prig.)
- G: There are plenty of reasons to dislike Islamic countries, the least of which having nothing to do with race. Almost all are lacking in respect for basic individual rights. Many sponsor terrorism. A few even allow the enslavement of non-Muslims.
- T: There are plenty of reasons to dislike anybody. In the meantime, what are the reasons for those reasons?
- G: Islam, Islam and a combination of Islam and the willingness to ignore the rights of others to make some quick money.
- T: If that's the way you really see it, at least you're willing to admit it.
- G: If you disagree, by all means make your case.
In case you hadn't noticed, I've been making that case all along. Oh, wait, that's right. You're just going to hold a pretext you don't understand and denounce the significance of history. Like I said,
Galt, it's hard to make that case to you when you only devote enough time to the issues to be a presumptuous bigot capable of offering only three sentences at a time, tops. I cannot communicate with you so long as you continue to refuse.
I take it back: one of your response sections has five sentences in it.
You seemed to be arguing that loony Khomeni's rise to power was due to the rule of the loony Shah.
Your lack of appreciation for both history and the human beings who lived it is rather vicious.
My point was that you can oppose one loony guy without supporting another loony guy on the opposite end of the loon-spectrum.
True enough, but that seems beside the point. In the applicable case at hand, the people ditched a US-supported nut in favor of a theocratic nut who promised to free them from the yoke of the US and its nuts.
Individual rights are most important to me. Theocracies of any sort are a threat to individual rights.
Nice job dodging the question.
Actually, that's wrong.
It was a very silly attempt.
The point wasn't stupid at all. It was quite true, in fact. The point of the article was to criticize the failures of fundamentalist Islam as a religion and culture. The fact that very few non-Muslims have any reverence for Islamic culture backs up his claims.
In the end, I suppose that you or Mr. Locke are welcome to answer the question:
Why is Islam the fastest-growing religion in the worldhttp://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/Fastest/?
Read your own statement that I was responding to with this comment.
Well, you still have an obligation to establish how your statement connects to mine if you would like me to consider it.
I wasn't blaming pawns of the Cold War for anything. I was explaining why the pawns tended to be pawns.
Review time again:
- T: Even if we move past the oil generalization, there's no pretending that the less-developed and undeveloped world weren't playgrounds for cruel Cold War ambitions.
- G: Sure they were. The main reason being the relative instability of these nations. When you have a new president every week, sooner or later outsiders will start taking an interest in who rises to power.
- T: So we should blame the pawns of the Cold War for not being the USA or the USSR?
- G: I wasn't blaming pawns of the Cold War for anything. I was explaining why the pawns tended to be pawns.
Was it just inconvenient to you to actually make the case of your latest justification? Because as you explain it, it would seem that the reason the Cold War governments took interest in these nations as pawns was because of their instability. Yet much of the instability of the pawns which affects us today descends directly from the Cold War. So it would seem that the instability of the pawns which affects us today, which existed during the cold war, and comes from the major players in the Cold War comes about because the pawn governments were unstable. And I know that doesn't make sense, but neither do you.
Let me try one more time to get this straight: Chaos caused by the Cold War only came about because the conditions (e.g. instability) resulting from the Cold War made the pawns attractive to the major players?
Talk about defective:
There are some people suffering. Let's agitate the suffering for our own benefit. Hey, why do they hate us?
And it's unlikely that any of this would have happened had the Soviets not invaded Afghanistan.
Well, imagine being the Soviets. What do you do when your enemy sends a covert mission to unseat a friendly government next door? It still stuns me that Carter pulled that stunt, but hey ... nobody ever said the Peanut Farmer was perfect.
You are missing the point. The problem with Islamic societies is that every grudge seems to count; from what the Americans did last week to what the Israelis did 55 years ago to what the Christians did 1000 years ago.
That is, I admit, a problem. Aldous Huxley, back around 1925, wrote that successful peoples have no use for history. He considered a symptomatic apathy toward history shown at the time by his fellow Englishmen, and compared that to the clinging to history and legends undertaken by the Irish. He pointed to Kosovo, and other downtrodden places where history and myth have been magnified as a bulwark against the misery of daily existence.
Left to go through a proper social evolution, Islam will develop to a point where Muslims have other things on their minds. But allowing people to figure out such mysteries on their own has always been as unacceptable to the West as it was to the Commies, or has been to Muslims in theocracies.
This comment has nothing to do with disrespect for history and everything to do with critiqueing a religion that holds grudges for a millennia.
You invoke history to make criticisms, you despise history that counterpoints your argument. I'm actually quite amused by the way you refute the notion of your disrespect for history by being disrespectful to history.
If I thought the last fifty years of conflict between Israel and its neighbors had any effect on a book written 1400 years ago, I would have mentioned it.
If you've given such an issue any serious consideration, you haven't shown it.
Yep. It's that same old point you refuse to acknowledge: Things that happened two weeks or 100 years ago aren't responsible for the oppressive nature of theocracies based on a 1400 year old book.
When I was a kid, I was taught that Christian compassion involved being kind to people and helping them out--e.g. charity. As I grew up, there occurred a trend around me that puzzled me: the clear majority of people I knew who called themselves Christian had begun to interpret compassion and charity differently. Helping a person in tough straits was a disservice to them, an unkindness. Charity was an injustice against the giver and the receiver. This seemingly religious interpretation of an idea was profoundly affected by the economic demands of the 1980s. Factors in history that are not specifically the religious idea affected the manifestation of that religious idea in the world. Anti-abortion? There's an old phrase: "Taking the trade". It goes back to Puritan America, at least. Lysander Spooner notes that Christian-derived sentiment in the 19th century made it illegal to drink spirits on moral grounds, yet prescribed that 10 years old was the age of consent for a girl to lose her virtue, and that you could cajole her consent with gifts and money. Ten year-old hookers? I'll bet they had some good herbal mixes for abortions ....
And can either of these ideas be ascribed to the whole of Christianity for all time?
How about the old sentiment that it was un-Christian to teach an African slave to read?
Are these symptomatic exclusively of the religion, or do other factors warrant consideration?
I am not confused by historical considerations. I just don't agree that historical considerations are causing the problems found in societies using the Koran as law.
So you insist. Yet you don't do a good job of establishing your point. You just repeat it as if it's self-evident; it seems as if you hope I'll just fall over of a stroke and accept your assertion without question. I would have to suffer brain damage, though, in order for your arguments to make any real sense.
There was no counter-accusation. A counter-accusation is when you respond to an accusation by making one of your own. This is not what I did. I denied two accusation one sentence.
You're right, I shouldn't speak so generally. It seems to confuse you. You have my apologies. Given that your denial was empty and worth absolutely zero, I was referring more to your tendency to respond to issues with simple counter-accusations. You know, like when you wrote:
As opposed to the Muslims who are still having a hissy fit over the Crusades, which happened nearly 1000 years ago. Why does a four hundred year grudge warrant condemnation but a 900 year old one doesn't?
It was a fine point for a different argument. You don't seem to want to look at any other factors. Your
modus operandi is to counterpoint explorations of the reasons for Islamic dysfunction by reaffirming that Islam is defective.
I don't hate Islam itself. I do hate the idea of using strict interpretations of Islam or any other religion as the basis of a society.
And yet you seem to think that there's no other way to approach Islam. Of course, if you gave a rat's behind about the history of Islam, you would understand what's wrong with your narrow approach. Not everything is as simple as you would like to imagine.
The point had something to do with people using historical grievances to justify current atrocities. But that argument falls into the realm of holding people responsible for what they do, and apparently is unwelcome in this discussion.
You're quite set on making the point about historical grievances. Why are you so determined to refuse consideration to the factors resulting from history that compel people to make grievances? I mean, you're welcome to your opinion, I won't deny that on any level. But if you think you can just go forward with silly affirmations (an example is coming), it would be unreasonable of you to expect me or anyone else to respect your opinion as educated, well-considered, or useful.
No, the question was whether using fundamentalist Islam as the basis for society results in a defective society.
I did not see Locke limit himself to fundamentalism. He tried to take the fundamentalist issues of the present and apply them to the whole of history, but Locke did not limit his criticisms to fundamentalism, and I think it is quite dishonest of you to attempt to distort the issue at this late stage.
Then again, what do I expect?
Like I said, silly affirmations.
One of these days, you ought to attempt to
support one or another of them.
But he didn't say that predominantly Muslims societies will be defective for all eternity.
He was, in fact, very careful about that. But he said the problem was that Islam was defective. He did not say that the problem was a contemporary interpretation of Islam. He said the problem was Islam itself.
Seriously, why is it that leftists start screaming about racism whenever anyone disagrees with them?
Well, like I said ... I'm running out of excuses to make for you.
And besides:
Bigot: One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
And . . . .
A person who regards his own faith and views in matters of religion as unquestionably right, and any belief or opinion opposed to or differing from them as unreasonable or wicked. In an extended sense, a person who is intolerant of opinions which conflict with his own, as in politics or morals; one obstinately and blindly devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion.
And yes, you're welcome to ask the obvious question. But if you don't already know the answer, it's best if you leave it alone and just cope.
I'd still be winning the debate.
By what standard? If it's anything like your standards regarding history, that's one dubious victory you're chasing.
:m:,
Tiassa
