Geoff's Devil, and Other Notes
Geoff's Devil, and Other Notes
"Garterbelt, can you dial D City two nine-hundred? Answer line: Copy that, cleared the city."
Bells said:
That religions are bad for women's rights? How could you possibly dissuade me from that?
It's a result of his happy straw man, kind of like Chuck's Devil.
"Chuck to the Future": Fastener, Chuck, Chuck's Devil, and the sad fate of Chuck and his Devil.
See, "Geoff's Devil"—such as it is—seems to view things differently than you or I.
For me, at least, it seems apparent that when you lay one behavioral template, such as religion, over another, such as a cultural heritage, the result cannot be expected to represent one or the other purely. One analogy would be to go watch the film version of
At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and during the scene in which Kathy Bates fits a bunch of indigenous girls with brassieres, watch the girls' fascination and then complain that Christians like their women to run around in their underwear.
Similarly, would be say that alcoholism, domestic violence, and sexual violence on American tribal reservations is representative of Christianity? No, of course we wouldn't; it is an outcome that we now know to predict when you lay obsolete religion over a foreign, ancient culture, and demand civilization.
In the end, the effects of these differing approaches bring predictably different results. A perspective rooted in considerations of human behavior will identify diverse factors and attempt to account for their effects. A perspective rooted in politics will simply demand a monolithic outlook and hope reality cooperates.
And it's not
just Geoff. This is a common trope in human societies, and is the reason many people cannot separate disdain for what takes place in a culture from open hatred of the people within that culture.
To wit, Islam doesn't help women's rights in the modern context, but the behavioral routines were devised a long, long time ago.
If we expect results from the Islamic world that conform to our expectations of civilized society,
then we must necessarily account for the different factors affecting the paradigm. History demonstrates this sort of transition; while some Christians, indeed, are pushing for a medieval outcome, it's fair to say that the vast majority of identifying Christians in our societies are simply apostate. That is, when American Christians, for instance, complain that our culture is losing its traditional values, well, yeah, they're right. But, then again, this is also the society
they made. In the time when we still had witch trials, American Christians were abandoning Christ's Apostles in order to fight "communism". Even today, if you put the leftist motto of "from each to each" in front of American Christians, a majority—perhaps vast—would reject it, at least until you showed them the fourth chapter of Acts. (And, yes, some would still reject it.)
In the U.S., this is why evangelicals focus on such insane issues. The "Christian" America they want back is, in terms of the dialectic of neurosis, sinister and detrimental.
What separates the wishful tyranny of American Christendom from, say, the applicable tyranny in many Islamic nations is, mainly, affluence. American "Christians" will behave in a most un-Christian manner if they feel circumstances demand. Much like the terrorists, our political evangelicals have forsaken their faith in order to presume for themselves the authority otherwise reserved to God. As
I noted earlier in the thread, "We aren't doing to ourselves what we've seen done in Sarajevo and Grozny. We've done it before, and we do not intend to ever do so again."
But if we reject the behavioral in order to focus on the political, the syllogism changes; no other factors matter except for the identity label. Poverty, education, the effects of geopolitics—none of it matters to the political outlook that demands the subject be represented monolithically.
Which brings us back to Geoff, or his "Devil", as such. Since the myriad factors affecting your assessment of "Islam" do not exist in his outlook, we ought not be surprised that he is surprised. He offers us very simplistic views of history and human behavior. Much like we see in the current rape thread, in which various players are unable to comprehend the arguments they're attempting to respond to, and thus fixed on straw men, so it seems with Geoff's understanding of how you view religion in general and Islam in specific.
Or, in short, you criticized Islam, which I don't think he thought was possible. You know, kind of like that discussion about crime prevention where some people are ignoring considerations of crime prevention tactics in order to complain that people are ignoring crime prevention tactics.
We must at least acknowledge the possibility that the blindness is not willful, but, rather, neurotic.