While I definitely share Infidel753's dislike of Islam, I don't share his apocalyptic, confrontational interpretation.
Quite a lot of the "Islam-isn't-really-so-terrible" stuff is coming from within Islam. I have a tiny bit of sympathy for such apologists; I can see them struggle to try to reconcile humanist ethics with Islamic scripture, but I also see them failing miserably every time. Unfortunately for Islamic moderates, there just isn't much equivocation or wiggle room in the Islamic scriptures (the Koran and to some extent the hadith), and they haven't had the extra millennium that Christianity has had to really perfect their double-think.
The Western/Islam confrontation is between two "huge, misogynistic, imperialist ideological" movements driven by religious and political fundamentalism. Neither Infidel753 nor I are at all justified in considering our personal libertarian[1] political philosophies to represent "true" Western thought. The West is as the West does, and right now the West is George Bush's and Tony Blair's.
The real confrontation is between rationality and superstition, a conflict that rationalists are not yet winning, even in the West. The Islamic world is lagging behind, but their ability to affect the West is limited mostly to inducing paranoia.
[1] In the small-ell literally descriptive sense of valuing individual liberty. Neither Infidel753 nor I self-identify as members of the Libertarian political party.
[T]he superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times, once it is debunked, takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. . . . [O]ne of the functions of old-fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that long-run civilized life requires.
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Friday, February 09, 2007
1 comment:
Please pick a handle or moniker for your comment. It's much easier to address someone by a name or pseudonym than simply "hey you". I have the option of requiring a "hard" identity, but I don't want to turn that on... yet.
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Well said.
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