The idea of freedom that we enjoy in the West comes right out of the Judeo-Christian faith. It's rooted in that. The road getting to it was certianly bumpy but an honest student of history cannot deny it.
So, what kind of freedom can we expect to come out of the Islamic faith? Can we even venture to guess? I think it would be unrealistic to expect it to resemble anything much like the freedom of the West.
The ideas that freedom and human rights are universal is a product of the Judeo-Christian fath. You cannot have one without the other, or so our Founding Father's believed. Are such lofty ideals core to the faith of Islam?
I'm not trying to make a point here or be smart. There's are just questions that occured to me while reading Dean conversation. Dean says the real problem is "lack of freedom." What kind of freedom? Islamic nations will never accept the freedom rooted in the Judeo-Christian philosophy. Is that the kind of freedom we're offering them? If so I think we're doomed to failure.
If there is any kind of freedom to be found in Islamic nations it must be a kind rooted in their faith.
So, I guess, the question is: Can Islam produce the kinds of freedoms that Judeo-Christianity has? If not, what will we do about it?
I'm not nearly as sanguine about the idea that individual freedoms and human rights descend directly from Judeo-Christian faith. Maybe the founding fathers of the USA thought it was, but how much of that was them rationalizing the idea of inherent rights of sentient beings through their own belief system. Didn't the divine right of kings also come from the same faiths?
I think it's more that the idea of individual liberty was an idea whose time had come, and had advocates in the right place and right time. And when those advocates of freedom and individual liberty who are muslim and have power in the muslim world are in the right place and right time, then we'll see the same thing.
People who want to control other people will use whatever mechanism is available. Whether it is religious, military, governmental, or other force, it will be used by those who do not believe in letting other people decide what they want for themselves.
And I'm glad to see questioning of the idea that people must answer from some specific viewpoint. Are we not all human beings first and foremost?
Maybe the founding fathers of the USA thought it was, but how much of that was them rationalizing the idea of inherent rights of sentient beings through their own belief system.
This statement strikes me as kind of odd. The Founding Fathers say they did X because they believed Y but you, some 200+ years later, think you know why they actually did it? Could it not be you're doing, right now, the exact same thing you're accusing them of? That is, since you don't believe in Y, as they did, you must then attribute their X to something else as to lessen the influence of Y in their, and ultimately your, life?
This seems like a case of taking modern day values and projecting them backwards in time upon people who couldn't possible hold them. Evolutionists do the same thing with secularism. Our modern day idea of secularism couldn't possibly mean the same thing secularism meant in 1776 but that doesn't stop them anyway.
I prefer to let the Founders to speak for themselves on this matter rather than second guessing them 230 years later.
The concepts of freedom and human rights were associated with a culture that was basically Christian, but the concepts themselves came from the rationalists like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. There is no reason to think that rationalism will not work in an Islamic based society, in fact I would say that for a few hundred years after the fall of the Byzantine Empire it was the Muslim world that was leading rational thought, and one of the great tragedies of history is that rationalism was somehow lost in those cultures.
But it could come back.
I really get tired of the old saw that our freedoms are based on Christian principles. Read Locke and Hobbes. Read Jefferson and Franklin. Read Hamilton and Patrick Henry. The "Age of Enlightenment" was the rise of rationalism.
Ah, more nonsense about the US being a "Christian Nation". Sean, as appears to be somewhat of a pattern, nails it. Many of our founding fathers, including the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the primary author of the US Constitution were DEISTS, not Christians.
If you want to argue that Christians had some influence, great. I don't disagree. But to suggest that freedom in the west, especially in the US is descendant from Christianity is vastly overstating things.
Kevin cant u see that u r the exact mirror image of the islamic fundos? you insist on a literal interpretation of text, your text is the true text, your version of the Divine Beloved is the only real one?
You are exactly isomorphic with them, a christian fundo mirror image of the islamic fundos.
My God, can't you ever address me without using personal attacks? Is it something your genetic code simply will not allow you to do? Really, why do you even bother to write? I'd respond to one of your points but I'm afraid it would get lost in that acrid brain of your.
Ali,
I'd like to see it. Again, (as Matoko seemed to have completely missed) I'm not trying to attack Islam. It's a genuine concern.
I expanded more on my thoughts over at JihadWatch on the front page.
Matoko, you're not allowed to read it because you'd just miss the point anyway.
[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts."
Every hope of the existence of church and state, and of civilization itself, hangs upon our arduous effort to defeat the doctrine of Negro suffrage.
Pope Nicholas V, instituted hereditary enslavement of non-Christians (in other words, Christo-dhimmitude). See the Dum Diversas.
St. Thomas Aquinas believed that slavery was "morally justifiable", though to his credit not as a matter of natural law, only positive law.
J.F. Brennan published Josiah Priest's "Bible defense of slavery" in 1851.
for the record, I do not (and never will!) believe that Christianity is inherently amenable to slavery nor do I believe that these and countless other examples of experts, leaders, and authorities within Christendom who have justified and defended slavery using the Bible are somehow normative or indicative of any inherent tendency against freedom in the Christian faith.
But neither will I ever accept the total and utter bullshit that freedom is grounded in Judeo Christian values. Thats polemical revisionist pap.
I prefer to let the Founders to speak for themselves on this matter rather than second guessing them 230 years later
good idea. Article 1, Section 2:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Article 4, section 2:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
Bonus question for Kevin. What day in civil rights history does March 4th commemorate? (you know, yesterday...)
(and no, I have absolutely zero intention of posting this comment in any further form. I am not out to prove anything about Christianity, and making a post of this comment would just be a needless insult in my opinion.)
(and yes, I am fully aware that my attitudes and charitable view towards Christianity above are not reciprocated. That's irrelevant.)
Well, since you don't intended to post here again, but rather take pot shots and run, I don't know why I should bother but I will.
Does the Bible or Torah have a single verse outlawing slavery? If so, please show it to me.
If you're as familiar with Torah as you seem to think you are then you'll know that, yes, the Bible didn't outlaw slavery but it did place strick guidelines about slavery. Simply, if you think about it for a quick second, slavery was the only option for a number of economic issues. Bankruptcy wasn't an option. So, you become endebted to an individual but you can't pay - then what? Slavery was the only option.
Additionally, laves were to be treat humanely. Abuse was not tolerated.
Then, there was the Year of Jubliee where anyone in debt was freed of the debt and allowed to go free.
So, no, the Bible didn't outlaw slavery but given the time it was written it couldn't.
Stop projecting modern day values upon the past. Especially when it's evident you never bothered reading what the Bible has to say about the subject.
Slaves were to be treated humanely and no one was ever a life-long slave.
This tiresome question from Kevin is one of the reasons I set down the editorial principles. It's been answered, over and over and over and over and over again, for anyone who really wants to look.
And I notice, once again, that any time ANYONE brings up bad Christian history, it's an "attack on Christianity" but bring up anything silly or stupid about Islam and it's just "rational criticism."
1) If freedom is a "judeo-christian invention," why is it that it took the Christian world over 1,800 years to develop free democratic countries? That's a rhetorical question. Obviously, anyone who looks at history KNOWS that Christians struggled mightily with themselves to accept these values, and they often went to war with each other over them.
Even during the American Revolution, it was mostly Christians fighting other Christians. That is just a fact. And the Christians who supported King George looked at the book of Romans, chapter 13, and the well-developed Christian concept of the Divine Right of Kings, to say that the revolutionaries were blasphemers. And when the rebels won, many Christians up and moved to Canada or went back to the UK, because they saw the American republic as a work of Satan.
Christians argued that slavery was Biblically sound. Christians founded the KKK, arguably the world's first terrorist organization. Christians spoke out heavily against giving women the vote, allowing them to choose careers, even against birth control (I won't go into abortion, PLEASE let's not go there).
The truth is that our modern concept of freedom IS modern, and rather radical. Did Christians have a whole lot to do with creating it? Yes, and they had a whole lot to do with fighting it too. Because these ideas are NOT fundamentally bible-based, and Christians had to struggle a long, long time to reconcile their faith with the kinds of freedoms we take for granted today. Indeed, most serious-minded Christians STILL struggle with it in many areas.
NONE of that is an "attack on Christianity" by the way, although I know some Christian somewhere who just had his PC sensibilities tweaked will whine that it is anyway.
2) Islam IS based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm really tired of people claiming it isn't. YES IT IS. It's a direct offshoot of Judaism, and many important Jewish scholars made major contributions to its development. It also incorporates many Christian concepts.
Christians are perfectly free to argue that the Koran is false. Or wrong. Muslims will shrug and say the Bible is a good book but has been corrupted by human influence and is not reliable. That's a standing argument between them. But it's stupid to suggest that Islam is not BASED on Judeo-Christian values. It simply is.
3) It has been proven, exhaustively already, that Muslims CAN and DO function very well in free democratic societies. References are available for this upon request. The documentation is exhaustive.
--
All of this is why the Jihadwatch crowd need to be ashamed of themselves, by the way. What they really do is construct their own special version of Islam that almost no Muslims even recognize, and then declare that we cannot trust Muslims to share our values.
Worse, we now have Evangelical Christians arguing that all these false things about Islam are true, BECAUSE THE BIBLE TELLS THEM SO. The reasoning? All faiths besides Christianity are false--therefore, you can make any crap you want up about other faiths, and it must be true because the BIble condemns other faiths anyway. Is that ridiculously stupid logic? Yes it is, but somehow it makes sense to some people.
Oh and it is also ENTIRELY true that the Founders were NOT all Christians, and major Founders including George Washington himself stated that America was not founded to be a Christian nation.
You need to study more history, Kevin. I take the Founders at their words too. You apparently don't know what many of them said about this.
Well, I believe in nothing, so in order to follow the direction of my own logic, I should only shrug at whether the roots of this society are christian, judeo-christian, judeo-islamo-christian, or maybe all of the above with admixtures of Buddhismt, Scientologist, Latter Day Saints, or even the Church of Whatever. But since most of my neighbors are Christians, I shut up and refrain from disturbing them when they pray or pretend to do so because everyone else is doing it.
There's all kinds of solid meat served up by Walter Russell Meade in his 1999 essay on the Jacksonian tradition in America, especially in wartime.
Because when that time rolls around, I'm one of those folks. At that point I want to ambush the Redcoats; shoot dead Johnny Reb; run the Spics out of Cuba; circumcise Kaiser Bill with a broken piece of glass; incinerate all the Krauts in Hamburg and all the Nips in Tokyo; turn loose the massed quad .50s on the chinese and horth korean gooks; pat Gunny Hathcock on the back when he uses a single such Ma Duece to kill some NVA gook leader from a half-mile away; and turn into a corpse any raghead who puts his sorry ass within shooting distance of Humvee convoy on the road out of Baghdad.
But then when the shooting's done, and either they surrendered or we got tired of fighting them, I think it's a nice idea to distribute M&Ms or Girl Scout cookies among the fresh-faced kids of the former enemy population. Remember back in '48? (Probably not. You're all too fucking young, and only a few of you read history and take it seriously.)
But anyway, that year, Adolf Hitler's Krauts had beome Germans once again. Nasty old Joe Stalin blockaded them in Berlin, in an effort to starve them into surrender to communism. Our response? The middle-aged version of the same Americans of the 8th Air Force who had been bombing the living shit out of them just three years or so earlier, volunteered in large numbers to pilot almost continuous flights of war surplust C-47 transports into Berlin's airports, filled to the brim with food so the Berliners wouldn't starve, coal so they wouldn't freeze that winter, and even candy for their kids. So those kids would know the other side of the Jacksonian tradition of America.
Anyway, I hope all the islamic folks who come here, hopefully to remake their lives as Americans, do everything they can to make sure no al-Qaida conspiracy develops among any of them, maybe next time to take out the Sears Tower, or the US Congress or maybe the White House that Flight 93's hijacker pilot had targeted on 9/11, until one of the Jacksonian passengers said to everyone and no one:
"Let's Roll."
I hope that real strongly. Because next time somebody pulls another Pearl Harbor on the continental United States, the concentration camps of 1942 will be reconstructed. And that next time, we are going to turn real, Jacksonian American nasty on anybody we catch; guilty or not.
(If this were 1861, and I had been a Southron, I'd have been out there drawing a bead with my rifled musket on Billy Yank. Just as easily as I would have been targeting Johnny Reb from the Union lines if I'd been from north of the Mason-Dixon line. There's a little of the Jacksonian tradition in just about every American.)
Arnold, who exactly would go into those concentration camps?
Anyway, I hope all the islamic folks who come here, hopefully to remake their lives as Americans, do everything they can to make sure no al-Qaida conspiracy develops among any of them, maybe next time to take out the Sears Tower, or the US Congress or maybe the White House
i guess there is the answer.
good to see that ur ok with seeing ur country turn to nazi means.
Ali - acknowledging the likely inevitability of something is not condoning it, let alone being "OK" with it. If there is one thing that this country is, it is vengeful. And that vengeance may not always be precise. That is simply a fact.
Kevin , i am pointing out in a rational, mathematical fashion, the 1-to-1 correspndance between kev-thot and jihaadi-thot.
You are isomorphic.
How is that a personal attack?
I am saying that your approach to the text of the bible is EXACTLY the same as the hirgabi approach to the Qur'an.
You are both literalists, and refute analogy.
You are both intolerant and insist your religion is the sole exclusive truth.
Show me where there is a difference?
Ali - acknowledging the likely inevitability of something is not condoning it, let alone being "OK" with it. If there is one thing that this country is, it is vengeful. And that vengeance may not always be precise. That is simply a fact.
Concentration camps are only inevitable if the citizens condone it. That is very different than saying terrorism is only inevitable if Muslims condone it b/c I, as a Muslim in America, can't do anything to stop a cave dweller in Afghanistan. However, an American can always tell his government not to kill Americans.
my question is -- when this "inevitable" concentration camp occurs. will you call your congressman or senator? or will you say "well, it was inevitable."
boy am i glad that this country has a powerful left b/c if i had to rely on people like you for my life it would suck.
good to see that ur ok with seeing ur country turn to nazi means
What Arnold is describing is a vigilante/self defense response, an American tradition, from the Guardian Angels to Roosevelt to the founding fathers. It's not really comparable to Nazism, it's more unstructured. It leans in anarchy's direction but hopefully it won't ever get there.
..and 'concentration camps' describes the prisons the British used to house the IRA, or the camps used for the Japanese here during WWII.
an American can always tell his government not to kill Americans
After 9/11, more than 70% of Americans polled know that Saudi Arabia is not an ally, yet our government continues to call the sponsors of 9/11 friends. You overestimate the control we have over our government.
Ali, you're a bright enough guy to understand that if enough Americans ever come to consider Moslems in this country a serious threat to the public safety;
and if a major attack is made on the soil of this country by Moslems;
and if most Americans consider such an attack as a major act of war;
then Moslems in large numbers either will be expelled from this country;
or if that is administratively impossible or even downright inconvient, will be stored behind electrified barbed wire or whatever else they may use in whatever konzentrazionlagern or gulags they surely will hurredly build in the USA for that purpose.
And no, don't get me wrong. It has nothing to do with Islam. But probably everything to do with the normative american perception of the kinds of folks who do this or that in the name of what they think is Islam.
As Sherard correctly pointed out to you, we are vengeful in this country. Ask any old-time German or Jap who survived what we and our allies did to them in World War II.
Are such methods characteristic of nazis? Frankly, Ali, most Americans don't give a damn.
You ought to know by now that most folks' patience with democracy is sort of limited, at the best of times. When the guns start going off, they park that stuff back in the closet. For the "duration", as people used to say in World War II.
Dean's got his line in the sand. Most people I know have got one too, of a somewhat different kind.
Which is this. Somebody tries to kill me, my family, or anybody else in this country, especially on a large scale; the result is that we never rest until we have tracked these folks down and killed them. Sometimes, not just them but anybody who comes from the same background. And in a case like that, we shoot first and ask questions later.
Terrorism has been around as long as there have been historians to document it. Romans dealt with terrorism in several areas, including in the area now known as the middle east where raids and assassination attempts against Romans were fairly common.
The word "assassin" comes to us from a group of what we would now call "terrorists" who also conducted assassinations and other attacks because they were part of a group that was severely weaker militarily than their opponents.
When the modern nation-states began forming in the 17th century, terrorism as we view it now began to gain traction. By the 18th century the word "terrorism" was coined to describe actions in France during and following the French revolution It is interesting that the majority of "terrorism" in France at that time was actually state-sponsored. This triggered a sort of "terrorism arms race" on both sides of the French conflict and some truly nasty things happened, including inciting mobs to inflict terror on opponents.
The Barbary pirates of North Africa were terrorists, plain and simple. In fact most pirates were terrorists in another form. But the Barbary Pirates took it to a new level, to the point that Thomas Jefferson decided it was time to build a navy to combat them.
Terrorism became a major tactic used by anarchists across Europe in the nineteenth century, mostly through assassination though, the suicide bomber had not been "invented" yet.
By the time the KKK came along, terrorism had been refined to the point that it was supremely effective and hard to root out.
Don't take this as any sort of defense of the KKK, I just want to make sure that terrorism is understood to be a worldwide phenomenon, not just one more thing evil Americans "invented."
Mary, I too hope it doesn't get "there". My daddy didn't raise me to be a killer or the member of some modern equivalent of the white bedsheet brigade.
But when it comes to plain old self-defense, then as you well know, there is an entirely different standard of conduct which becomes normative, and stays that way. For the duration of the emergency.
And when push comes to shove, that is exactly what all our guns are there for.
Create a real anarchy in this country. Then see what we do to you as a result of all that.
So, Dean, again, do you condemn organizations or people like Tariq Ramadan, who are confirmed and certified by the United States government as supporters of terrorism?
and
After 9/11, more than 70% of Americans polled know that Saudi Arabia is not an ally, yet our government continues to call the sponsors of 9/11 friends. You overestimate the control we have over our government.
So which is it? Are we to accept what our government says as God's Truth, or are we to make up our own minds, based on our own interpretation of the facts? Or are we supposed to accept what you say without question?
If it ever happens, I suspect there might be some sort of an official sworn oath thing. Not too different from Dean’s line in the sand. Like “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.” And even if you say you’re with us, you probably ought to sleep with one eye open if you look kind of brown.
And again, not that I condone this, but I could see it happening. There are a lot of seriously stupid and misguided people in this country, and it only takes a small percentage to raise some serious hell (hmmm, kind of like Islam, maybe?).
And I suspect the crowd looking to strip away your rights will be made up about equally of Kos folks and LGF folks.
The only difference will be that the Kos folks will expect the government to do the dirty deed for them, but the LGF folks will gladly do it themselves.
Besides, who among you can say that ethnic profiling is an ineffective method of police work, in a time of actual or threatened terrorism carried out by totally ethically identifiable perpetrators?
Especially if I have to ride off at 39,000 ft altitude locked into the fucking airliner in question.
So which is it? Are we to accept what our government says as God's Truth, or are we to make up our own minds, based on our own interpretation of the facts?
If our government is willing to let Saudis into the country, they'll let anyone in. Their standards are extremely low. So, when they do keep someone like Ramadan out, there's got to be a very good reason.
When the government indicts someone, or when they declare that a person is an enemy combatant, that's a binding legal judgement, based on evidence that we may or may not be aware of.
In any case, I'm not asking Dean to make any kind of 'legal' judgement. I'm just asking if he believes that supporting or condoning groups that the US government judges to be terror supporters will help or hurt the war on terrorism. Put more simply, should we condone terrorists to stop terrorism? My answer would be no.
I can only speak for myself. I have never supported "groups that the US government judges to be terror supporters." And I only support Tariq Ramadan, an individual, insofar as he calls for reform in Muslim countries, such as his call to end corporal and capital punishments under Muslim law. Does this mean that if I am against terrorism I should be for stoning?
good to see that ur ok with seeing ur country turn to nazi means.
Concentration camps are not death camps, so it would be more accurate to characterize them as British Empire means, not NAZI means. Either way, I don't condone them. America nuked Japan. Twice. This is generally regarded as good policy, hereabouts, and I do condone it. Either way, since America can turn quite nasty, if sufficiently provoked, it is a bad idea to provoke America. Arnold is a conservative. We believe that the nature of human beings does not change, whether or not we condone the results. If sufficiently provoked, I predict we will have concentration camps, no matter how much I protest. If provoked even more, I predict I will go to jail or be killed if I protest.
I don't know if I will have the courage to protest, or if I will even have the courage not to rationalize my protests away.
Abolitionist history is replete with examples of leadership coming from devoutely Christian sects, groups and individuals. Quakers were the first to speak out to end slavery in England and America but many other examples are easily found, many, many evangelicals included.
Wilberforce, himself, was a devout Anglican as was John Newton, an ex-slave trader turned clergy man. Without the work of conscious-stricken dedicated Christians this abomination would have carried on far longer than it did, no doubt. Christians in both Europe and America saw an ill in their society and worked tirelessly to bring it to an end.
And I only support Tariq Ramadan, an individual, insofar as he calls for reform in Muslim countries, such as his call to end corporal and capital punishments under Muslim law. Does this mean that if I am against terrorism I should be for stoning?
Yassar Arafat called for peace and reform, yet he was allied with unsavory characters. Saudis say they oppose terrorism, yet they continue to contribute to known terrorist charities, like Al-Haramain.
Tariq Ramada, Abbas, the Muslim brotherhood, they're all playing the same game - basically, they claim to be moderates because they're not personally holding a gun to our heads - they're just supporting the people who are.
It's a very old con, very few people are falling for it anymore and it's kind of insulting that you make this argument.
It's a very old con, very few people are falling for it anymore and it's kind of insulting that you make this argument.
The anti-stoning argument? Sorry, but I am against stoning. Like it or not, Tariq Ramadan is listened to by many Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East. He is popular. I don't know much about him, but I would say that, given his popularity, it is significant that he has made a forceful argument against the hudud from an Islamic law perspective. That has an effect on Muslims, and for it I am glad.
In the face of all this sort of stuff, with people being pushed to declare their willingness to give members of a non-western religious faith a chance to prove that non-western beliefs do not necessarily mean anti-western beliefs, I am beginning to regret contributing to the stigma of religious bias.
Which means that I also regret some of the tirades I initiated on these pages specifically against your Roman Catholic Church. For that, I apologize without being asked. I recognize people honestly attempting to spread goodness when I see it, even if I cannot personally validate the premises of the faith that underlies their efforts.
---
Yes, I think I am a conservative, even with my sincere support of womens' right to control their own reproductive processes and the necessity for scientific use stem cells for vital medical research; both of which I am certain you and your church strongly disapprove.
And as a loyal American who has lived through two Pearl Harbor attacks -- one in 1941 in mid-Pacific ocean and the other 60 years later in the heart of New York and Washington -- I must all but cork myself to keep my rage from overflowing at what was attempted against us six years ago, and what I think may yet be coming our way the first time a chink is found in our national armor.
I would just as soon see hidden enemies of this country, who may be actively planning our destruction, tracked down and killed, if their guilt is certain. But that does not mean I want non-disloyal american Moslems put into concentration camps.
But I know too well the rage that seethes under the surface of the american national temperament. And I wish we could identify, target, and kill all the religious and secular leaders of the islamic world who purposely sow the hatred that trains young madrasa pupils to beoome suicide bombers, thus ultimately endangering the freedom and well-being of honest and loyal Moslems who have chosen to spend their lives in the West, among us.
In fact, I sincerely hope that freedom-loving Moslems of the West would be the first to volunteer to hunt down these scoundrels elsewhere in the world and help eliminate them and the terrorism they bring upon humankind.
Because I think that in the end, if those people are not defeated, broken, discredited and perhaps even killed in the East, and if they succeed in sneaking mass-murder teams into our strongholds of the West, then we shall indeed see the cessation of civil liberties for Moslems in the West. And perhaps for most of the rest of us as well.
I hope we are not compelled to war against the Moslems of the west. Perhaps in the long run there is much they could contribute to our american culture as they become part of it.
I am certain events shall arise from time to time that cause me to contradict these hopes, as if I had never written them. But hope springs eternal, even though I am no longer young.
The anti-stoning argument? Sorry, but I am against stoning.
I meant the 'X is moderate because he doesn't want to kill you right now' argument. It's so old, it's a cliche.
This argument is as transparent as the 'you wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge?' If you were visiting New York, and someone assumed that you were dumb enough to fall for it, wouldn't you be insulted?
Like it or not, Tariq Ramadan is listened to by many Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East. He is popular.
Sean: You're basically right. We have no fundamental disagreement.
Mary: I think Tariq Ramadan made the mistake of admitting on a form from the American government that he had once made the mistake of giving a few hundred dollars to a couple of groups that he later learned were terrorist groups. That's what he says. I see no reason not to accept his word on that. As I noted in Dean Esmay, Terrorist Supporter.
As opposed to the Kahanists, who utterly embrace terrorism, with multiple convictions and multiple examples.
Show me evidence that Ramadan made more than a dumb mistake, and was honest about it when the American government asked him to fill out the form, and I'll take it more seriously.
I ask again: do we want these people to be our friends, or do we want to grill them constantly on every possible mistake?
Dean Esmay has personally given money to terrorists. That is a fact. What do you think of me for that?
Trying to tease apart Christianity and the history of the West seems very problematic to me.
There seems to be two competing threads of thought here: one that the evolution towards democracy in the West is by and large independent of any Christian cultural underpinnings, and that democracies will emerge under other cultures and religions given enough time.
The other thread is that the modern democratic state is a inevitable and perhaps exclusive byproduct of Judeo-Christian culture.
My reading of history is that democracy was accelerated if not facilitated by the process of the Reformation, which basically redefined the relationship between man and God. Until Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis on the door of the Church in Wittenburg, Christianity had been ruled by religious hierarchy which by its nature was political and inevitably linked to the rule of nation-state. Luther made the case that the relationship between man and God was personal and not to be dictated by some artificial and man-made authority (i.e. the Catholic Church). In essence this emasculated the power of religious hierarchies.
This had to be a profoundly radical concept, which set the stage for individualism, the age of Enlightenment, and revolutionary ideals of the 18th century. People can argue that all of these dynamics had nothing to do with Christianity. I think that is silly. Clearly the various Protestant sects that evolved, each with their own interpretation of religion allowed diversity of political opinion and discourse to accelerate. It certainly promoted the political tensions which prompted pilgrims to risk their lives to seek asylum in a wilderness across the Atlantic Ocean.
With respect to other argument, that this process of individualism could only happen in the context of a Judeo-Christian heritage seems minimally, a premature conjecture.
Modern democracies are relatively new. The oldest democracy is little over two hundred years old, and most other democracies arrived within the span of the 20th century. Christianity might have have been the catalyst that facilitated Western civilization to arrive to the modern democratic state first, but I believe democracy could very well prove to be the product of rational thought in a culture that is unimpeded by ignorance or the heavy hand of oppressive dictatorships.
Show me evidence that Ramadan made more than a dumb mistake, and was honest about it when the American government asked him to fill out the form, and I'll take it more seriously.
I ask again: do we want these people to be our friends, or do we want to grill them constantly on every possible mistake?
Dean, I can list other evidence that shows that Ramadan's ties to terrorism are more extensive than giving to the widows and orphans fund, but you know that's a waste of my time.
Actually, I am an ex-Catholic who is now a member of the Church of Christ. I do believe that my new church has alot to learn from my old, and vice versa. I am hitting the Catholic angle harder here because Dean will have a harder time claiming that Catholics are outside mainstream Christianity. Church of Christ isn't either, but Dean seems to think so. It's certainly orders of magnitude smaller!
Okay, Wince. That's good to know. I can't say I know much about the particular brand of Protestantism reporesented by the Church of Christ. But I am certain as we all continue our intellectual voyages of discovery of self, we shall have much to learn from one another; us non-believers, all kinds of Christians and Jews, and now even Moslems such as Ali and Aziz.
Nevertheless, I certainly hope that the entirety of Dean's World posts and commentaries are dominated neither by anti-islamism nor its counterpart, anti-anti-islamism. There was a time I remember when Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communism becase first a scare, then a bore. Then anti-McCarthyism became as much a bore as McCarthyism had been.
Bit by bit in the past year or so, this anti-islamophobia stuff seems to have become the central ouevre of the intellectual life of Dean Esmay and of this blosite. I'm sure I am not the only one of his friends on this blogsite whou wish he would cease smearing his toast so heavily with this particular kind of jam. It dulls your tastebuds after a few nibbles. Even so. I'm not the kind of guy to offer up an excuse and walk away from his breakfast table.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
3.6.2007 6:12pm
Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.
The idea of freedom that we enjoy in the West comes right out of the Judeo-Christian faith. It's rooted in that. The road getting to it was certianly bumpy but an honest student of history cannot deny it.
So, what kind of freedom can we expect to come out of the Islamic faith? Can we even venture to guess? I think it would be unrealistic to expect it to resemble anything much like the freedom of the West.
The ideas that freedom and human rights are universal is a product of the Judeo-Christian fath. You cannot have one without the other, or so our Founding Father's believed. Are such lofty ideals core to the faith of Islam?
I'm not trying to make a point here or be smart. There's are just questions that occured to me while reading Dean conversation. Dean says the real problem is "lack of freedom." What kind of freedom? Islamic nations will never accept the freedom rooted in the Judeo-Christian philosophy. Is that the kind of freedom we're offering them? If so I think we're doomed to failure.
If there is any kind of freedom to be found in Islamic nations it must be a kind rooted in their faith.
So, I guess, the question is: Can Islam produce the kinds of freedoms that Judeo-Christianity has? If not, what will we do about it?
I think it's more that the idea of individual liberty was an idea whose time had come, and had advocates in the right place and right time. And when those advocates of freedom and individual liberty who are muslim and have power in the muslim world are in the right place and right time, then we'll see the same thing.
People who want to control other people will use whatever mechanism is available. Whether it is religious, military, governmental, or other force, it will be used by those who do not believe in letting other people decide what they want for themselves.
And I'm glad to see questioning of the idea that people must answer from some specific viewpoint. Are we not all human beings first and foremost?
This statement strikes me as kind of odd. The Founding Fathers say they did X because they believed Y but you, some 200+ years later, think you know why they actually did it? Could it not be you're doing, right now, the exact same thing you're accusing them of? That is, since you don't believe in Y, as they did, you must then attribute their X to something else as to lessen the influence of Y in their, and ultimately your, life?
This seems like a case of taking modern day values and projecting them backwards in time upon people who couldn't possible hold them. Evolutionists do the same thing with secularism. Our modern day idea of secularism couldn't possibly mean the same thing secularism meant in 1776 but that doesn't stop them anyway.
I prefer to let the Founders to speak for themselves on this matter rather than second guessing them 230 years later.
But it could come back.
I really get tired of the old saw that our freedoms are based on Christian principles. Read Locke and Hobbes. Read Jefferson and Franklin. Read Hamilton and Patrick Henry. The "Age of Enlightenment" was the rise of rationalism.
That's one of the key reasons the tagline on my blog is "Rational Conservatism."
If you want to argue that Christians had some influence, great. I don't disagree. But to suggest that freedom in the west, especially in the US is descendant from Christianity is vastly overstating things.
You are exactly isomorphic with them, a christian fundo mirror image of the islamic fundos.
Congratulations! You win the "how to use isomorphic correctly in a non-scientific statement" sweepstakes! Dean will get your prize to you.
Seriously, I'm impressed.
i have a response to you in a few minutes. its one of the first things i wrote on my old blog, but i want to revise it.
My God, can't you ever address me without using personal attacks? Is it something your genetic code simply will not allow you to do? Really, why do you even bother to write? I'd respond to one of your points but I'm afraid it would get lost in that acrid brain of your.
Ali,
I'd like to see it. Again, (as Matoko seemed to have completely missed) I'm not trying to attack Islam. It's a genuine concern.
I expanded more on my thoughts over at JihadWatch on the front page.
Matoko, you're not allowed to read it because you'd just miss the point anyway.
Does the Bible or Torah have a single verse outlawing slavery? If so, please show it to me.
Here are teh opinions of some noted Christian scholars and political leaders invoking Christinaity in defense of slavery:
Jefferson Davis:
Robert Dabney, 19th century Presbyterian pastor:
Pope Nicholas V, instituted hereditary enslavement of non-Christians (in other words, Christo-dhimmitude). See the Dum Diversas.
St. Thomas Aquinas believed that slavery was "morally justifiable", though to his credit not as a matter of natural law, only positive law.
J.F. Brennan published Josiah Priest's "Bible defense of slavery" in 1851.
for the record, I do not (and never will!) believe that Christianity is inherently amenable to slavery nor do I believe that these and countless other examples of experts, leaders, and authorities within Christendom who have justified and defended slavery using the Bible are somehow normative or indicative of any inherent tendency against freedom in the Christian faith.
But neither will I ever accept the total and utter bullshit that freedom is grounded in Judeo Christian values. Thats polemical revisionist pap.
good idea. Article 1, Section 2:
Article 4, section 2:
Bonus question for Kevin. What day in civil rights history does March 4th commemorate? (you know, yesterday...)
(and no, I have absolutely zero intention of posting this comment in any further form. I am not out to prove anything about Christianity, and making a post of this comment would just be a needless insult in my opinion.)
(and yes, I am fully aware that my attitudes and charitable view towards Christianity above are not reciprocated. That's irrelevant.)
Well, since you don't intended to post here again, but rather take pot shots and run, I don't know why I should bother but I will.
If you're as familiar with Torah as you seem to think you are then you'll know that, yes, the Bible didn't outlaw slavery but it did place strick guidelines about slavery. Simply, if you think about it for a quick second, slavery was the only option for a number of economic issues. Bankruptcy wasn't an option. So, you become endebted to an individual but you can't pay - then what? Slavery was the only option.
Additionally, laves were to be treat humanely. Abuse was not tolerated.
Then, there was the Year of Jubliee where anyone in debt was freed of the debt and allowed to go free.
So, no, the Bible didn't outlaw slavery but given the time it was written it couldn't.
Stop projecting modern day values upon the past. Especially when it's evident you never bothered reading what the Bible has to say about the subject.
Slaves were to be treated humanely and no one was ever a life-long slave.
How bout that.
I will go back to the point I tried to get across last week, i.e., that SOME Muslims are at war with the US.
I think everyone would agree that the US was founded on SOME Christian principles.
But that doesn’t make the US a Christian nation.
I agree with you. We're not a Christian nation. Not anymore. And there's a price to pay for that.
And I notice, once again, that any time ANYONE brings up bad Christian history, it's an "attack on Christianity" but bring up anything silly or stupid about Islam and it's just "rational criticism."
1) If freedom is a "judeo-christian invention," why is it that it took the Christian world over 1,800 years to develop free democratic countries? That's a rhetorical question. Obviously, anyone who looks at history KNOWS that Christians struggled mightily with themselves to accept these values, and they often went to war with each other over them.
Even during the American Revolution, it was mostly Christians fighting other Christians. That is just a fact. And the Christians who supported King George looked at the book of Romans, chapter 13, and the well-developed Christian concept of the Divine Right of Kings, to say that the revolutionaries were blasphemers. And when the rebels won, many Christians up and moved to Canada or went back to the UK, because they saw the American republic as a work of Satan.
Christians argued that slavery was Biblically sound. Christians founded the KKK, arguably the world's first terrorist organization. Christians spoke out heavily against giving women the vote, allowing them to choose careers, even against birth control (I won't go into abortion, PLEASE let's not go there).
The truth is that our modern concept of freedom IS modern, and rather radical. Did Christians have a whole lot to do with creating it? Yes, and they had a whole lot to do with fighting it too. Because these ideas are NOT fundamentally bible-based, and Christians had to struggle a long, long time to reconcile their faith with the kinds of freedoms we take for granted today. Indeed, most serious-minded Christians STILL struggle with it in many areas.
NONE of that is an "attack on Christianity" by the way, although I know some Christian somewhere who just had his PC sensibilities tweaked will whine that it is anyway.
2) Islam IS based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm really tired of people claiming it isn't. YES IT IS. It's a direct offshoot of Judaism, and many important Jewish scholars made major contributions to its development. It also incorporates many Christian concepts.
Christians are perfectly free to argue that the Koran is false. Or wrong. Muslims will shrug and say the Bible is a good book but has been corrupted by human influence and is not reliable. That's a standing argument between them. But it's stupid to suggest that Islam is not BASED on Judeo-Christian values. It simply is.
3) It has been proven, exhaustively already, that Muslims CAN and DO function very well in free democratic societies. References are available for this upon request. The documentation is exhaustive.
--
All of this is why the Jihadwatch crowd need to be ashamed of themselves, by the way. What they really do is construct their own special version of Islam that almost no Muslims even recognize, and then declare that we cannot trust Muslims to share our values.
Worse, we now have Evangelical Christians arguing that all these false things about Islam are true, BECAUSE THE BIBLE TELLS THEM SO. The reasoning? All faiths besides Christianity are false--therefore, you can make any crap you want up about other faiths, and it must be true because the BIble condemns other faiths anyway. Is that ridiculously stupid logic? Yes it is, but somehow it makes sense to some people.
You need to study more history, Kevin. I take the Founders at their words too. You apparently don't know what many of them said about this.
There's all kinds of solid meat served up by Walter Russell Meade in his 1999 essay on the Jacksonian tradition in America, especially in wartime.
Because when that time rolls around, I'm one of those folks. At that point I want to ambush the Redcoats; shoot dead Johnny Reb; run the Spics out of Cuba; circumcise Kaiser Bill with a broken piece of glass; incinerate all the Krauts in Hamburg and all the Nips in Tokyo; turn loose the massed quad .50s on the chinese and horth korean gooks; pat Gunny Hathcock on the back when he uses a single such Ma Duece to kill some NVA gook leader from a half-mile away; and turn into a corpse any raghead who puts his sorry ass within shooting distance of Humvee convoy on the road out of Baghdad.
But then when the shooting's done, and either they surrendered or we got tired of fighting them, I think it's a nice idea to distribute M&Ms or Girl Scout cookies among the fresh-faced kids of the former enemy population. Remember back in '48? (Probably not. You're all too fucking young, and only a few of you read history and take it seriously.)
But anyway, that year, Adolf Hitler's Krauts had beome Germans once again. Nasty old Joe Stalin blockaded them in Berlin, in an effort to starve them into surrender to communism. Our response? The middle-aged version of the same Americans of the 8th Air Force who had been bombing the living shit out of them just three years or so earlier, volunteered in large numbers to pilot almost continuous flights of war surplust C-47 transports into Berlin's airports, filled to the brim with food so the Berliners wouldn't starve, coal so they wouldn't freeze that winter, and even candy for their kids. So those kids would know the other side of the Jacksonian tradition of America.
Anyway, I hope all the islamic folks who come here, hopefully to remake their lives as Americans, do everything they can to make sure no al-Qaida conspiracy develops among any of them, maybe next time to take out the Sears Tower, or the US Congress or maybe the White House that Flight 93's hijacker pilot had targeted on 9/11, until one of the Jacksonian passengers said to everyone and no one:
"Let's Roll."
I hope that real strongly. Because next time somebody pulls another Pearl Harbor on the continental United States, the concentration camps of 1942 will be reconstructed. And that next time, we are going to turn real, Jacksonian American nasty on anybody we catch; guilty or not.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
i guess there is the answer.
good to see that ur ok with seeing ur country turn to nazi means.
Honestly, is it so much trouble to type the whole word? Even if you misspell it (as I often do)?
I swear everything you type after I see the "u r" or such things it all turns to "blah blah blah"
I just can't take your posts seriously, it's my fault I know but....
You are isomorphic.
How is that a personal attack?
I am saying that your approach to the text of the bible is EXACTLY the same as the hirgabi approach to the Qur'an.
You are both literalists, and refute analogy.
You are both intolerant and insist your religion is the sole exclusive truth.
Show me where there is a difference?
do i care?
Concentration camps are only inevitable if the citizens condone it. That is very different than saying terrorism is only inevitable if Muslims condone it b/c I, as a Muslim in America, can't do anything to stop a cave dweller in Afghanistan. However, an American can always tell his government not to kill Americans.
my question is -- when this "inevitable" concentration camp occurs. will you call your congressman or senator? or will you say "well, it was inevitable."
boy am i glad that this country has a powerful left b/c if i had to rely on people like you for my life it would suck.
im going to go to my kos diary now.
What Arnold is describing is a vigilante/self defense response, an American tradition, from the Guardian Angels to Roosevelt to the founding fathers. It's not really comparable to Nazism, it's more unstructured. It leans in anarchy's direction but hopefully it won't ever get there.
an American can always tell his government not to kill Americans
After 9/11, more than 70% of Americans polled know that Saudi Arabia is not an ally, yet our government continues to call the sponsors of 9/11 friends. You overestimate the control we have over our government.
and if a major attack is made on the soil of this country by Moslems;
and if most Americans consider such an attack as a major act of war;
then Moslems in large numbers either will be expelled from this country;
or if that is administratively impossible or even downright inconvient, will be stored behind electrified barbed wire or whatever else they may use in whatever konzentrazionlagern or gulags they surely will hurredly build in the USA for that purpose.
And no, don't get me wrong. It has nothing to do with Islam. But probably everything to do with the normative american perception of the kinds of folks who do this or that in the name of what they think is Islam.
As Sherard correctly pointed out to you, we are vengeful in this country. Ask any old-time German or Jap who survived what we and our allies did to them in World War II.
Are such methods characteristic of nazis? Frankly, Ali, most Americans don't give a damn.
You ought to know by now that most folks' patience with democracy is sort of limited, at the best of times. When the guns start going off, they park that stuff back in the closet. For the "duration", as people used to say in World War II.
Dean's got his line in the sand. Most people I know have got one too, of a somewhat different kind.
Which is this. Somebody tries to kill me, my family, or anybody else in this country, especially on a large scale; the result is that we never rest until we have tracked these folks down and killed them. Sometimes, not just them but anybody who comes from the same background. And in a case like that, we shoot first and ask questions later.
Welcome to America, buddy.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Terrorism has been around as long as there have been historians to document it. Romans dealt with terrorism in several areas, including in the area now known as the middle east where raids and assassination attempts against Romans were fairly common.
The word "assassin" comes to us from a group of what we would now call "terrorists" who also conducted assassinations and other attacks because they were part of a group that was severely weaker militarily than their opponents.
When the modern nation-states began forming in the 17th century, terrorism as we view it now began to gain traction. By the 18th century the word "terrorism" was coined to describe actions in France during and following the French revolution It is interesting that the majority of "terrorism" in France at that time was actually state-sponsored. This triggered a sort of "terrorism arms race" on both sides of the French conflict and some truly nasty things happened, including inciting mobs to inflict terror on opponents.
The Barbary pirates of North Africa were terrorists, plain and simple. In fact most pirates were terrorists in another form. But the Barbary Pirates took it to a new level, to the point that Thomas Jefferson decided it was time to build a navy to combat them.
Terrorism became a major tactic used by anarchists across Europe in the nineteenth century, mostly through assassination though, the suicide bomber had not been "invented" yet.
By the time the KKK came along, terrorism had been refined to the point that it was supremely effective and hard to root out.
Don't take this as any sort of defense of the KKK, I just want to make sure that terrorism is understood to be a worldwide phenomenon, not just one more thing evil Americans "invented."
But when it comes to plain old self-defense, then as you well know, there is an entirely different standard of conduct which becomes normative, and stays that way. For the duration of the emergency.
And when push comes to shove, that is exactly what all our guns are there for.
Create a real anarchy in this country. Then see what we do to you as a result of all that.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
and
So which is it? Are we to accept what our government says as God's Truth, or are we to make up our own minds, based on our own interpretation of the facts? Or are we supposed to accept what you say without question?
If it ever happens, I suspect there might be some sort of an official sworn oath thing. Not too different from Dean’s line in the sand. Like “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.” And even if you say you’re with us, you probably ought to sleep with one eye open if you look kind of brown.
And again, not that I condone this, but I could see it happening. There are a lot of seriously stupid and misguided people in this country, and it only takes a small percentage to raise some serious hell (hmmm, kind of like Islam, maybe?).
And I suspect the crowd looking to strip away your rights will be made up about equally of Kos folks and LGF folks.
The only difference will be that the Kos folks will expect the government to do the dirty deed for them, but the LGF folks will gladly do it themselves.
Especially if I have to ride off at 39,000 ft altitude locked into the fucking airliner in question.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
If our government is willing to let Saudis into the country, they'll let anyone in. Their standards are extremely low. So, when they do keep someone like Ramadan out, there's got to be a very good reason.
When the government indicts someone, or when they declare that a person is an enemy combatant, that's a binding legal judgement, based on evidence that we may or may not be aware of.
In any case, I'm not asking Dean to make any kind of 'legal' judgement. I'm just asking if he believes that supporting or condoning groups that the US government judges to be terror supporters will help or hurt the war on terrorism. Put more simply, should we condone terrorists to stop terrorism? My answer would be no.
Concentration camps are not death camps, so it would be more accurate to characterize them as British Empire means, not NAZI means. Either way, I don't condone them. America nuked Japan. Twice. This is generally regarded as good policy, hereabouts, and I do condone it. Either way, since America can turn quite nasty, if sufficiently provoked, it is a bad idea to provoke America. Arnold is a conservative. We believe that the nature of human beings does not change, whether or not we condone the results. If sufficiently provoked, I predict we will have concentration camps, no matter how much I protest. If provoked even more, I predict I will go to jail or be killed if I protest.
I don't know if I will have the courage to protest, or if I will even have the courage not to rationalize my protests away.
I'd rather not find out.
Yours,
Wince
Wilberforce, himself, was a devout Anglican as was John Newton, an ex-slave trader turned clergy man. Without the work of conscious-stricken dedicated Christians this abomination would have carried on far longer than it did, no doubt. Christians in both Europe and America saw an ill in their society and worked tirelessly to bring it to an end.
Yassar Arafat called for peace and reform, yet he was allied with unsavory characters. Saudis say they oppose terrorism, yet they continue to contribute to known terrorist charities, like Al-Haramain.
Tariq Ramada, Abbas, the Muslim brotherhood, they're all playing the same game - basically, they claim to be moderates because they're not personally holding a gun to our heads - they're just supporting the people who are.
It's a very old con, very few people are falling for it anymore and it's kind of insulting that you make this argument.
The anti-stoning argument? Sorry, but I am against stoning. Like it or not, Tariq Ramadan is listened to by many Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East. He is popular. I don't know much about him, but I would say that, given his popularity, it is significant that he has made a forceful argument against the hudud from an Islamic law perspective. That has an effect on Muslims, and for it I am glad.
I've got no idea what you just said. Keep in mind it doesn't make you look smart,or hip, just lazy.
Wasn't dissin' your argument just your delivery.
In the face of all this sort of stuff, with people being pushed to declare their willingness to give members of a non-western religious faith a chance to prove that non-western beliefs do not necessarily mean anti-western beliefs, I am beginning to regret contributing to the stigma of religious bias.
Which means that I also regret some of the tirades I initiated on these pages specifically against your Roman Catholic Church. For that, I apologize without being asked. I recognize people honestly attempting to spread goodness when I see it, even if I cannot personally validate the premises of the faith that underlies their efforts.
---
Yes, I think I am a conservative, even with my sincere support of womens' right to control their own reproductive processes and the necessity for scientific use stem cells for vital medical research; both of which I am certain you and your church strongly disapprove.
And as a loyal American who has lived through two Pearl Harbor attacks -- one in 1941 in mid-Pacific ocean and the other 60 years later in the heart of New York and Washington -- I must all but cork myself to keep my rage from overflowing at what was attempted against us six years ago, and what I think may yet be coming our way the first time a chink is found in our national armor.
I would just as soon see hidden enemies of this country, who may be actively planning our destruction, tracked down and killed, if their guilt is certain. But that does not mean I want non-disloyal american Moslems put into concentration camps.
But I know too well the rage that seethes under the surface of the american national temperament. And I wish we could identify, target, and kill all the religious and secular leaders of the islamic world who purposely sow the hatred that trains young madrasa pupils to beoome suicide bombers, thus ultimately endangering the freedom and well-being of honest and loyal Moslems who have chosen to spend their lives in the West, among us.
In fact, I sincerely hope that freedom-loving Moslems of the West would be the first to volunteer to hunt down these scoundrels elsewhere in the world and help eliminate them and the terrorism they bring upon humankind.
Because I think that in the end, if those people are not defeated, broken, discredited and perhaps even killed in the East, and if they succeed in sneaking mass-murder teams into our strongholds of the West, then we shall indeed see the cessation of civil liberties for Moslems in the West. And perhaps for most of the rest of us as well.
I hope we are not compelled to war against the Moslems of the west. Perhaps in the long run there is much they could contribute to our american culture as they become part of it.
I am certain events shall arise from time to time that cause me to contradict these hopes, as if I had never written them. But hope springs eternal, even though I am no longer young.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I meant the 'X is moderate because he doesn't want to kill you right now' argument. It's so old, it's a cliche.
This argument is as transparent as the 'you wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge?' If you were visiting New York, and someone assumed that you were dumb enough to fall for it, wouldn't you be insulted?
Like it or not, Tariq Ramadan is listened to by many Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East. He is popular.
Played well..
Do you know Fared Mohammed by any chance?
Mary: I think Tariq Ramadan made the mistake of admitting on a form from the American government that he had once made the mistake of giving a few hundred dollars to a couple of groups that he later learned were terrorist groups. That's what he says. I see no reason not to accept his word on that. As I noted in Dean Esmay, Terrorist Supporter.
As opposed to the Kahanists, who utterly embrace terrorism, with multiple convictions and multiple examples.
Show me evidence that Ramadan made more than a dumb mistake, and was honest about it when the American government asked him to fill out the form, and I'll take it more seriously.
I ask again: do we want these people to be our friends, or do we want to grill them constantly on every possible mistake?
Dean Esmay has personally given money to terrorists. That is a fact. What do you think of me for that?
F*CK THE REVOLUTION!
There seems to be two competing threads of thought here: one that the evolution towards democracy in the West is by and large independent of any Christian cultural underpinnings, and that democracies will emerge under other cultures and religions given enough time.
The other thread is that the modern democratic state is a inevitable and perhaps exclusive byproduct of Judeo-Christian culture.
My reading of history is that democracy was accelerated if not facilitated by the process of the Reformation, which basically redefined the relationship between man and God. Until Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis on the door of the Church in Wittenburg, Christianity had been ruled by religious hierarchy which by its nature was political and inevitably linked to the rule of nation-state. Luther made the case that the relationship between man and God was personal and not to be dictated by some artificial and man-made authority (i.e. the Catholic Church). In essence this emasculated the power of religious hierarchies.
This had to be a profoundly radical concept, which set the stage for individualism, the age of Enlightenment, and revolutionary ideals of the 18th century. People can argue that all of these dynamics had nothing to do with Christianity. I think that is silly. Clearly the various Protestant sects that evolved, each with their own interpretation of religion allowed diversity of political opinion and discourse to accelerate. It certainly promoted the political tensions which prompted pilgrims to risk their lives to seek asylum in a wilderness across the Atlantic Ocean.
With respect to other argument, that this process of individualism could only happen in the context of a Judeo-Christian heritage seems minimally, a premature conjecture.
Modern democracies are relatively new. The oldest democracy is little over two hundred years old, and most other democracies arrived within the span of the 20th century. Christianity might have have been the catalyst that facilitated Western civilization to arrive to the modern democratic state first, but I believe democracy could very well prove to be the product of rational thought in a culture that is unimpeded by ignorance or the heavy hand of oppressive dictatorships.
Of course Iraq could prove us all wrong.
I ask again: do we want these people to be our friends, or do we want to grill them constantly on every possible mistake?
Dean, I can list other evidence that shows that Ramadan's ties to terrorism are more extensive than giving to the widows and orphans fund, but you know that's a waste of my time.
Thanks for answering my question.
actually, you can't.
Actually, I am an ex-Catholic who is now a member of the Church of Christ. I do believe that my new church has alot to learn from my old, and vice versa. I am hitting the Catholic angle harder here because Dean will have a harder time claiming that Catholics are outside mainstream Christianity. Church of Christ isn't either, but Dean seems to think so. It's certainly orders of magnitude smaller!
Yours,
Wince
Nevertheless, I certainly hope that the entirety of Dean's World posts and commentaries are dominated neither by anti-islamism nor its counterpart, anti-anti-islamism. There was a time I remember when Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communism becase first a scare, then a bore. Then anti-McCarthyism became as much a bore as McCarthyism had been.
Bit by bit in the past year or so, this anti-islamophobia stuff seems to have become the central ouevre of the intellectual life of Dean Esmay and of this blosite. I'm sure I am not the only one of his friends on this blogsite whou wish he would cease smearing his toast so heavily with this particular kind of jam. It dulls your tastebuds after a few nibbles. Even so. I'm not the kind of guy to offer up an excuse and walk away from his breakfast table.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.