Remember they did not invent toilet paper in Arabia until 1968. Up until that time(and for quite a few still) they used sand and when it rained a little water. (sandybuns will make a guy cranky, maybe that is why bin Laddie is a tad rough. He is awful bony to have too many sand grains rubbin' in the pucker patch) That is why they only eat with one hand. They cooked over camel dung and ate lizards until say the mid 50's. Do not eat in middle eastern countries. Worse than Mexico for Dhow fever.
I don't think Arabia is that backward judicially. Mark Steyn has waned a little askance in the Post at their weekly decaps, but if Canada capitaled every one who offed their neighbour, we would have about 2 felon fries a day. Texas still does the big sleep for about 2 longhorn assassins a week.
But we have to face facts. Never mind Suleiman and the Andalusian empire. The Arabs are still on the cusp of the middle ages and receding. We went forward and gradually lost witch hunts and replaced them with electoral politics, with merely virtual torture.
The Muslims went backwards and replaced enlightenment with ever more reconstructionist attempts to reconcile the misinterpretation of the sublime with the incessant nagging of the revelations of the nature of phenomena.
When our religionists could not see the systematics of nature within their scriptural rigor, they bowed to the lack of necessity of religion to dominate or operate other systems. Galileo conquered the Galilean in his ken. (not really, as the two sets of knowledge never overlap. But we can seem to say so, as religion always attempted to have the final word, or the only word when the Pope's word was law and decree.)
We have successfully extricated religion, philosophy, law and science. We can live with imperfection without sin.
Hopelessly entangled, like a cave man in long chain polymer straight jacket, the Muslim thinker uses science like a Devil's hammer to smite the servants of the Devil. A child could tell him he is crazy and naive to look for god in atoms and stars. He needs a sophomore psychology course to let him know his religion does not conflict science, fatalism does not deny philosophy or science. Allah can coexist with a Universe that begins and ends; is random and systematically predictable at the same time.
All the Muslim has to do is admit that he is not the best interpreter of his own religion. I can straighten him entirely out. I can tell him how to keep peace with Mohammed, Allah, Mecca, any amount of prayer, hookers on fifth avenue, Immanuel Kant, Sartre, interest rates, and quantum theory. I can point out that following Mohammed and sticking asword up another's butt because another thinks trees have spirits is basically un-Mohammedan. It's all blindingly simple. All he has to do is understand that mathematics cannot allow any the incursion of any other reasoning that is not necessary to arrive at the answer, but that the answer cannot justify mathematics itself. Then he is free to paradoxically, not let religion and math interfere, although the other is the only thing that can speak of the one. Systems are not self justifying, yet they are complete. External systems cannot operate systems but they can within their system justify them.
I will give them 125 years. They will catch on.
EC<:-} |
