OTOT
Hey t2, religions are a funny thing, especially when they are followed by alot of people. If you criticize them, either you get persecuted or people say you are racist or worse. If I said that Devil Worship is a bad religion, with bad consequences for society, no one would argue with me, primarily because not only is it self-evident, but Devil Worship doesn't have too many followers. Now when you try to criticise a religion with a huge following, you can die for it. For instance, if I was in the dark ages in Spain and I criticized Catholicism publicly, I would probably be writing my own death sentence.
However, luckily, I'm in the good ole' U S of A and I can say what I want whenever and wherever I want without fear of persecution. So when I say that Islam and the Quran has many ingredients that make for a bad religion and has very negative consequences for a freedom loving society, does that make me racist? You'd be naive if you thought that. But you call people who criticize the Islamic religion racist only because they have a billion followers and you are trying to appear politically correct.
When it comes to religion, I'm about as tolerant as they come. I grew up Catholic, but at the private schools I went to, we were encouraged to read about all sorts of religions. My interest in the great religions of the world carried over into college, where I continued my readings and studies. As a result, I believe there are a lot of truths in many of the different religions. In my readings, I kept noticing that two relgions moreso than others tended to verge on the fanatical and tended to mix up church with state. One was Judaism and one was Islam. However, the Jews have been historically persecuted for millenia, so you can understand and even excuse their fanaticism when it comes to their desire to stick together and protect themselves. Also, when they finally converged on Israel after the diaspora, they managed to reclaim the land from desert and built for themselves a democracy where women had more rights than the women in America at the time of it's founding. The hard work of the Jews despite incredible odds in the Middle East lifted up all the people in the region and spawned a community that has produced a great deal of wealth and increases in the standard of living that impacted the Arabs in the region as well.
Islam, on the other hand, is followed by a once great people who lived on a land that they failed to improve for 1,000 years prior to the Jews arrival. In the 1940s, the Arabs were living in conditions that had not changed for over a thousand years on land that was dead and swampy. Not only that, but the Arabs in the Middle East lived largely in a feudal state, with the effendis living large in Cairo and resorts throughout the Middle East. Progress towards nationalism by the Arabs of the Middle East largely occurred as a reaction to the great success the Jews had in the region and was spurred on by their joint hatred of the Jews. A common enemy and hatred does wonders for a divided people. But in many if not most of the countries the Arabs managed to build a country for themselves, it always turned out as a dictatorship/tyranny. The places where they practiced the religion most closely ended up being the most cruel regimes, because Sharia is a very uncompromising and medievel set of laws.
So am I being racist or am I just well versed in history and religion? When one is the object of criticism it is never a comfortable thing. But instead of denying the criticism, coming up with useless defenses, or blaming the West, the U.S. or the Jews for Islamic people's problems, perhaps they should be asking themselves why the they don't spend more time examining the internal causes of the extremism that finds such fertile ground in their culture?
So the bottom line for me is, believe whatever you want, no matter how wierd or extreme or logical and good. I nor anyone in the USA cares. But when your religion compels you to kill people or infringe on anyone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that is when I believe the religion needs to get a checkup and either modify itself or be modified by the freedom and peace loving people of the world. What's more if an entire culture seems to be in a state of stagnation such as the culture of the Arabs in the Middle East, perhaps it's not just the religion that is at fault. Perhaps, there is more wrong that needs to be examined. How is it that Israel can make for themselves a successful nation and industrious, productive society out of rock and desert, yet the Arab countries are poverty stricken, except for the few oil barrons at the top of their society? Instead of blaming everyone else, do something. Overthrow the Arab princes and claim for yourself a democracy. Lift yourselves out of the quagmire, because no one else will do it for you. And blaming America or Israel or any Western country and killing our innocents won't ever in a million years solve the Arabs' basic problems. Only the Arabs can solve their own problems. |
