David Warren has another interesting religio-philosophical lecture on the Islamic world up on his site. Excerpt:
It is one thing to oppose or compare, for instance, Christianity to Islam, faith against faith. But in the post-modern West we too easily lose sight of what is really comparable, and instead oppose unrelated things. Christianity is, in itself, no more responsible for the post-Christian, vaguely pacifist nihilism that claims much of the West, than Islam is responsible for the psychopathic violence that is an expression of nihilism in the post-Muslim East.
This nihilism emerges, on each side respectively, not as an embodiment but as a caricature of the old faith. And just as we may joke, in the West, about the differences between Protestant atheists and Catholic atheists, I want to draw this distinction between post-Christian nihilists and post-Muslim nihilists. For I am convinced by my reading of the Muslim world today, that they, as we, have a true crisis of faith. And while the West may be a little ahead of the East on what I'd like to call the "unlearning curve", the East is catching up quickly.
davidwarrenonline.com |
