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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (45921)	5/12/2004 3:14:12 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

JotW, Re: .I am verrrry interested in your take on this... That may be short-lived. :) Basically, I am someone who has been brought up as a Christian, but for the past three decades, I have assiduously and willfully avoided any association whatsoever with organized religion. The greater I distance myself in time and study of organized religion, the greater the disdain for it I feel. I admire your willingness to take up the study of the Muslim faith, and some of the aspects of its organizing principles. I take exception with your view of the "vicegerency" of the faithful. Since I'm perpetually looking at the human condition through the lens of class struggle and power politics, I can assure you that my examination of the joint administrative roles of the caliphate and the ayatollah regime leave little-to-no doubt whatsoever about a profoundly hierarchical organization of most Muslim nations. I sense none of the "democracy" that you seem to have extrapolated from your studies. Rather, I see some rather rigidly organized sects with rather rigidly inherited leadership statuses determined at birth. Take the cases of al Sistani and Moqtada al Sadr, two of the Shiite leaders in Iraq who have been in the news. Both men are following in the footsteps of their fathers as leaders of their respective clans, tribes and groups of followers. Both are where they are due to hereditary rigidities, and not because of any democratically enacted mandate. Nor can they be considered merely "first among equals". They clearly have a superior status to their followers, and this defies the rather idealized version of reality presented with the vicegerent myth. Rather like the myth of equality in the U.S., where we all know that only certain men (and a tiny handful of women) of a certain class are ever going to be part of the "Establishment" and rule this nation. We won't have a black, Chinese, Hmong or Thai President of the United States during my lifetime. * In concluding, I'd like to say that while I admire your willingness to study comparative religions, I do not share an interest in the topic. I've completely satisfied myself that religion is a scheme used by clever manipulators among us to gain a measure of social control and privilege over a more-or-less befuddled and superstitious general population. I see this working the same in most societies. And I find the democracies of the EU to be among the most enlightened of societies. There the role of religion, particularly religion's almost perverse association with war, to be downplayed and considered a relic of a more barbaric era. On a personal level, I find that there is a truly dislikable trait of many Americans, particularly the religious. That is an insufferable excess of meddlesomeness and interventionist messianism that is truly dreadful. I advise you that absolutely no one in the Middle East or the Arab world has the least bit of interest in your perhaps well-intentioned but clearly mis-guided interest in correcting the flaws of Islam. You must realize that America and Americans have now lost all, ALL** credibility in the Muslim world. Abu Ghraib is a deathknell of George Bush's outrageously illegal, immoral and pompous Crusade. If you want to look for opportunities to be a do-gooder reformer, look no further than the Republican Party in the U.S. What a despicable wreck.