The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Problem with Islam...

The Problem with Islam...

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, October 7 2008, 20:43:27 (CEST)
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.....Is the same problem with Christianity, up to the 18th century: The blending of church and state.

When the Church was supreme and almost equal to Kings, there existed a Dark Age of stagnation, superstition, officially sanctioned violence towards unbelievers...censorship....stranglehold on science and education and a total lack of individual freedom and dignity. Granted that with freedom comes the chance to screw up badly...but that’s a price humanity pays for the number of free individuals who blaze trails of glory for the rest of us. Freedom is no guarantee of righteous behavior but then neither is abject slavery....no matter how ordered and docile the slaves.

That was the main reason ancient Greece defeated the Persian Empire. When push came to shove there was no contest between free men, with all their squabbles and irrationality against hordes of Persian near-slaves.

When you want to get somewhere high up and lofty you risk falling and breaking your neck....that doesn’t mean it’s better to remain in a cellar all your life safely chained.

Islam’s golden age came early on before the conquests were solidified. Up to the Mongol Invasion Muslim countries were the most civilized and advanced, even in science and philosophy than any in Europe. The priest, rabbi and mullah’s knack for explaining political or natural disasters as a visitation from God to remind people how far they have strayed from the righteous path is a mean and mealy-mouthed hoax, an added insult they must suffer. But it works. Muslim culture never recovered after that...except for briefly during the heyday of the Ottoman Empire. But soon religion took the same stranglehold of Muslim society as it still had on Christian.

The difference is that Christians fought against their religion...rebelled at its efforts to rule the human mind and set limits to human reason and discovery and originality. From then on, from the 14th century on, the Christian church began to lose ground and power while the Ulema gained it.

Islam is in terrible need of a Renaissance, a be-birth. Of course arch-conservatives will lose ground...but they have to. No society can improve by standing still...or looking backward to a golden age. It was golden then...it’s dust now.

Where Muslims, even when dirt poor, managed to give the world some of its most prominent thinkers, philosophers and scientists...Islam today is tied up tight like Christians once were...when they lived under the Church.

As a moral system it’s perfectly fine....even Christianity, aside from teaching cannibalism, is okay. But too many restrictions are placed on human development, especially in all the billions of ways that a church or mosque might find objectionable......and their greatest objection is that once people are allowed to live and think free, to pursue science and education and discovery...they become less susceptible to the fantastic yarns, miracles and dogma which were designed and intended for ignorant hordes....the problem is that even though no mullah or priest intends it, their religion is best suited to ignorant hordes and thus they have a strong aversion to truly educating people and especially not allowing them individual freedom with the potential to shatter all superstition.

Muslim countries won’t be able to hold their own against the West, each other and confront the problems they had even before the 20th century without getting religion out of politics. It isn’t Islam or Muhammad who is to blame....it’s the official religion and its rulers that are the problem...just as they were in Christianity. It isn’t Muhammad...it’s the government that uses Muhammad to mask its venality and opportunism...but this can never change unless there is a formal division between Ulema and state...to remove even the temptation.

In the West we face the same problem now only in reverse....the Church is trying to get back into politics...where we threw it out centuries ago. The Church wants to again decide education...science and even philosophy. The Church would love to have the position and power now that the Ulema has in Muslim countries. That this would be a tragedy can best be shown by pointing to our president Bush....these are the kinds of leaders we will get more of if we allow the Church to intrude itself once again. They’re the kind Islam already has enough of.

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