There is a joke that has been going round recently, which goes as follows:
Question: What is the difference between the Western world and the Islamic world?
Answer: The West has produced those who developed technology that helped to put a man on the moon, whereas Islam produces backward savages who bark at the moon.
It might be a tasteless joke, but it has some grim truths contained within it. The Western Judeao-Christian-secular world has created societies based around science and technology, democracy and the rule of law. Islam on the other hand struggles with basic concepts such as slavery is morally bad or, not treating women like chattels. Apart from oil and some minerals, which were not created or invented or even developed by Muslims, there is very little that the free world needs from the Islamic world. We really don’t need Islamic gyno-hatred, nor are we hankering after Shariah Law and as for religiously inspired violence, we can pass on that as well.
The free world doesn’t require that people shut off their critical faculties and live their lives according to the instructions of various bearded mental cases, we accept that some people will believe in the transcendent but that is their choice both to believe and to choose a religious path. The free world has at least made the attempt to not kill and to prohibit the killing of those who believe in a different interpretation of God, the Islamic world cannot even manage that sort of tolerance of differing belief, even though religious tolerance is essential for the creation of a civilised society.
The academics of the free world have had the space to examine closely the foundational canon of the West such as the Bible, the New Testament, the Torah and other religious books and the sky has not fallen in. Christians still believe in the divinity of Christ and don’t, anymore, desire the deaths of those who say otherwise or who say that Jesus (Yeshua ben Joseph) is just a Rabbi from the School of Hilel. Similarly Jews, who believe in ‘Torah ha shamiyim’, the Torah direct from God, do not want to kill other Jews for saying that the Torah was written by men who were inspired by God. We have hopefully moved beyond such killing in order to stamp out ideas. However, Islam has not moved very far along this path which encompasses both tolerance within religion and tolerance between religions. Sadly it is easy to imagine what would happen should an academic whether Muslim or non-Muslim, undertook the same sort of textual analysis that has been done to other holy books, to the Koran. It would not be long before such academics found themselves treated the same way as the writers and cartoonists of CharlieHebdo have been. There is no freedom, academic or otherwise, in Islam.
The free world has had revolutions, reformations, and a renaissance. These great events have helped to create the conditions for an explosion in knowledge and the industrial facilities to turn this knowledge into products and services. The Islamic world has not done this. It sat on minerals and other resources and often made little use of them until other more educated people recognised their potential. The Islamic world has not had a renaissance of knowledge nor has it reformed itself and although Islamic culture may often be revolting, it has never properly had a revolution against that which truly oppresses Muslims, and that dread oppressor is Islam itself. In free countries religion has often grown and evolved with the culture and the technology. The Reformation in Christianity would not have been as huge a thing as it was without the means to distribute, via printing, dissident religious ideas. The Jewish Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment from which Reform and all the other non-Orthodox strands of Judaism evolved) would not have sprung up in Europe without the cultural, social, political and economic changes that were brought about by both the French and the Industrial Revolutions, and by both an internal and external push towards secular, instead of purely religious, education. Judaism and Christianity have had their revolutions and some would say that the world is better for it.
Until Islam has the ‘revolution against the prophet’ and against the Shariah that they need to have in order to grow, Islam will always be backward when compared to many other secular or religious paths. It will always be a social, cultural and academic retardant, it will always use violence to stamp out heretical ideas (even when those ideas are good ones), it will always oppress. Unless Islam changes itself, or has change forced upon it, it will continue to be an ideology whose values are completely incompatible with the values of the free world.
There is nothing that Islam can give me or teach me, that I could possibly want ,or need, that would make my life, or the life of other humans, a bit better. But the actions of Islam’s followers and the content of the ideology, make me both despise it and wholeheartedly reject it. I do not wish to kill or harm Muslims, but every day I fervently wish that they would revolt against the religious ideology that both harms and imprisons them, and threatens us.
Those who are citizens of free countries have a choice, we can stand with the culture that put a man on the moon or we can stand with the culture that produces too many people who can only bark at the moon.
I’ve chosen to stand with the culture that lets me live free, and not the one that would have me in chains. What’s your choice?
From one perspective, one of the Judeo-Christian religions (allegedly) is counter-reforming the separation of church and state powers in the West. Back to the sixteenth century we go!
I think Sharia inoculates Islam against a reformation on those terms. As does their habit of drumming the Koran into their kids from the age of four, if necessary with the aid of a stick to the head. The products of that system are indoctrinated beyond redemption, or too concussed to argue. Our excuse for an education system can’t even immunise Muslim kids against thinking slavery is a great idea: witness the twitter chat over the Yezidi slaves.
Nope, the battle for Muslim minds is lost. Although the MSM and politicians will continue to wage it anyway, all the while we’ll be losing actual territory in the UK: streets, towns, cities.
I simply do not know what you are referring to in your first sentence.
Is it Judaism or Christianity?
In which state is this happening?
Please, don’t cloud your meaning with obscure references unless you are 100% confident that your readers will pick up on them.
Apologies, yes: ‘Abrahamic Faith’ would have been a better phrase. Although I’m pretty sure Islam is now lumped in under Judeo-Chrisitianity, when it suits the writer, at least.
There is a tendency for some to refer to the Big Three monotheistic religions as Abrahamic faiths. Although it is true that Muslims claim that they are descended from Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar his wife’s maidservant after a sort of early surrogacy arrangement there is no proof in that claim. Ishmael doesn’t get a good write up in the Torah being described as a ‘wild donkey of a man, whose hand is against every man’. I prefer to refer to the more civilised monotheistic religious paths as Judeo-Christianity because the moral code and the values of Islam appear to differ so greatly from that of Judaism and Christianity. Although Islam claims Abrahamic heritage, it doesn’t act much like the other two. It doesn’t feel the same to me at least.
“Salaam” and “Shalom” aren’t that far apart, linguistically. Islam itself claims judeo-christian heritage, but expresses nothing but contempt for its own roots.
Agree there that these words are not too hard apart. That’s very well put about how Islam claims a Judeo-Christian background but then despises the very roots it came from.