[extropy-chat] Islamic fundamentalism in USA

[Nicholas Anthony MacDonald]

"As a nice counter-point to Mike Lorrey's alarmist post about how bad 
the Islamic situation in Europe is last week the LA Weekly published an 
interesting piece on increasing allure of fundamentalist Islam to white 
and hispanic americans. The most interesting point is that these new 
converts are much more fundamentalist in their beliefs (no western 
music, movies etc) than than the vast majority of immigrants."

It would be interesting to see if such a trend starts in Europe as well.  Jean-Francois Revel almost insinuated such in the book he did with his son Mattieu Ricard, "The Monk and the Philosopher", as they discussed the growth of both Islam and Buddhism in Europe.  In his view, it seems like a legitimate possiblity that native Europeans, no longer inspired by a secular worldview, could turn to fundamentalist Islam to provide a new "wisdom tradition" and vision of meaning for their lives (a scary choice).  Revel, no fan of monotheism (his most famous work being "Without Marx or Jesus"), hopes that Europeans searching for spiritual nourishment turn to the much more benign Buddhism, even as he questions it's metaphysical truth.

-Nicholas MacDonald