[extropy-chat] 'a process of non-thinking called faith' 2 (2)

[Jeff Davis]

On 11/26/06, Joseph Bloch <transhumanist at goldenfuture.net> wrote:
> With all due respect, Sam, I don't believe you understand the situation regarding the threat posed to the West from the Jihadists.

With all due respect Joseph I believe you have drunk deep of the
hysterically-exaggerated-threat Kool-Aid.  It's the oldest political
tool: find a bogeyman, hype him (or it) to apocalyptic/existential
threat, exploit the fear, and rake in the war profits
both fiscal and political.  With the Commies gone, Islam has been
nominated as the next bogeyman.

> While it is true that not all Muslims subscribe to the Jihadist ideology, the plain fact is that the expansionist Jihadist ideology is the norm within the broad Islamic community.

Just because you assert this, presumably because you believe it,
doesn't make it true.  Show us some links to some facts or something
purporting to be factually substantive.  Also, many(most?) religions
proselytize, seeking new adherents.  But that needs to be
distinguished from an ongoing program of active military aggression in
the service of theocratic imperialism.

> The vast majority of religious schools (which are just about the only schools in many Muslim nations) and mosques espouse that philosophy. It is not a fringe, or even a minority.

Islam has been on the defense, legitimately so, against western
aggression, domination and expansion for a long time.  The most recent
spasm of western aggression beginning in Nov of 1917 and continuing
with substantial ferocity to this day.   Self-defense is universally
viewed as legitimate across cultures.  It is disingenuous to
mischaracterise defense as offense and to then couple this untruth to
the common religious practice of evangelizing and declare Islam to be
on a global jihad to kill or convert all unbelievers.  Google up war
deaths of the twentieth century and determine for that period how many
westerners have been killed on western soil by invading armies of the
east and vice versa.  That should fairly well establish the degree to
which jihad has been, and remains, defensive in nature.

> The violent expansionist jihadist philosophy is mainstream Islam.

I disagree.  You'll have to provide facts in support of this
(otherwise unsubstantiated) assertion.

> We have our "friends" in Saudi Arabia, who have spent the last few decades spending their oil wealth building the infrastructure to propagate that interpretation of Islam, to thank.

As I understand it the wahabi sect has been a challenge for the House
of Saud.  They feed it to keep from being eaten, so they can keep
raking in the oil wealth, not because they support the wahabi
religious authoritarianism, asceticism, and militancy.  Thus oil
wealth and Saudi vulnerability combine to amplify wahabi extremism.
One could even make a case that it is the west through its addiction
to oil that creates Islamic militancy, just as its appetite for drugs
creates the drug trade.  The west doesn't NEED to drive and get high,
but  the underprivileged folks in Islamic countries NEED to eat.

>
> Comparisons to Christians (as others have made) are unsupportable. The Muslim world never underwent a Reformation as did Christianity, and is still mired in the mind-set of the Crusades which Christianity thankfully shook off several centuries ago. I will point out that Episcopalians and Baptists, while they do indeed share the vision of converting the world, stop short of exterminating those who, when presented with the choice, fail to choose to convert.
>
> Last time I looked, there weren't any Methodists flying planeloads of innocent people into buildings.

No, they prefer to drop planeloads of bombs etc on innocent people.
And don't tell me that they drop the bombs on the bad guys, and that
the innocent people -- collateral damage -- are killed by accident,
because it's pure political expediency and cowardice.  They don''t
want pay the price required to spare the innocent, to put soldiers on
the ground to root out the bad guys and only the bad guys.

>
> They are not just "a few Muslim leaders", although I will admit they are indeed "madmen." They are the mainstream of the leadership and educational institutions of the worldwide Muslim community, and they have turned the jihadist philosophy into the mainstream of Muslim jurisprudence.

Substitute "Judeo-Christian fundamentalist" for "Muslim" in the above
paragraph and you will have a perfect description of the Bush/neocon
crusade/jihad.

>
> I will be the first to admit that Christianity is not, as a rule, a friend of Transhumanist ideology. However, given a choice between Christianity and Islam, I will take the former any day of the week. At least they don't chop off the heads of people with whom they disagree.

Here we see the result of  "thinking" under the influence of the
Kool-Aid.  It leads you to the inherently contradictory notion that
sawing someone's head off with a knife is somehow fundamentally
different from blasting the same head off with a machine gun.

The real difference, the meaningful difference, is to be found in two
numbers: 2882 as of today, and ~655,000.  By this metric western
crusader "evil" outpaces Islamic jihadist "evil" by a factor of 227:1.
 You can quibble about the numbers, but my point is clear:  on the one
hand we have is the reality based community and on the other the
Kool-Aid based community.

-- 
Best, Jeff Davis

               "Everything's hard till you
                     know how to do it."
                              Ray Charles