[ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero

[John Clark]

On Aug 5, 2010, at 7:44 PM, Keith Henson wrote:

> I happen to be concerned about the environmental conditions that will
> drive fundamentalist Christianity to excesses in stupidity beyond those of Islam.

Wow, that would be very stupid indeed! Look, even in the Bible Belt (aka the Hookworm and Incest Belt) they don't stone to death women who's husbands accuse them of adultery even though the Bible says you should, instead they will engage in doublethink and say every single word of the Bible should be taken literally and the part about stoning in the Bible should be taken figuratively. In contrast Muslims are more logically consistent, they note similar hateful passages in their silly holy book and just say fine lets go for it. 

> It's happened. Read the Wikipedia page on pope Urban II to see why.

I don't care about pope Urban II, he died over 900 years ago. The good things Islam did 900 years ago don't impress me and the bad things Christianity did 900 years ago don't worry me. 

> Fundamentalist Christianity is having a very serious effect on the science education
> of the population.

You will get no argument from me on that, and it's true that fundamentalist Islam has little effect on science education in Islamic countries, but that's because there is virtually no science education in Islamic countries.

>  At least in the US, fundamentalist Islam has had relatively few consequences

That's because in the USA Islam is relatively rare, but that hasn't stopped them from opening over a hundred religious schools in America all teaching Islamic Creationism that is every bit as stupid as its Christian cousin.  

> But to answer your question, I don't have a sensible or acceptable course of action.
> Except to work on the engineering aspects.

That's the best I could come up with as well, and I think you would agree that at best that is a long term solution, so what do we do in the meantime? I don't think pretending that we don't see the elephant in the living room and all is right with Islam is the way to go.

  John K Clark  





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100806/5f709084/attachment.html>