[ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero

[Ben Zaiboc]

John K Clark wrote:

"I don't know how to solve the problem either but I do know how to make it worse, pretending there is no problem."



I can't argue that pretending there is no problem is useful, unless the problem was going to go away on its own in any case, but it might be useful to formulate exactly /what the problem is/.

I don't mean the general phenomenon of religious belief, which we won't see going away in any significant way this side of the singularity, and I don't mean the very few incidents of 'actual terrorism', such as that one single case in America (or two cases, perhaps I should say), and the handful of similar, but less spectacular ones in other countries.

Apart from in their own countries, Muslims have done surprisingly little physical damage, considering all the hysteria about it (I'm not trying to belittle the fact that thousands of people have been killed, mind).

So, what *is* the problem?  I think there's more than one problem, but if you separate out the problems of what goes on within Islamic countries from the problems that Islam causes in democratic ones, perhaps we can identify what might be done to at least defend against them.

So, apart from human rights abuses in their own countries, mental abuse, censorship, etc., the occasional act of vandalism and murder committed against and in other countries, and the possible threat of triggering a nuclear war, what problems does Islam pose to the civilised world, and are they any different in nature to the problems posed by, say, fundamentalist Christianity?

Ben Zaiboc