[ExI] Moooon

[Dan]

Actually, no in both cases. Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism both started much earlier and were rapidly expanding during the Cold War. E.g., the Iranian Revolution was in 1979 -- about a decade before the Soviet Empire started to crumble. And the US government helped to foster it in Afghanistan during the 1980s to undermine the pro-Soviet regime there.
 
Christian fundamentalism in the West seems to have had its biggest boost from seeing the Soviets as godless and seeing godlessness as the key feature. E.g., "In God We Trust" was added to US coins and "under God" was added to the US "Pledge" of Allegiance in the 1950s -- at the start of the Cold War.
 
It's not as if 1989 or 1991 rolled around and all these people suddenly decided, "Let's adopt the most whacked out ideas of our religion we can and promulgate them now." They were doing this all along and it was already a widespread phenomenon.
 
Regards,
 
Dan
From: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>
To: Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com>; ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2011 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] Moooon


2011/7/21 Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com>

In my estimation, the Cold War was a big set back overall for human progress -- all the wasted resources and the overall fear mindset. (In my view, too, it helped to shift America more in a religious direction to fight those "godless commies.") I think we're still recovering from that.
Mmhhh. Fundamentalism, both of the christian and of the muslim flavour, actually exploded after the end of the Cold War. This does not mean to imply that the same was unconditionally a good thing, but WWI was not either, and yet certainly created an enormous push towards change, technological and not.

-- 
Stefano Vaj 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110722/028f3cc2/attachment.html>