What is it that makes one society dangerous to another? Quite obviously (except to a cultural relativist), it's that one society's moral views allow it, or encourage it, to indulge in violence against the other. To say that someone is evil is another way of saying that he's a moral deviate.
If we leave aside the Christian mythos -- the mystical aspects of Christian belief -- and concentrate only on the ethos, the moral prescriptions and proscriptions, we find the highest and best moral system yet adopted by anyone anywhere. It's a refinement of the moral system of classical Judaism. It adds to the old Judaic defensive morality -- the "thou shalt nots" of the Commandments -- the positive requirement of charity toward the less fortunate.
I claim this to be the highest known morality for a simple reason: when it's practiced, it works. It results in a society at peace, whose members are clean, self-respecting, and self-reliant, and who do unto one another as they would have one another do unto them. Judeo-Christian morality produced Western Civilization, in particular the uniquely splendid civilization known as the United States of America.
I could wish nothing more for the whole world than that all its peoples learn and practice Christian morality, regardless of whether they adopt the Christian mystical beliefs.
By contrast to the Christian moral system, the dangerous cultures of the world find it acceptable and desirable to bring other peoples down by violence. Classical Islam, as formulated by Mohammed, did not countenance this; the prescription to convert the infidel by the sword and the notion of holy war were added to Islamic belief a couple of centuries after his death. But we're not facing classical Islam any more; we're facing the radical version, animated by an implacable hatred of all things foreign. There is no better demonstration of this than the many televised celebrations that occurred when word of the attack on the World Trade Center reached Iraq and the Palestinian settlements.
Two peoples, one with a morality that not only allows but takes joy in murderous violence against the other, face each other over an unbridgeable gulf. If we want an end to the violence, we must eradicate the moral system -- radical Islam -- that animates and sustains the opponent. Because this system is transmitted and reinforced at gunpoint by the surrounding culture, the culture itself must be atomized. The individuals that make up the culture must be scattered and taught the ethos of the sane civilizations: the Judeo-Christian ethos.
On this point, Ann Coulter has brilliantly and forthrightly faced the essence of the intercultural problem. And nothing anyone screams about "intolerance" or "fascism" will affect this calculation by one jot.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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