Posted on 11/08/2001 11:27:01 AM PST by ouroboros
He's right on target with this.
Nuke 'em while they pray!
I believe Aristotle said, "The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend." We need to keep this in mind. Ironically, one of Aristotle's most noted pupils was Alexander the Great, who happened to "visit" Afghanistan before.
To sum it up, I just don't expect the Northern Alliance to become our "good muslim" ally for a long period of time. We have all seen what islam is capable of becoming, and they are no exception.
That's the kicker. Especially in Israel.
By moving in here, converting, multiplying, and becoming a large fifth column.
it often replaced burdensome old bureaucratic governments with relatively undemanding regimes — and low taxes. As long as its authority was respected, Islamic rule was comparatively libertarian.
Is everything we know wrong? Where do I sign up?
"Taking a longer view, he saw Islam, though inferior in material power, as having a great advantage: its religious faith was still strong, while the West was losing its religion and consequently its morale. He thought it entirely possible that Islam would catch up technologically, while he doubted that the West would undergo a spiritual revival. "
It is precisely because they are trapped in their religious beliefs that they are technologically backwards. They were ahead of Europe for centuries, but turned their backs to science because of the questions it raised. Imagine if Gallileo & Co. had agreed with the church that the sun really did revolve around the Earth; this is much like what happened with Islam.
The Middle East will never advance (and will thus never really threaten the west) until it becomes more secular, not the other way around. In other words, the only way to 'beat' us is to become like us. But by the time that happens, there will no longer be a reason to attack.
His last point about the birth rate was laughable. Sub-Saharan Africa's birthrate is also far higher than the West's. Does this indicate that they are a threat to us as well?
But the reason the West has flourished technologically is not because it has abandoned religion in favor of secularism, but because its first universal religion had dogmatized the rationality of the universe and man's ability to know it. Skepticism is a constant companion of secularism, and a skeptic can hardly do science if he doubts his own ability to know anything outside himself.
JasonC has written a very interesting interpretation of history on this thread. For instance:
The paradox must be fully faced. The [rejected] Islamic philosophy that thought relatively highly of the powers of human reason and opposed skepticism, and which relied heavily on Aristotle (and some Platonic notions), was in the west incorporated into -church- doctrine, into Acquinas. Which the later forces were reacting -against-.The secularizing skeptics (like Hobbes and Hume) were -opposing- that doctrine in the Enlightenment, not endorsing it. They were effectively saying, scholastic philosophy cannot really know about such things, and its pretences that it does are vain. And the Protestants were also opposing it, though for somewhat different reasons. They argued that the church had put falliable human reasoning where it didn't belong and thus distorted scripture, and drew the conclusion that literalism was a safer policy to ensure orthodoxy.
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