And is that lack of knowledge due to the government savagely restricting information availability?
Fellow by the name of Alexander Bain, in 1843, built a neato device that would reproduce writing via a pen connected to wire-connected pendulums. Elisha Grey (that Bell fellow beat him to the patent office to lock in the telephone by a not very large margin) patented a facsimile transmission system.
But the answer’s nope, at the time of reading I did not know that, nor the bit about the gunpowder-fueled engine (very neat). The above I learned in a handful of minutes of net use, which led me to some pretty interesting pages.
Notice that we live in a culture where that kind of thing can be done. Others don’t.
I’ve no idea where omniscience enters into it. One of the prime things any repressive regime must do is restrict the availability of information–I don’t think they do that just because they’ll get bored otherwise, they do so because the less restricted it is, the more imperiled the ongoing existence of that regime is. If an outside agency can force that state of affairs wider open, it can only help.
As it happens, I do hold the christian fundamentalists at least partly responsible for McVeigh’s actions. However, you still haven’t read what I posted. Destroy the THEOCRACIES. Religion does have a place in the world, much as I personally deplore it. The time for cultural relativism is gone. If your culture advocates the destruction of others by violent means, there’s no room for it on the planet.
And yes, I’m aware of the contradiction in the above, but it’s a place to start.
Did you actually read my first post? I didn’t say anything about bombing anybody. We need to destroy their culture by assimilating it. Adapt and overcome.
I think one of the reasons for the Taliban’s success is that many people in Afghanistan have no idea what the Koran really says. They simply memorize a bunch of foreign phrases without even knowing what it means. The Taliban can claim to be acting in accordance with Allah’s will because no one else can decide on their own what Allah’s will really is.
I won’t say that Western culture would be superior to Islamic culture. I will say that the Taliban have perverted Islamic culture towards evil ends, and that they have used ignorance to do so.
Um, folks, Islamic culture of today is the foremost parent of terrorism worldwide. Terrorist organizations that either spawn from political unrest in primarily Islamic countries or are fundamentalist Islamic in nature make up at least plurality of active terrorist groups worldwide.
Take a look at the first drop down list on this page. Those are just the major players. You will see that many, if not most, of those groups are Islamic fundamentalist or are associated with Islamic countries.
Countries which are primarily Islamic in nature are the vast majority of governments now known to actively support terrorism, with the exceptions of Cuba and North Korea.
Let me say that again, for effect: most governments which sponsor terrorism are of “Islamic culture.” The other two are Communist dictatorships.
Islam has a problem. Islamic culture has a problem. Islamic culture is the root of the largest chunk of terrorist activity. To fight terrorist activity, we must also recognize and actively combat the thriving minority component of Islamic culture that condones and even encourages this fell form of political and religious warfare.
I do not disagree that terrorist segments are a minority of Islamic culture. I do not disagree that most Muslims are peaceful, gentle people. I do not disagree that Islamic countries are vastly different from one another. I do not disagree that my understanding of Islam worldwide is imperfect. That does not detract at all from the fact that Islam foments this vile form of warfare better than any other culture or culture component in the world.
Quibble with the definition if you will, but Allah is on the lips of the largest number of people who would kill in this fashion which we Americans find so difficult to understand. It is folly to lie to ourselves and pretend otherwise.
What other religions, IYHO, no longer have the right to exist?
Sadly, instead of a renewed interest in books such as “Brave New World,” and “Animal Farm,” and the film “THX ####” (sorry, I can’t remember the number in the film’s title), what we are already faced with is the mass media replaying World War II “newsreels” loaded with jingoistic and racist comments.
I’m beginning to wonder if this planet is even worth saving anymore.
Islam is not the problem, intolerance of alien ideas is.(See, Monty, I’m better now.)Islam is not some monolithic force for evil anymore than Christianity is. We are dealing with the Islamic equivalent of the Montana Militia, people who are afraid of secularization and who believe that their holy land, the Hijaz area of Saudi Arabia, is being polluted by the presence of unbelievers.
They hate the US for being, as they see it, an oppressor who supports Israel, a foreign regime forced upon the people who had been living in Palestine for centuries, who have now been uprooted and disposessed of their land by the usurpers. The terrorists who devastated New York and the Pentagon are haters and bigots. They represent Islam as much as Falwell, Robertson, and Phelps do the panoply of Christianity.
If you want to destroy Islamic culture, let’s dynamite the Taj Mahal, built by the Moghul emperors of India. Let’s melt down Isfahan brasswork and rip up the silks of Tashkent. Let’s pour out all the Shiraz wine (from Iran, you know),tea and coffee. Throw out pita bread, yogurt, baklava, and falafel. Don’t forget to stop using algebra, algorithms, the number zero, and most of the names of stars, like Algol, Mizar, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka.
Woah, Monty! Don’t get me wrong, here. All I’m saying is that there is a direct correlation between this style of political warfare and Islam. If you want to point out that there is a direct correlation between Christianity and brutal face-to-face fighting by organized military units, you won’t hear a peep out of me.
This is a problem. Islam itself may be the key to the solution. How, I don’t know, but the best way to quell this form of behavior is probably from within.
I do not support the destruction of Islam, but don’t you dare dismiss the obvious, glaring problem by saying Islam is blameless. It is not.
Gobear, I think you are on to something there. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why the Falwells and the Robertsons aren’t out there encouraging similar things. My first suggestion would be that minority positions are accorded more respect here than they are over there. Like I said, I don’t have any decent solutions, but we damn well know where the problem lies, and we know what the primary motivation of many of these terrorist groups is.
Actually, they are, but we live in a secular society where religious crackpots have little power. I think you are unfairly blaming Islam for problems that should be attributed to societal and political causes. There are nations with large Muslim populations, like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where Islamic fundamentalism is virtually nonexistent.
Afghanistan is a small, nountainous nation where most people’s first alliance is to their tribe, not their nation, to which they feel little or no connection. Because the Qu’ran can only be considered authoritative when read in the original 7th century Arabic, the local population only know what their mullahs, themselves no scholars, have told them. The situation is similar to that of the pre-Reformation European peasant, who could not read the Bible for himself and so only knew what his priest, who was likely himself to be uneducated, told him, and we know how tolerant Europe was in the Middle Ages.
The country has always been poor, and the devastation wrought by the Russians and then the civil conflict have left the Afghans with little to believe in except a radical mix of hillfolk tradition and fundamentalist teachings by poorly educated mullahs.
The Afghans would be in the same situation if they were Christian, Druze, or First Church of Quetzalcoatl (Reformed).
Well, I can see we’re not going to agree here, so I’m going to bow out of this. My personal opinion is that the religion causes the societal and political problems, by attempting to control politics, the law, and national destiny.
As I said, I think it is part of the problem, and part of the solution, too.
I’m not calling for a destruction of the Islamic religion. Just the culture that supports and encourages people to take these sort of tactics. Poor, ignorant and oppressed is no way for anybody to live, no matter what their religion. We’ve seen what resisting western cultural imperialism causes, we’ve seen what people that adapt to it can become.
The Vatican doesn’t need to be assimilated, because they are already a core part of western culture. Are you going to keep bringing up irrelevancies, or are you going to discuss the point of the question?
Agreed.
It is ironic to me that as far as cultures go. the largest threat is to mainstream Islam, which up to now, has been for the most part “the silent majority”. It certainly is evident to me that martyrdom with reward of attendance by virgins and attractive young boys in paradise is embraced and applauded by the street “masses” in several prominent Islamic countries, and yet mainstream Islam is largely silent in opposition, preferring to direct it’s attention towards non-muslims and denying these interpretations of paradise as being non-Islamic.
What I am hearing from prominent Muslims however here in Canada is that we should get at the root cause of the problem and support all implementation of UN resolutions re Israel and pay heed to the Durban conference with respect to issues of Israel.
It is incomprensible to me at the moment to reconcile this immediate reaction with the rest of our society. If American policy is the cause of Islamic terrorism. then statements like these at this time can certainly provide “justification” for the domestic anti-Islamic response which is such an embarassment for both Canada and America.
Let us not quibble about this. Islamic fundamentalism with martyrdom is our enemy. It is the enemy of Islam. Know your enemy!
Ya know, Sofa, I was thinking exactly along these same lines over the past week. Sometime in the past 100-300 years, Christianity came to recognize that war and barbarism in the name of religion is utterly unacceptable. Violence in the name of Christianity still occurs (see assassinations of abortion providers, etc.), but violence now is more likely to hurt the Christian terrorists’ cause rather than help.
Getting Christianity to that point was a brutally slow and painful process. Christianity has a lot to atone for, if you think in those terms, be it the Crusades, the slaughter of native Americans, the Inquisition, whathaveyou.
Islam hasn’t reached that point in its evolution, which makes sense - Christianity had a 700-year head start. The overwhelming majority of Muslims, I am quite sure, condemn violence, but there still is an undercurrent of justification - the “underlying causes” we are hearing so much about. Islam has to mature still.
The question is whether such a maturation can be rushed or forced. The U.S. was able to force such a change in Japan, with the elimination of the militarist element of state-sponsored Shinto after WWII. But that was a very special case - if only because it was the religion of one country, and the U.S. took total control of that country for a period of years. I don’t force is a possible answer for a religion as vast as Islam.
But are there ways the maturation process can be accelerated?
