06-19-2006, 08:59 PM
There will not be any rollback of Sunni Islam in pakistan as these people will literally die first. There can only be a regeneration of an enlightened culture from within.
The Islamist ideals of a universal theology, one church, one creed and a populace bent on piety to the exclusion of secular thought, reason, science, plurality along with song, sex and joi de vivre is the obverse of the history of Christian Europe. <span style='color:red'>Except that Christianity was more efficient at killing-- Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Cathars, Hugenots, Australian Aboriginals, Native North- Meso- and South Americans ,Acadians, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Moors, atheists, heretics, homosexuals, witches...you get the idea.
Thus, the world has seen this before. The history of Christian Europe is frightening and heart-rending-that, in the name of God, millions of poor, illiterate, intimidated people were burned alive, mutilated, savaged, coerced into tithing their meagre earnings and kept in ignorance. But Europe took 2,000 years to produce a Descartes and a Thomas Jefferson. Not, I believe, because of reason's divine spark, but because of profit and a literal broadening of horizons as they too learnt how to navigate the seas (almost certainly partly from Indian navigators) and the age of commerce.
It seems to be a genetic code of religions that are revealed-the inevitable combat of the jealous gods to the last human. Much better to propitiate the dung beetle in my opinion.
The Christian church expected the world to be evil and ugly so it made the world evil and ugly- Nietzsche.
Does the West have any right to demand a rollback of the Islamist agenda?
</span>
The Islamist ideals of a universal theology, one church, one creed and a populace bent on piety to the exclusion of secular thought, reason, science, plurality along with song, sex and joi de vivre is the obverse of the history of Christian Europe. <span style='color:red'>Except that Christianity was more efficient at killing-- Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Cathars, Hugenots, Australian Aboriginals, Native North- Meso- and South Americans ,Acadians, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Moors, atheists, heretics, homosexuals, witches...you get the idea.
Thus, the world has seen this before. The history of Christian Europe is frightening and heart-rending-that, in the name of God, millions of poor, illiterate, intimidated people were burned alive, mutilated, savaged, coerced into tithing their meagre earnings and kept in ignorance. But Europe took 2,000 years to produce a Descartes and a Thomas Jefferson. Not, I believe, because of reason's divine spark, but because of profit and a literal broadening of horizons as they too learnt how to navigate the seas (almost certainly partly from Indian navigators) and the age of commerce.
It seems to be a genetic code of religions that are revealed-the inevitable combat of the jealous gods to the last human. Much better to propitiate the dung beetle in my opinion.
The Christian church expected the world to be evil and ugly so it made the world evil and ugly- Nietzsche.
Does the West have any right to demand a rollback of the Islamist agenda?
</span>