A few months back Dinesh D'Souza wrote an insightful column about how freedom was essential to genuine virtue, and thus the Islamic critique of American lack of morals had no force: it's easy to be virtuous in a society where your alternative is amputation or stoning. Now he has written another about how this point should become a centerpiece of the still-neglected ideological battle against radical Islam. From SFGate:
So far, the U.S. government's military response in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere has been reasonably effective against terrorism and its sponsors. But our intellectual response has been weak.This matters because ultimately it is not enough to shut down the al Qaeda training camps. We must also stop the "jihad factories," the mosques and educational institutions that are turning out tens of thousands of aspiring terrorists and suicide bombers. We cannot kill all these people. We have to change their minds.
Yet America is making few converts in the Muslim world.
The problem is that we have not effectively answered the strongest version of the Islamic critique of the United States. Usually Americans seek to defend their society by appealing to its shared principles. Thus our leaders remind us that America is a free society, or a prosperous society, or a diverse and pluralistic culture, or a nation that gives women the same rights as men. The most intelligent Islamic critics acknowledge all this, but they dismiss it as worthless triviality.
One of the leading theoreticians of Islamic fundamentalism was the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, who has been called "the brains behind bin Laden." Like the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, Qutb was a man who lived in the West and knew its ways. After studying in America, he wrote a book called "The America That I Saw" in which he argued that his familiarity with the United States was his basis for rejecting it.
Qutb, who died in 1966, wrote that he was shocked by the rampant prejudice of Americans, especially toward Arabs and Muslims. He professed outrage at the materialism and sexual promiscuity of American culture. ...
A second problem, Qutb wrote, is that the core principle of America is liberty -- the right to determine one's own destiny. This, he argued, is a highly defective principle because liberty can be used well or liberty can be used badly. ...
Let us concede at the outset that freedom will often be used badly in a free society. Freedom by definition includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom becomes the forum for the expression of human flaws and weaknesses. On this point, Qutb and his fundamentalist followers are quite correct.
But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. The millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy lives deserve our highest admiration because they have opted for the good when the good is not the only available option. Even amid the temptations that a rich and free society offers, they have remained on the straight path. Their virtue has special luster because it is freely chosen.
By contrast, the theocratic and authoritarian society that Islamic fundamentalists advocate undermines the possibility of virtue. If the supply of virtue is insufficient in free societies, it is almost nonexistent in Islamic societies because coerced virtues are not virtues at all.
Consider the woman in Afghanistan or Iran who is required to wear the veil. There is no real modesty in this because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue. It can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.
Once the reins of coercion are released, as they were for the Sept. 11 terrorists, the worst impulses of human nature break loose. Sure enough, the deeply religious terrorists spent their last days in gambling dens, bars and strip clubs, sampling the licentious lifestyle they were about to strike out against. In theocratic societies such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran today, the absence of freedom signals the absence of virtue.
This is the argument that Americans should make to people in the Islamic world. It is a mistake to presume that Muslims would be totally unreceptive to it. Islam, which has common roots with Judaism and Christianity, respects the autonomy of the individual soul. Salvation for Muslims, no less than for Jews and Christians, is based on the soul choosing freely to follow God.
We can make the case to Muslims that freedom is not a secular invention. Rather, freedom is a gift from God.
Moreover, it is not the case that Islamic fundamentalists care about virtue while we in the West care only about freedom. We, too, care about virtue. Like them, we seek the good society; but we disagree with the Islamic fundamentalists about the best means to achieve this goal.
In the Western view, freedom is the necessary precondition for virtue. Without freedom, there is no virtue.
Dinesh D'Souza, descended from two peoples who bore the brunt of the furor Islamicus (Portuguese and Indian) is to be commended for much of what he says. However, while generally a D'Souza fan and no admirer of Seiyyid Qutb (or of the Nasserite government that hanged him), there are points where I can agree with Qutb.
John Adams also said that American liberties were designed for a moral and religious people. By a studied refusal to admit that some things people do are indeed immoral and pretend that God can be ignored, present-day America's leadership is sawing off the branch on which it sits--at a point exactly midway between the trunk of the tree and the hip nearest the trunk. This is one reason why America's elite (all classical liberals in the sense that they see liberty as the chief and highest good) simply refuse to admit that radical Islamicism poses a danger. It's why our multi-culti era can be so shamelessly exploited by Muslims who have absolutely no respect for it.
Islamic "virtue" gives a legal/religious mandate to murder those who do not accept their belief system.
Islamic "virtue" gives a legal/religious mandate to male muslim promiscuity/debauchery.
Islamic "virtue" competely dehumanises women.
Islamic "virtue" sanctions lying.
I could continue, but suffice it to say that islamic "virtue" encompasses many, many things which are intrinsically evil. There is no right and wrong in islam, only licit and illicit acts, ie. if the koran and hadiths sanction an act then it is licit, regardless of how evil it is.
When muslims preach to us about their family "values", pause a minute and think about what these values actually encompass.
The difference between us is, if we engage in immoral behaviour, we know it's immoral, we know we're doing wrong. They engage in immoral behaviour but they believe it's moral, even when they know it's harmful to others.
D'Souza makes the point -- and why not? -- made at various times by one John Milton. "Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" from Paradise Lost, and most relevantly, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue" in his defense of free speech (i.e. print) against prior censorship, Areopagitica.
But is that enough? Is it really a case of persuading Muslims that "freedom" is a good idea, and that we are not so unrelievedly decadent as they seem to think, or their ideas of decadence and license are false?
Is this not still missing the point -- which is the inculcation of hatred toward Infidels, the unwillingness to permit the historical study of the origins of the Qur'an, the unwillingness to take a relaxed and unaggressive attitude toward non-Muslims, the insistence that -- despite all the evidence to the contrary -- that it would be a good thing, rather than a bad thing, if Islam were to cover the globe?
Talk about "democracy" and "freedom" in Islam is only a means to an end: which is to limit the power of Islam, because Islam itself causes its adherents to be malevolently, often murderously, disposed toward non-Muslims, and it is Islam itself, a system of total regulation, that inhibits skeptical inquiry.
Projects for displaying our freedoms, and our wonderfulness -- from sea to shining sea, are misplaced.
Instead of educating Muslims about the joys of freedom, it would be better to spend one's efforts educating non-Muslims about the real nature of Islam, and to keep it up so that Muslims, wherever they were, would not be able to carry on the kitman, taqiyya, sheer blague, as at present (helped by an army of non-Muslim apologists).
And that, in turn, would require some of those Muslims to begin not only to tell the truth to others, but to begin to analyze the nature of Islam as a belief-system, and the real, as opposed to the heavily, sanitized -- or even romanticized (as with the myths of Al-Andaluz), or even glorified (Caliph Haroun al-Raschid, all those translators desribed as "rescuing" the intellectual legacy of classical antiquity).
Education of non-Muslims about these matters is the best way to ensure that some Muslims, those who can think for themselves, will begin their own self-education in numbers large enough to cause something like hints and glints of self-criticism, and of limits placed on the practice of Islam.
Nothing else is possible. There is no Senior Editor in the sky who will red-pencil out passages from Qur'an, or throw out as spurious, a millennium after Bukhari and Muslim et al., some of the best-known, and most dangerous, of the hadith.
Could there ever have been a Muslim John Milton, saying the kinds of things he said in Eikon Basilike, or Areopagitica, or Paradise Lost? No? Why not?
I don´t agree that you can discuss with muslims in a rational way. Virtue for them is a quite different thing than for westerners. Even a lie for them is not a bad thing because in their sacred texts is allowed if certain conditions are met. For me it would be a miracle if islam changed. I don´t believe it at all.
"Qutb, who died in 1966, wrote that he was shocked by the rampant prejudice of Americans, especially toward Arabs and Muslims. He professed outrage at the materialism and sexual promiscuity of American culture. ..."
Jeez! if he thought the 1950's were bad....nothing will please these fascists.
Hugh wrote:
"Could there ever have been a Muslim John Milton, saying the kinds of things he said in Eikon Basilike, or Areopagitica, or Paradise Lost? No? Why not?"
I'm reminded of a quote by the late Stephen Jay Gould, who said that he was less concerned with the convolutions of Einstein's brain (anatomist's had long asserted that deep folds in the brain tissue indicated greater intelligence) than how many Einsteins lived and died in obscurity in 19th-century Western sweatshops and factories.
Einsteins and Miltons are born and made, but as Pasteur might have said, chance favors the prepared society.
My posting is not meant as a position but rather as a request for information or instruction.
DD says in the quoted text: "Islam, which has common roots with Judaism and Christianity, respects the autonomy of the individual soul. Salvation for Muslims, no less than for Jews and Christians, is based on the soul choosing freely to follow God."
But Geisler and Saleeb, _Answering Islam_, on p. 30 quote someone else saying: "'Orthodox Islam the absolute predestination of both good and evil . . . There was great discussion among the early Muslim theologians as to free will and predestination, but the free-will parties (al-qadariyya) were ultimately defeated.'" and then they expand on that for a page or two.
Trifkovic (_The Sword of the Prophet_) p. 62 says, "One consequence of Allah's absolute transcendence and lordship is the impossibility of human free will. Islam not only postulates the absolute predestination of all that we think, say and do, it would regard as heretical any suggesiton that ma has any choice in the proceedings; all has been divinely preordained and willed by Allah. . . . Sinners are as predestined as the virtuous believers and will suffer eternaly in Gehenna."
I am not much of a theologian at all, but I see no room here for a "soul choosing freely to follow God." Can anyone point me towards enlightenment about this apparently square circle?
Ooops. The Geisler & Saleeb quotation *should* have started "'Orthodox Islam teaches the absolute predestination . . . "
Islamic virtues?! Don't make me laugh!
Islam is the ONLY religion I know of where it's considered a greater sin to eat pork than it is to kill someone (suicide bombings included)
I'd like to know just how many libs in America would be willing to give up their precious sexual freedoms for Islam.
Remember, Islam condones the killing of homosexuals.
And they have done so, too.
Hypocrite Liberals.
If the idol of the libs, Monica Lewinsky, was Muslim, and discovered for her trysts with Clinton she would have been stoned to death under Sharia.
I accept rejection from an 'intellectual' who worships a one-rock-god: Allah.
All muslim troubles with the West revolve around their extreme ethnocentrism, period.
Islam is a conquest cult, pure and simple. Taking a muslim back to his 'scripture' reforms him into a ruthless homicidal fanatic utterly without remorse or mercy.
Without its conquest and supremacy creed Islam is but an empty shell of folklore and absurdities.
Democracy, science, rational philosophy are apostacies to Islam.
Islam is the natural agent of despotism. Look at its social structures -- and the nations that have been overtaken.
A couple of observations:
Pilgrim: I can't agree that the idea of predestination denies the possibility of virtue and choices. I really can't speak for Muslims on predestination, since I am not a Muslim myself, and have only a nodding acquaintance with their beliefs. But in the Augustinian and Calvinist theologies (which follow much of the Bible, including the words of Jesus Christ Himself), the eternal decree of God is the ultimate cause, the last layer of the onion to be peeled away. Further, in Calvinist theology, God chooses to work through means (including human) to accomplish His ends.
Further, the Calvinists, in virtually all Western countries where they became dominant, fostered systems of limited government that included the participation of ordinary people. This was because they denied that either kingship or ordination perfected a man; and affirmed that all, including those saved by God's grace, remain sinners justified only by Jesus' righteousness and sacrifice. Hence, the Reformed (Calvinist) churches fostered systems of ecclesiastical polity that were highly republican, with councils of ministers and elders deciding important issues in a collegial manner, and the laity electing their elders and ministers (extending a call).
I am not surprised that Muslims argued over predestination and free will. The existence God means that such a question must arise. Also, the ancient Greeks had a sense of how long chains of causation determine the actions that people take. That was the idea behind Greek tragedy.
If Muslims are predestinarian, the point where I part company with them is in their belief that there can be a further rvelation after God's own Word walked among us as a man--especially when it is abundantly clear that the compilers of the Qu'ran between Muhammad and the Caliph Usman clearly misunderstood those portions of Scripture on which they drew.
Kinda off topic
but I think we have lost our way.
Sent to me by my pastor. Something tells me the left will not like this! But this is who founded My Country.
Mr. Presidents, what do you think of the Bible?
"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."
- George Washington, 1st President
"I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen."
- John Adams, 2nd President
"That book, Sir, is the Rock upon which our republic rests."
"The bible is true. Upon that sacred Volume I rest my hope of eternal salvation through the merits of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."
- Andrew Jackson, 7th President
"In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for this Book we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it."
"Now let us treat the Bible fairly. If we had a witness of the stand whose general story was true, we would believe him even when he asserted the facts of which we have no other evidence. We ought to treat the Bible with equal fairness. I decided long ago that it was less difficult to believe that the Bible was what it claimed to be than to disbelieve it."
- Abraham Lincoln, 16th President
"My advice to Sunday Schools, no matter what their denomination, is: Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization, and to this must we look as our guide in the future."
- Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President
"The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book, and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation."
- William McKinley, 25th President
"A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President
"I am sorry for the men who do not read the Bible every day. I wonder why they deprive themselves of the strength and of the pleasure."
- Woodrow Wilson, 28th President
"The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country."
- Calvin Coolidge, 30th President
"The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life."
- Herbert Hoover, 31st President
"We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President
"The Bible is endorsed by the ages. Our civilization is built upon its words. In no other book is there such a collection of inspired wisdom, reality, and hope."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34thPresident
By David Guzik
Bar, thanks for the post. But, have you noticed, the selfsame people who try to appease Islamicist radicalism are the same who think Bush is dumb for reading the Bible and honoring Christ?
Kepha1, thanks for your reply. From it I can conclude that some Protestant Christians hold both doctrines, i.e., of predestination and of free will, and have limited, representational polities both for the church and for the community at large. I checked in a couple of non-academic reference works and concluded that the original Calvinist, viz., Calvin himself, maintained a very strong doctrine of predestination, denied free will, and established or attempted to establish a theocratic polity in Geneva. So for my immediate purposes I conclude that a doctrine of predestination in and of itself does not necessarily impel its believers to accept or reject a doctrine of free will. And that leads me back to the goal of my original posting, which is to learn not about Western Christianity but about Islam. Specifically I am trying to judge the validity and scope of DD's statement that "Islam, which has common roots with Judaism and Christianity, respects the autonomy of the individual soul. Salvation for Muslims, no less than for Jews and Christians, is based on the soul choosing freely to follow God." Can folks point me to references that would help enlighten me on whether, where, when and to what degree it is true that "salvation for Muslims, no less than for Jews and Christians, is based on the soul choosing freely to follow God," and how Islamic thinkers have discussed and resolved the tension between predestination and free will? Certainly I am interested not only in general Islam but also in varieties of Islam and in different eras. Such information could be useful in DD's rhetorical enterprise -- it would seem helpful to be able to cite respected Muslim teachers or communities who stress free will, rather than to work from a presumed and vague commonality among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Actually Pilgrim, it's quite simple. The debate between free will and predestination/determinism exist in all rational philosophies in some form. Most rational solutions have a 'weak' definition of both. A both-and rather than an either-or solution.
Islam isn't really interested. Salvation as Christians understand, it is an unearned free gift from God already paid for by the death of Christ. The challenge is to live in the power and grace of that salvation.
Islam offers a way of possibly pleasing Allah. It is a return to legalism, and a much more vicious legalism that that of the Old Testament.
The mistake of all forms of religion is to offer a way of climbing Jacob's ladder into heaven. OT religion was supposed to offer grace via the sacrificial system and the laws showed you how to live.(The battle between Jesus and the Pharisees was about this.)
Islam cannot guarantee salvation. Even Mohammed ( and, according to the Qu'ran, Jesus) must appear before Allah and be judged. There are no guarantees, because 'forgiveness' is dependent on individual performance.
In Christianity, forgiveness is dependent on God's Love for us. As I hope I have shown, albeit simplistically, there is no common ground.
In Islam, the debate is between; whether the soul might freely choose Islam and enter a race it might still lose or just disobey and lose anyway; or whether Allah makes the choices anyway. Both-and is no better than either-or. This level of uncertainity leads to superstition and magic; Djinns and wizards etc. It also leads to a paranoid attempt to prove that one is right and acceptable to Allah. On the one hand the Sufis and on the other hand the Islamic heart of violence.
In Christianity, the Hyper-Calvinists and the Hyper-Arminians both get it wrong. It's a bit like light. Is it waves or particles? Both-and runs counter to Greek logic but reality was not made by a Greek god! It was made by a God who seeks relationships of Love. When this informs philosophy and action it creates a very different view of the world.
to pilgrim: as i am not an islamic scholar and most of what i know comes from reading these webpages, robert spencer's book, and various other references, i would hesitate to speak about free will and predestination with regard to islamic thinking. however, i do have a few thoughts of my own i would like to share.
first off, i find it very interesting that in daniel 11:36, it says, "...for that that is determined shall be done." daniel 11 is indeed a timeline prophecy that begins in the medo-persian empire and ends with the defeat of the antichrist. it is quite clear that we are living approximately in the 39th and 40th verses right now. so, it seems to fly in the face of the free will argument that God would inspire his servant daniel to dictate a prophecy covering the entire future of the world and say in it that "that that is determined shall be done."
furthermore, the bible codes reveal prophecies that are being fulfilled in real time. how on earth could moses and other biblical writers encode information about the 1929 stock market crash, ww2, the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki, the assassination of j.f.k., 9/11 (naming the 19 hijackers by name), the capture of saddam hussein, and on and on and on? well, when we consider that God says he is the alpha and omega and knows the end from the beginning, we can clearly see that God knows each and every destiny. is this predestination? maybe. but would it be predestination to give up and jump off a building? what a tragic comedy that we could be brought onto a planet struggling in a good and evil cosmic battle just to grapple with the philosophical question of determinism vs. free will and then be predestined to commit suicide in a fit of depression. that wouldn't match the idea of a loving God. in fact, since the decision would be made subjectively, it could be argued that it was done vis-a-vis the free-will mechanism.
this gets even more exciting when we consider the revolution in understanding time that was begun by albert einstein. now we know and speculate that there are many more dimensions in the universe than the 3 in the visual world and that of time arrow. when you let your imagination get carried away, this could indeed explain the spiritual world, where there are angels from God and fallen angels of lucifer interacting with humanity and influencing the paths thereof. could this mortal coil indeed be a confinement to time arrow and the 3-dimensional world? once released from this mortal coil, will time travel be possible? will we be able to pass through walls? will we have the abilities necessary to physically go to the center of the sun and watch the fusion reactions? the possibilities are immense.
i speculate that God could say through daniel that that which is determined will be done since, indeed, God knows the end from the beginning. our subjective consciousness is free will. we are constrained by time arrow. it does not mean we are compelled to throw our lives away to hellfire in abject apathy due to the condition we humans find ourselves in. in this light, it would seem that extreme islam has taken the low road. escape from this mortal coil for them is through suicide homicide -- the false doctrine that they can earn their path to paradise through violating the 6th commandment. did not the snake say to eve, "ye shall not surely die"? and yet, eve is dead.
D'Souza suffers from an inability to separate libertarianism from theology. There is nothing in most Protestant creeds that forbids compelled virtue. Prohibition was pushed on Americans by authentic Bible-thumping Christians, in fact, Christians have always been at the forefront of compulsion in America giving their full support to laws against prostitution, drugs and gambling. All of these represent "compulsory virtue".
What D'Souza will not recognize is he is trying to offer a rational argument over why one faith is preferable to another, but that is impossible. Articles of faith are not justified rationally, if they were they would not be faith, they would be a rational philosophy. Sensing this D'Souza announces that freedom is a gift from God, thereby reducing human liberty to an article of faith.
Not satisfied with with trying to "out faith" the Muslims D'Souza further states that Muslims and Christians want the same kind of world and differ only in how that world should be attained. The Muslims want a world without freedom, after all, Islam means "peace through submission"! Freedom and submission are not compatible. What is D'Souza smoking?
If this argument sounds familiar then you may recognize it as being essentially the same as the argument between "peaceful, democratic socialists" and their more violent (and more consistent) brethren the Communists. The socialists continually chanted "We applaud your ends, we condemn your means" and found themselves murdered in droves in every country where the Communists took over.
Christians face the same fate as the socialists if they are as unwilling as the socialists were to challenge their own beliefs.
Islam's only strength is that it's validity cannot be denied by Christians without also denying the validity of faith as a means of knowledge. The madness of Islam can only be opposed with a rational philosophy for living in this world, not the theological and intellectual appeasement of D'Souza.
Here we go again. It's dispiriting to have people who know little about Christianity professing to be wise about it, but their doing so makes them juicy targets.
"D'Souza suffers from an inability to separate libertarianism from theology. There is nothing in most Protestant creeds that forbids compelled virtue.
NB:Prohibition was pushed on Americans by authentic Bible-thumping Christians,
Reality: Prohibition was approved en-masse by society and voted into law by elected representative and appointed Senators. That's a huge groundswell of support. And in case you don't know, Prohibition was to outlaw the public consumption of alcohol -- i.e. the saloon -- which was an epicenter (and still is today) of all sorts of other vices.
NB:"in fact, Christians have always been at the forefront of compulsion in America giving their full support to laws against prostitution, drugs and gambling. All of these represent "compulsory virtue".
Reality: It doesn't take a faith in Christ to understand the dangers that prostitution, gambling, or recreational drug use pose to the order of society. Now if you want to argue position (i.e. who was first in line to support such things), that's a meaningless endeavor. My point is that many people support these positions.
NB: Articles of faith are not justified rationally, if they were they would not be faith, they would be a rational philosophy.
Reality: Faith is supported by reason, and reason is supported by faith. Augustine had the best quote on this matter. NB can't seem to grasp that faith (as trust) is logical. I trust my mom. I trust my dad. I trust my car brakes. Etc. God doesn't say "throw out your brains", he says "your brains can only take you so far." And what they lead up to is trust in a higher intelligence, which is faith.
NB: Sensing this D'Souza announces that freedom is a gift from God, thereby reducing human liberty to an article of faith.
Reality: Our whole Constitution and government is based upon this realization. The whole American experience is founded upon the concepts that human beings have fundamental liberties, granted by God.
NB: Islam means "peace through submission"! Freedom and submission are not compatible. What is D'Souza smoking?
Reality: Freedom and submission are quite compatible. Remember that it was the 18th century Christians (by and large) who created a concept of limited government. Why? Because they understood that as man is fallen, so what does also tends towards corruption -- thus it must be limited to prevent misuse. They did this and it worked because the populace submitted to a higher authority. The dedication of the populace also kept the appetitite of the government in check.
NB: Christians face the same fate as the socialists if they are as unwilling as the socialists were to challenge their own beliefs.
Reality: I don't think you quite understand what you're saying here. Islam is not my belief as a Christian, and thus, I have no desire to implement a Sharia world. Christianity doesn't look down on self-defense, so I doubt many Christians will be "slaughtered in droves."
NB: Islam's only strength is that it's validity cannot be denied by Christians without also denying the validity of faith as a means of knowledge. The
Reality: You don't read JihadWatch much, do you? I won't fill up this space with a rebuttal, but suffice to say that many, many Christians (self included) have spent many, many words rebutting Islam on many, many grounds. Your statement above is simply silly.
~NMJ
Nomorejihad
My comments were so "silly" that you spent more words attacking them than I wrote.
If Christians persist in their biblical fantasies their children will worship Allah and then kill their parents.
No number of quotes from Augustine can change facts. The fact is that Christians feel morally inferior to Muslims because Christianity demands unselfish dedication to God and few western Christians are willing to pay that price. The feelings of guilt paralyze them and stop them from things like blowing up mosques where terrorists reside. They end up negotiating with animals like al-Sadr instead of killing them because they fear that their God will see more virtue in devout Muslim murderers than in hypocritical Christians.
Guilt is powerful and Christians are consumed with it.
Muslim terrorists die for their beliefs and kill the innocent at every opportunity yet D'Souza thinks he can win their hearts with prattlings about freedom being a gift from his Imaginary Friend. No one willing to blow themselves to pieces in order to kill you and gain entry into paradise can be reasoned with. Monsters like that must be killed.
The choice is reason or faith. Choose reason and live, choose faith and die.
to n.b.: regarding your statement, "The fact is that Christians feel morally inferior to Muslims..." i would imagine that if this is fact, there should be some empirical evidence.
i'm also confused as to your leap from discussing morality (the inferiority of christians to muslims in this case) to guilt.
also, reason is but one of three schools of basic philosophical thought -- theology and empiricism being the other two. if you believe reason superior to science and theology, more power to you. however, i would find an argument out of the school of reason that overturned the school of empiricism to be quite a feat -- perhaps the most important intellectual breakthrough of all time since it would overturn newton, einstein, and a litany of other empiricists. (it is true that the post-structuralists have attempted to do just that, yet they also wish to overturn reason. in essence, post-structuralism is the embrace of anti-truth and the jettisoning of truth itself.) also, reasoned arguments against the existence of God are exercises in atheism -- hardly the most successful school of thought as less than 10% of the world's population are atheists.
indeed, i speculate that as knowledge continues to increase, we will see a debalkanization of these three philosophical schools of thought, and they will become integrated as opposed to separate and antagonistic. that really has happened to rationalism and empiricism already; and theology is rising as is plainly evident by the increased attention such topics currently receive in politics and journalism. indeed, the jihad of islam is a stick coaxing the world's population to pay more attention to theological issues.
Maybe the reason why the West is facing an onslaught of radical Islamicism is because the modern West has insisted on seeing all theisms as equally false--and God is not mocked. It throws the word "fundamentalist" around without understanding a thing about it, and pretends its "sophisticated" when it codemns the Christian and Muslim kinds equally without examining the "foundations" of the two belief systems (idea: is Marxism-Leninsm the 'fundamentalism' of evolutionary scientific positivism?)
The mullahcracy of Iran is no theocracy. Theocracy is the rule of God (not of clerics or self-appointed charismatics). In fact, our whole Western system of civil liberties rests on the theocratic visions of the medieval and reformation periods, for which the rule of God implied the political supremacy of law--especially in the heirs of the Swiss-Rhenish-Puritan Reformation. If people bothered to read such people as Calvin, Beza, DuPlessis-Mornay, Althusius, Rutherford, Ponet, Goodman, Marnix van St. Aldegonde and other stalwarts of Calvinist political theory, they would see that this is indeed the case, that they taught that a godly political order posits the political supremacy of law rather than of the king or cleric. Also, as for concrete political institutions, Calvin himself held in Book IV of the _Institutes of the Christian Religion_ that a mixture of aristocracy and democracy represented the best form of civil government.
This is a far cry from the despotism of the Caliphate (which failed anyway); or the semi-discguised European fascism shared by the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba'ath.
Kepha1:
Your choice of Calvin was quite a poor one to distinguish Christianity from Islam. Calvin set himself up as the moral/legal dictator of Geneva. He controlled every aspect of the lives of Genevans down to the kinds of clothes they could wear.
Being true to his barbaric faith he invited Michael Servetus to a disputation and then charged Servetus with heresy (a typical example of Christian hospitality). As prosecutor, judge and jury Calvin had Servetus executed.
Calvin would have made a great Ayatollah.
Sorry, non-believer. I stand by the heritage of Calvinism in politics as a clearly different one from that which Islam--at least its radical manifestations--is likely to foster.
I challenge your asseretion on Calvin's position in Geneva. If he couldn't get his beloved idea of weekly communion past the City of Fathers of the town, he was a pretty poor excuse for a dictator.
Also, Calvin's position at the trial of Miguel Serveto--wanted and condemned virtually everywhere in Europe for his anti-Trinitarian theology--was that of expert witness. The affair of Servetus took place shortly after Calvin was recalled from Strasbourg to the Geneva that banished him because Calvin has expertly answered Cardinal Sadoleto's invitation to the Genevans to return to Rome. Again, Servetus was charged and condemned by the Genevan civil magistrates; and once he was condemned by the same body, Calvin tried in vain to substitute beheading for burning.
Keep in mind Servetus once tried to lure Calvin into France, where the latter would have been subject to arrest and execution as a heretic, too.
Nineteenth century Unitarians, who wrote most American schoolbooks at the time, enjoyed being able to paint a black legend about Calvin. I refer you to an article by Thomas Davis in _Church History_ of a few years back on the construction of this image of intolerance.
I thank all who posted responses to my notes. "Thought provoking" is a phrase we have deadened by overuse; but I was provoked as I haven't been in years to think hard. If my notes today don't mention something you said, please don't assume I wasn't listening or disagree. There were just too many threads that opened up.
Anyhow, here briefly are some of the thoughts I thunk:
1) My goal was and is limited to discussing a rhetorical (aka "ideological") tack proposed by DD to contribute to the goal of cutting off the breeding ground for violent jihadists. My goal does not include deciding or even debating the truth or wisdom of Islam, Calvinism, Unitarianism, atheism, whatever. For this goal, Muslim beliefs regarding (say) predestination are important only insofar as they affect the effectiveness of DD's proposed rhetorical approach.
2) The rhetorical target is neither monolithic nor homogeneous. So in stead of all-or-nothing judgments of the rhetorical argument perhaps a better question might be like -- "Where is this argument likely to have the most positive first-order effects? If it had those effects, what might the second-order effects be?" I don't think anything we might say is going to make the imams in charge of those schools decide some morning that America isn't such a great Satan after all. That's not a rhetorical battle we can win, at least not using conventional rhetorical means.
3) It seems that predestination is a second or third order influence. If folks threaten harm or offer rewards based on the other's future behavior, then these folks are acting in a free-will setting (whatever they may think of the long term, predestined inevitability of their victory, or whether or not they believe that their threat or promise was predestined). So I repeat my judgment that for these limited purposes I don't need to think about predestination.
4) Now here is where it gets sticky, when I try to answer where the DD argument will have its strongest positive influence. From the little I know, I judge that the DD argument won't positively influence traditionalist or conventional Muslims. Here is my thinking, expressed as a crude analogy that I invite you to improve. To the extent that Islam affirms and acts out the principle that salvation is attained through a known set of performable works, the good society is sort of a salvation factory or farm. It aims to produce works-doers. Freedom is not an organic part of this factory design and to the extent that it is relevant at all it is an instrumental good, not a final good. Freedom doesn't add any goodness in its own right. If a free society has some percentage of folks with admittedly more robust virtues but has an overwhelming non-salvation product, it is not a good salvation factory or farm. To paraphrase entirely out of context an American, Christian polemicist whom I respect: "A good society is one that makes it easy to be good. A bad society is one that makes it easy to be bad." I'm stumbling here, but let me stumble confusedly to the end of the thought. My notion is that the salvation-by-works thing means that the good behaviors *are* "real" because they are effective for salvation whether or not they are lived out in an environment that Westerners would describe as "unfree." And in fact the "unfree" society is a "good" society because it makes it easy to be good as defined this way (not only by government coercion but by social structures, etc.). The behaviors described as virtues that are real because they are lived out in personal freedom are actually unreal because they do not lead to salvation, however admirable they may be.
5) Another way to blunder towards the same point would be to say that if freedom is not an independent good (directly associated with God or core to non-theist moral philosophies) then a rhetorical argument that uses freedom to define what is or is not real will not convince.
6) Now I can try to extricate myself (or at least end the posting) by going back to my earlier question. If the DD argument won't appeal to traditionalist or conventional Islamic thinkers, to what part of the Muslim world might it appeal? My obvious answer would be that it might appeal to those who have to some degree come to see freedom as a primary good that is associated with God or godliness or that actually somehow contributes to salvation; or to those (like Ibn Warruq) who no longer deem salvation the overriding goal. And for each of the primary targets, where in the Muslim world would the secondary effects be? How about the Turks?
7) One might try to help the DD argument along by finding and heightening Islamic distinctions between real and mechanical performance of divinely specified actions and behaviors. I.e., go for the "real" vs. "unreal" distinction without pre-emptively specifying freedom as the determinant.
8) One might ask which folks outside the Muslim world but involved in the dispute might be open to the DD argument. The French? The Indians?
chw
Kepha1
Calvin murdered his opponents and you gave him a pass. Why? Because you agree with his position on the Trinity?
I rest my case against Christianity's intolerance and barbarism on your words. When they have the power, Christians kill without pause and without mercy. They excuse every barbaric act of other Christians and ignore the agony of Christianity's victims.
Truly a religion of love!
This is not a sarcastic or ironic message. It's what it says it is, that and no more.
Non Believer, it seems your goal is publicly to argue with Christians or publicly to prove Christianity is wrong and evil. Well, I can understand that. I will argue with you elsewhere online if you wish. This isn't a challenge, because neither of us will change our mind. (I am an Orthodox Christian.) And I won't promise to get angry or even irritated. But if you want to argue I'll argue with you. I can set up a forum for this purpose, or you can, or you can specify an existing forum. You can choose the membership of the forum. Since my offer is OFF TOPIC here, anyone who wants to say *anything* about it should *not* post here but rather send me email at mt1016b-tango@yahoo.com
-- Pilgrim