Fighting a ghost
I've been in a discussion on Individual-Sovereignty@yahoogroups.com about Islam. This used to be quite a sophisticated discussion group, but of late it's turned into an anti-jihadist echo chamber. No problem with that as such; being anti-jihadist is like being pro-motherhood and apple pie. The problem is linguistic: most of the people there have been anthropomorphizing Islam, attributing volition and moral agency to a set of ideas. Here are some examples of such anthropomorphizing and collectivist-think:
I would like to develop a list of major excesses by islam in the last 50 years.
How do you seperate the deeds from the religion that spawned them.
Yeah Bob, our religion. 90 percent of Americans call themselves Christian.
I see several problems with this:
1. It lets I-slammers (jihadists) off the hook for their actions, demeaning them in the process by implying they are robots controlled by a religion. An example of this would be the stoning of adulteresses. We disapprove of this in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, but the Jews have the same law, and where and when have you heard of a Jewish adulteress being stoned? I haven't, ever. It denies the possibility of reform in the Islamic world. If "Islam" is pulling the strings, how can the acted-upon influence the actor?
2. If "Islam" is out to get us, we must punish it, maybe kill it if there is no other way to make it stop what it is doing. Instead of fighting a group of people, we would be fighting a holy war against an idea. This is a bad idea for two reasons. First, because such a war is unwinnable, because the Islamic world is breeding faster than the West. Even with favorable kill ratios (abetted by wasteful techniques such as suicide bombing), that's a powerful element. Second, if we accept the notion that we can make physical war against an idea, then we can make war against ANY idea, and freedom is dead. The eventual result of such thinking is that the US will become a Christian Nation (in the sense that Saudi Arabia is a Muslim Nation).
From such seemingly minor errors in language use comes the death of Western civilization, and thus of Islamic civilization. Like two non-swimmers trying to save each other, we will pull each other down.
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