To the post How We’ll Play the Game, I’d like to the following cautionary tale: a look a the French experience in dealing with their Muslim immigrants and citizens—now that Muslims make up about 12% of the French population. Here’s a second take on France and Sharia law.
And a bit of supporting evidence
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13 responses to “And a bit of supporting evidence”
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“They would be met at borders with guns,”
Well, our friends the Minutemen are working on that one …
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oh, oops. i didn’t actually say what i was thinking about the “Core concepts” thing. 😉 I guess it’s fairly self-explanatory, though.
just like there are good rules of thumb about infants, there will likely be rules of thumb about animism. toddlers, pantheonism (is that a word?). adolescence – violent monotheism. and so on, such that each religious “style” is accompanied by a set of rules & definitions that govern how it will be expected to look & feel.
that would fit your analogy of Christianity “growing up”. however… it also means there might be something “older”… ah, well, food for thought. back to work.
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well, you do have 20 years on me in that respect, and the young always think they know better than their elders. 😉
reading some of the other entries you’ve made, i’m considering another standpoint regarding “core concepts” for religions… something related to the maturity level of the society, such that there are parallels drawn between religious development of a society and psychological development of a person. i need to remember to look for information on that, and see if any researchers have looked into that formally.
the only other point i would make regarding Christ’s teachings is that he was bringing his word into a primarily Judean society. The tenets which he supported were built atop that structure, which DOES include the ideas of religious right & might in times of war.
If there is a point where it says “Ignore everything that came before”, then I’m blanking on it; it might be there, but I’m at work and only have a few more minutes of lunch to spare. I’ll definitely do some reading when I get home, though, and cross-check your blog for any insights you might have. 🙂
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eitje–I’ve been looking for a strict center to all religions for over thirty years, and looking hard. I have not found one. I’ve found religions that practiced tossing live infants into a furnace to feed the gods, and religions that practiced ripping the still-beating hearts out of awake, aware men, women and children to make the sun rise. Religions that sacrificed one young man every winter solstice to bring the spring. Several religions now that teach that women are chattel without the right of self-determination, who can be married in clusters to one man, and who have no rights except those rights that man gives them, including the right to keep breathing and the right to get into heaven.
Christianity was a crap religion between the 14th and 18th centuries in some parts of the world, where the Inquisition held sway. But to be true to its teachings is to refute the justice of the Inquisition. Christ did not teach torture and war.
Mohammed did, though.
Prophets are the centers of their religions, and there can be no true center because the prophets did not all teach the same things.
As for majorities, that’s something I’m still dealing with in the culture clinic. They happen for very good reasons, and they are, in general, good things for their cultures. They’re a survival mechanism. They can go bad. But the majority culture in the US, for example, is the one that has for a couple of centuries acted to protect the rights of the individual, and has grown in tolerance toward those different from it. If that were not the case, minorities would not still exist. They would be met at borders with guns, and in the streets with guns, and would be routed from their homes and slaughtered wholesale.
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“Fundamentalist Christians—well, exactly where are they the majority, and what institutional evils have they committed?”
I guess it depends on perspective of how big something has to be to be considered institutional. The rest of this post is primarily anecdotal, I’m afraid. 😉
I spent many years living in east Texas, where curse words in public would get you a firm look from many people, but racial slurs rarely batted an eye and sometimes drew similar commentary. A place where lynch mobs can still sometimes form – you may recall the story of a black man in Jasper, Texas, that was drug to death behind a truck. You probably don’t know bout Vidor, Texas, where the blacks were run out of town last century and have only just begun to return (as a town, 97% white. as a county, 90% white).
I suppose that’s not really the Fundamentalists doing damage directly, though – they’re not deciding to hate negros and jews, that’s just a social problem that’s being held in place around a hometown christian core. I’ll leave my commentary, though, because i think it’s something the churches could affect, if there was reasonable cause to do so. just another example of the effects of majorities.
Religious persecution *IS* something where there is active engagement from the Fundamentalists. I know several people that follow alternative religions. There is a continuous and active smear campaign in place against Wiccans, for example, such that every child knows that witches are always evil. Except for the good witch in Oz, of course.
By keeping up a constant barrage of anti-pagan pamphlets, bulletins, handbooks and other communications, they are actively engaging in the social extermination of another religious following.
But, again, the Fundamentalists are not alone in this kind of thing, and they’re hardly the worst of the world. These are only a few examples of how, as a comparative majority, Fundamentalist Christians are able to oppress their comparative minorities.
now, i’ve been awake for far too long today. i hope i’ve made sense. if not, please correct me. 🙂
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“From what you’ve written elsewhere, I think you’re better than that.”
i appreciate that. i suppose i was fairly off-the-cuff with that note. my intention was as follows.1) majorities exist, and they surpress minorities. if they didn’t, then there wouldn’t be words to define and seperate the two groups. strictly, BECAUSE the groups are well-defined enough around whatever ideology seperates them to create distinct entities that we can label “majority” and “minority”, there will be conflict between them. also, if a majority shifts to the ideology of the minority, then it loses its majority status – no matter its popular size.
2) there have been atrocities throughout history placed as offerings at the feet of religious creed. muslims certainly didn’t invent oppression or facism. i think that historically and currently, those acts that are most injurious to the world community as a whole can be precisely connected to the vices of the people in charge, while are copied, consumed and converted into a populist drive for results. look at the potential loss of liberties that has been invoked by the blind faith of the general American public in the last 5 years, and tell me that Bush wasn’t the symbolic Imam to all of the people voting their support for him.
I completely agree that there are horrible things being done on all sides of the world, to all kinds of people, and by all kinds of people. I completely agree that there are too many people actively avoiding thought and discussion about how those feelings, words, and actions can be abolished.
I do not agree that I am preaching moral relativism in any way – I feel that I am constrained by the limits of this text box and my time, so that I’m unable to express my true thoughts on the subject in anything more than the space provided here. Concisely, I am attempting to provide a view on current and historical trends. I do not agree with what I feel is an inaccurate assessment of one specific type of majority (a Muslim majority), and the effects of that one kind of majority on the minorities interacting with it.
In fact, I think the root of the problem is in segregation of “major” and “minor” factions, no matter what the topic. The simple act of calling any other group of people “majority” or “minority” only propogates the concept of “different” and “outside of us”. There *IS* a strict center, I believe, that all religions share. It’s the details that cause the wars.
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Eitje—No, you really can’t say that. At least, you can’t say it with any credibility. The “it’s all the same” line is a convenient bit of dogma of the Church of Moral Relativism that allows genuine criminality to be clumped into the same dirt pile as general assholery. The line, and the lie, are intended to stop debate and silence critical thought. Since the CMR is such a popular religion at the moment, there are an enormous number of people who are quoting the dogma and not doing a damn bit of thinking. From what you’ve written elsewhere, I think you’re better than that.
Maoist communists are responsible for the murders of hundreds of millions of people. Fundamentalist Christians—well, exactly where are they the majority, and what institutional evils have they committed? The abortion clinic bombings by a couple of dirtbags don’t count, I’m afraid, since they were roundly denounced by the entire Christian community, including almost all of the Fundamentalists. During the time of the Inquisition, Christianity was a theocracy like Islam, and like Islam, it was bad business. The difference is that Christianity grew up.
Not all majorities are the same, not all countries are the same, not all religions are the same, and each must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, based on the actions, not words, of citizens, followers, believers, or recruits.
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All of Europe is going to become a Muslim state if they don’t start reproducing soon. It is staggering to see birth rates in western countries vs. birth rates per Muslim women. Our only hope is to westernize Muslim nations. Send them an X-box now. 😉
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extremists from any religious branch have caused problems, and we can trace back the supression of various peoples in the name of religion as far as written history allows.
I think you can as easily say “where fundamentist christians are the majority…” or “where maoist communists are the majority…” or, really, “where there is a majority…”
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Anders—You’re absolutely right about that quote: “Wherever there are large numbers of Arabs, there is crime and violence, particularly against women.” It’s false, and an egregious piece of racism that I managed to miss in the reading. I apologize. Arabs are not and never have been a problem.
Muslim fascists, whose members come from all races, all parts of the world, and all walks of life, have been a problem since the inception of the religion. Wherever Muslims are the majority, the minority are oppressed. The oppression varies by type and degree, but it is ubiquitous.
However, I’ve pulled the article you questioned from my links, because the woman was flatly wrong. (I didn’t read the other articles she had there.) A better and more to-the-point article has replaced it.
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Intelligent speculation?! This woman says: “Wherever there are large numbers of Arabs, there is crime and violence, particularly against women.”
Golly. That tends to happen wherever large numbers of *people*, regardless of race, are concentrated. And somehow an unscientific Internet poll lends credence to the idea that France will adopt Sharia law.
The other two are more disturbing, especially the second item.
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Add to the fact that the UK, regarding these issues, has proven that they’re limper than a college frat boy’s yahoo. Need proof? A Muslim cop in the UK objected to his assignment: to guard London’s Israeli embassy. And was supported. Regardless of the fact that the guy carried a gun, and I don’t want him near the Israeli embassy to begin with, why the hell has he not lost his job? Police officers take an oath. If you’re not willing to fulfill that oath, you’re in the wrong line of work.
There’s also the fact that UK leaders feel the need to tell Muslim doctors that they must ignore the tenets of their faith in order to treat patients who, for example, have STDs. Or, say, a raging case of Judaism?
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With double digit unemployment why would Muslims want to usurp French society in the first place? I admit I did not read the whole article but France isn’t exavtly the land of milk and honey. If anything the promised land is here in Alberta with 0% residentual vacancy rate and an an unemployment rate around 3% and there are no signs of our economy slowing down anytime soon.
Now I’ve got nothing against the French or even Muslims for that matter. But what’s the big attraction for France? I think there are a lot of Muslims in England as well.
Oh well, what do I know? Sorry about the typos.
Jim
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