American Thinker Blog: What Would Jesus Do (with the Qur'an)?

[polaris93]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/04/what_would_jesus_do_with_the_q.html

% The nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. - Jones Qur'an burning redux.Good points, and worth reading whether you are a Christian or not. Frankly, I

Comments

[jordan179]

A religion/culture that encourages adults to throw tantrums of any kind, for any reason, is a serious social pathology in the same way that the mindset of people in a dysfunctional family is, and, in fact, has most of the salient characteristics of the latter. It has been pointed out, accurately enough, that Jews all constitute one vast extended family. Well, it should be noted that Islam is one vast dysfunctional extended family, including all the same horrors that dysfunctional families always do: wife-battering, child-battering, sexual child abuse, rape of members by members, and all the rest of it.

Very insightful, and very true.

Encouraging it to continue behaving in that way is not doing its adherents any favors, especially not the children of Muslims, who, like all children, grow up thinking that the way their family does things is normal. But in the case of dysfunctional families, that way is not normal, and certainly isn't healthy in any way. The same is true of numerous Muslim communities ...

Yes. One of the reasons it's not doing its adherents any favors is that it means that they are under no pressure to mature, and so they don't. Another really big reason it's not doing its adherents any favors is that, eventually, they are likely to encounter someone who won't give in -- and has both the power and inclination to respond to their tantrums with overwhelming retaliatory force. Then, Muslims who otherwise would merely have been humiliated wind up dead.

[polaris93]

Yep. I believe that Wafa Sultan has said that Islam is not doing her people any good -- hell, it's not doing anyone any good. It's possible that the Islamic doctrine of Occasionalism has also contributed to that culturally inculcated type of childishness, encouraging people to believe that they don't have to do anything on their own because nothing they do can affect the outcome of events, so they might as well do anything they please - or do nothing at all (which may also account for the fact that since the 12th century, there's been damn-all in the way of technological or scientific advance come out of Islam). That religion really isn't good for the people who follow it -- and certainly isn't doing non-Muslims any good!

[jordan179]

Yes ... the Muslim idea that everything happens because, and only because, of God's continually-expressed will is a perfect excuse to avoid considering the consequences of or taking responsibility for one's actions. If the question of success or failure is out of one's own hands, then one need not evaluate one's prior actions or engage in chains of logical reasoning to predict the outcomes of one's present or intended future actions: one merely prays and hopes that God will look favorably upon one's endeavors.

The irony is that the Arab Muslims weren't that fatalistic at the beginning. They became this fatalistic after being conquered by the Turks, and then their fatalism (because of the special place of Arabic in Muslim culture) infected the whole Muslim world. To this day, non-Arab Muslims aren't as fatalistic as Muslim Arabs, which is why the Arab world has become the backwater of the Muslim world, sustained only by the twin pillars of oil and pilgrimage.

[polaris93]

Which is a warning on what not to do if you want your civilization to remain functional and healthy: embracing fatalism is . . . fatal. Not to make a lousy pun, but still.

Tom Kratman discusses Occasionalism and related issues at length in his novel Caliphate, and does a very good job of it. I wish someone would do the same for the similarity of Islamic culture and that of dysfunctional families, because it really needs study and discussion.

# 2

[polaris93]

This may also explain, at least to some extent, why self-identified "liberals" (a fine old word; I really wish they'd stop using it in exactly the opposite way as its original definition) seem to sympathize so much with Islam and Islamists: they're survivers of egregious abuse as children, and are still in denial about it.

I'm serious about that; it's not a joke, and it could explain why so many of them seem mentally ill:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAyCdfOXvec)

I don't know what, if anything, could be done about that, but it's certainly an interesting "coincidence." (I'm going to add that to this post, as well -- it's a point that needs to be made.)