Recent content by metacristi

Actually there are good reasons to think that the Renaissance would have happened without Islam, not to mention the Enlightenment. The claims you mention are largely unsubstantiated being essentially political in nature, a by product of the current climate of cultural relativism taken to the...

The British brought with them in India the positive elements of Enlightenment and Modernity, including rationality (even regarding religion), the ideas of individual rights, democracy etc, the main cause of the so called 19th century 'Renaissance' in India and rediscovery of its past is...

Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazny, Muhammad Ghauri and the religious motivated crimes / forced conversions of the Delhi Sultanate, Tamerlane, the enslavement and killing of Hindu dhimmis who could not pay the dhimma all over Islamic rule and so on tell you something? Even the Mughal period...

Of course if one holds that Islamism has very little in common with Islam (popular today even among some of those who draw attention about the dangers of political Islam) then one could find appealing that the oil found in fundamentalist held countries is enough to explain the observed facts...

There are other roots of course but without Islam it is unlikely that these people would have kept such an animosity toward the West, which actually helped them to become rich (just look at Japan and Germany). Islam is still the main culprit, for example in Iraq most of the insurgencies against...

The main problem is that the Islamic world has never been secular in the Western sense of this word, mainly due to Islam, again we deal with only a shallow penetration by modernity even today, that's why keeping the more secular dictators in power appears as the best policy to follow (as a side...

They have nonetheless a religious ideology which has created at least a 'tail' of violent practitioners all over the history of Islam (the whole Islamic world sometimes), even in periods of peace. Even today. And the perpetrators have, quite often, proved to be far from being poor. An ideology...

Who kill muslims here mate? Typical of those so called 'progressives' (regressive in fact) who have to invent 'fascists' with all costs in order to fuel their incurable delusion... http://www.danielpipes.org/18521/german-and-austrian-media-outrage-me

It has nothing to do with believing that muslims are little better than donkeys mate. The question was whether the muslims can bring into the mainstream the Enlightenment view that the unaided Human Reason can have precedence even over what is clearly written in the Revelation / Quran (needed by...

If we could somehow make the donkey follow Reason then it would be a good chance to convince him to drink. I am sure muslims fare much better in what Reason is concerned. Although I am rather pessimistic overall myself I would argue that this is a much better direction of research than...

Thinking that we can create safe and soundly a better society via protecting such belief systems like sharia Islam (as it is today) is the real delusion I would say, much bigger than accepting the mass immigration per se (which can of course be a problem even if people from very similar cultures...

I am more optimistic than you, although I agree that Islam is much more difficult to reform (due to its specific 'fabric' *). A key part of the solution is to attempt to transform it via exposing muslims to the view that unaided Human Reason has primacy over tradition and even revelation...

Well when the leader of the Labour Party, elected with the largest margin in recent history I understand, shows open support for the Islamic terrorist group Hamas (proscribed by the European court of Justice) I would say we have a big problem. Inadmissible to praise the release of Hamas...

I would restate what you say, too many so-s :) -We can perceive that which we did not know before and humans are fearful yet curious people -Religion is an early attempt to explain what we perceive / the Universe -Unfortunately before the rise of science most religions taught that the deep...

As a side note to my last post, Maimonides left us an account of mainstream Islamic philosophy during the Middle Ages: God is primarily Willpower not Reason in islam, he does not act via secondary causes like the laws of Nature, no point to try to find laws of nature (moreover it is blasphemy...