Comment

ADL Condemns Remarks by Geert Wilders

485
haakondahl4/30/2009 5:47:02 pm PDT

re: #448 zombie

It seems to me, from pondering the comments on this thread, that there might in fact be two different religions: an extremist fundamentalist sharia-promoting Islam, and a less-observant secular-friendly moderate Islam. And that they’re not really the same religion after all.

How much simpler is it then, to allow that Islam wherever you find it is probably the same religion, but that some people insist that it comes with a lot of fascist garbage stuck to it. And that really, it’s those people, not the religion, providing the garbage?

When you look back at ancient texts and plays and such, you realize that human beings have been remarkably unchanged for thousands of years. I live in Japan, and now I work in Afghanistan. I have some familiarity with the things that change and the things that don’t change, although I confess I would be clueless to try to list them. It’s just a feeling I have that it’s no more chauvinistic to claim a difference in people across time than it would be to claim the same difference across space.
I don’t have much patience for learned folks who lecture in ponderous tones about how different cultures experience time differently (often backing this hogwash up with incredibly demeaning explanations about how “they are an agricultural people, so to them, time is of a circular nature, like the seasons”…), and so forth. As if we don’t have more farmland in America than most countries have land, period.
It all just strikes me as “Sudden Expert Syndrome”, wherein whatever probably true fact lying close by is pressed into service to explain an otherwise ludicrous claim. And it always seems to rest upon the audience having no direct experience with the topic at hand.