re: #867 Naso Tang

I swear. A lot of people do.

That you can’t make sense of what I said says more about you than me, and it is you who are getting aggressively indignant when you think you hear anything you don’t like. Why don’t you just stick to downdings?

No, it really doesn’t. Englightenment values doesn’t have the same meaning as ‘enlightened’ in the sense you used it. Europeans used to be a bunch of religious zealots until the Enlightenment happened and brave, brave, brave men gave their all to change their societies, one after another. And even then, there is still enough religious insanity brewing in the background to clearly show that we could slip into it again— the Dominionists are real.

The Muslim world needs an Enlightenment. It needs to go through the process that Christianity did. In many places, as CuriousLurker has noted, like the West, this has largely happened already; Muslims who identify first and foremost as Americans, for example.

There is nothing special about the Koran that makes it an evil religious book. Most religious books are basically the same, they all contain good and evil and justifications for terrible things and justifications for decent things.