WHAT MUSLIMS NEED

I discuss here the often stated premise: “What the Arab world needs is an Enlightenment.”

Why? Well, all the usual suspects tell us that the Enlightenment “worked” in Europe and freed them from the iron grip of Catholicism, Calvinism, and the other religious isms that had controlled thinking and politics for centuries. It got rid of the inherited aristocracies that had dominated for almost a thousand years. So “The Problem” in the Middle East is religion. And if they would get Enlightened like the EU and American Left, why they would be just like us: Religion Free.

Religion is bad because people blindly follow it and religious states are by nature tyrannical; just like the university states we have in this country today. Therefore, mankind--—whoopsie, I meant humankind; bad boy Howard---must be free FROM religion as well as hereditary aristocracy. However, Certain Dictatorships, Communist States, and tribal thugs seem to be OK without any Enlightening at all, as long as they are so poor they will obey all the same usual suspects and not get too snotty. China is getting snotty but God is dead over there so they will come around, eventually.

Most of us who didn’t major or minor in philosophy don’t have a clue about the Enlightenment. Many of us who actually took the courses were given the usual Leftist Marxist propaganda that we spent at least a decade un-learning if we cared at all. "I think, therefore I am" really means that when you really think, what you think about is the exploited masses of peasants and workers being crushed by the forces of Capitalism. After you are taught to think like that, you are clearly am.

So we got Enlightened. Some of us acted in the musical version of Das Kapital or danced in one of Engel’s ballets in college; we all hum a little Voltaire and rock to some Rousseau now and then just to stay hip at the right parties; and we all know people who have smoked a little Locke and ended up in jail thank you very much.

To be “enlightened” is to free from religion. We gotta somehow make those Islamic MF’s get enlighted. Toss that shit-for-brains God and the Bible into the sewer. But getting people to enlighten themselves isn't easy. Even though it seems easy when you don't think about it.

The Enlightenment didn’t just happen. In 18th century England, due to the Magna Carta back in twelve something or other, just before Aquinas started blabbering, the Brits were well on their way to a democratic government long before the Frenchies started Enlightening one another.

The seed of the European Enlightenment had to be planted first and that seed was planted when Aristotle—--the man, not the wine---was rediscovered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1300's, and for a while all the smart guys were using Aristotelian logic exclusively to defend the faith. But that didn’t last long, because just as Aristotle basically brought down the Gods of Greece, the smart guys used Aristotle to bring down the world as they knew it. I have no idea why the smart guys aren’t blabbering that what Islam needs is an Alexander the Great since Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor but I’m not one of the smart guys. It was by thinking stuff not in the course that earned me an incomplete in “Marx and Socialist Pornography" a popular course way back when.

The “seed” of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas led to “Humanists,” who were a bunch of guys who thought that God as then interpreted by clergy was not really a vengeful God. They thought that human life was to be glorified and loved by God. Their aim was to restore to Christianity the creative glories of Greece and Rome. Original sin didn’t exist. So everybody was getting jabbed by humanism before being KO’d by the Enlightenment.

When Galileo emerged to “prove” that the earth was not the center of the Universe as the Pope said the Bible demanded, the Vatican rapidly filled with shredded human waste, a waste that eventually landed on Galileo thus shutting him up. However there were others in Northern Europe, who were out of the reach of the Church, who kept thinking.

Humanist questions kept popping up, usually posed by people like monks or very religious types. They were led further astray by a guy by the name of François Rabelais who openly labeled lots of Church doctrine as absurd; he said shit like, "Jonah wasn’t swallowed by no whale," and "maybe two of every animal in the world couldn’t fit on a shitty little boat." The actual bridge to the “Enlightenment” was built by a French guy with the fruity name of Michel de Montaigne, who asked the BIG question: "What do I know?" Meaning, know without a doubt. He was the first moral relativist, the first with a sliding scale of ethics. He further asked: “Who are we to say that the natives in Brazil are immoral when compared to us?” Even worse, this French prick asked: “If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose those values by force on others. Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular religious or philosophical beliefs.” Sound familiar? We can’t impose freedom, democracy, kindness toward others, or human rights for those in disagreement; we must drift on a sea of relativism. Europe and the American Left have been “de Montaigned,” not enlightened.

If only Islam would do that. They could then be relativists too.

René Descartes—“I think therefore I am”---in the 17th century, attempted to use reason to shore up the Faith. While he did a great job, he made a lot of logical mistakes which were demolished by later Enlightenment thinkers.

And it is here that we need to stop with the Enlightenment stuff. The Enlightenment came after Humanism. It's very possible that Islam needs some humanist questioning more than anything else. They “need” their own guys like a Rabelais and a de Montaigne because Islam is frozen in the 11th century, spiritually and economically. Man is subservient to God--—and woman is subservient to man—--and they must surrender completely to the faith. Many say that Islam means surrender. Or else.

The mind set in Islam right now is to kill anybody who remotely sounds like a Humanist. And they mean it. Nobody asks the big questions like: “Where in the Koran does it tell me how to build a bridge?” “How can an imam without any knowledge of civil engineering issue a fatwa regarding sewage treatment?” Anyone who dares ask is killed. Islam absolutely has the right to dictate ethics and morals to the rest of the world. Islam has the duty to kill those in disagreement.

I don’t see any Muslim clerics or men in power who ask questions. Do you? As Saddr once again spreads terror in Bashra we can see what happens to those who ask anything. And the supposedly, sort of, "enlightened" Sistani sits on his ass and watches the murders.

No questions are asked that we can hear. Even though there are quiet “buts and howevers” hovering about. A guy named Naipaul wrote a book that earned him a Nobel Prize (you know, the same one that Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev won), a book that told us plenty about real people and real Islam. The main thing Naipaul focused upon was the fact that there were good Muslims, bad Muslims, and indifferent Muslims; plenty of Muslims who think “out of the box”. The bad and indifferent pretend to be good just like lots of Baptists and Catholics pretend to be good. We must be aware that plenty of Muslims are thinking in private, asking questions to the ceiling in the middle of the night, have snotty wives who are sick of keeping their heads down and their intellects shrouded, in short there are bad and indifferent Muslims who are ready to break out. Sharansky calls these types of people who live inside a totalitarian state the double thinkers; people who exist in every controlled society and who must pretend fealty to stay alive, and it’s the double thinkers who may come up with something. It’s not likely that there will be an enlightenment or a humanist movement; what it looks like is that democracy may come before anything else. “I am free therefore I am.” But the enlightened in Europe and America know democracy can’t happen, you can’t have God and freedom. It’s impossible.

Another reason to hate those goddam Jews in Israel.