allpoints wrote:in an attempt to get back on track....
jackattacks wrote:Based on current demographic research-the population accepting Islam will grow faster than any people professing any other belief. What percentage of Islamic countries are democratic? What percentage of Islamic countries promote gender and religious equality? Immigrants who practice Islam are forming an ever increasing percentage of the population of all countries in the world. By the 21st Century citizens who practice Islam will control the majority of Governments in the world. What will become of our secular educational system? What will become of our freedom to write, read and say what we please? This will largely depend on the hoped for evolution that Islam will be obliged to undergo.
the old One Ring thing, huh?
while it may work to great effect in a Tolkein mythos, in real life it's what Objectivists like to call a "Frozen Abstraction" ie, holding something (Islamic or Christian demographics) as fixed while one projects it into a highly fluid future
all the evidence points in the direction that there can never be 'one religion to bind them' because dogma apparently has to fracture once it gets to critical mass
besides, the age of dogmatic faiths has passed here in Middle Earth - there's just too much information out there that works to ever go back to the way things were
the Enlightenment rages on, and the conflicts will be too much for even the most backward to cling to memes that just can't be resolved in the face of something better
(and no, i'm not an Objectivist)
Maybe not but you're right. The focus is on Islam, but the people within Islam causing "problems" are the uneducated and poor. Islam/religion is just what they fall back on, what they put their faith into, mostly because they've never seen another option. People who are practicing Muslims, but also college professors, teachers, surgeons, scientists, etc. these people may be practicing, they may be religious, but no matter if they realize it or not they've seen the "true light" of reason and as you say there's no going back. People who practice Sharia law do so because they have no understanding of anything else, any alternative.
There are the exceptions but they only underline the rule. There are the lost - I'm speaking mostly of Western W.A.S.P.'s who drop their religion (since it's mostly inert anyways) and jump on Islam and all of a sudden you have an 'educated' person proving my statements above as 'wrong'. However these people always exist. In the sixties it was Jim Jones, in the seventies it was the 'born-agains' -- the hippies who washed ashore after the good ship Leary sank. There are always the lost who so intensely need to be 'found'.
What you say about predicting a fluid future while predicting that one phenomenon will remain unchanged is true: it's an easy conclusion to fall into but it's very unlikely. Just as the Church -- the "Earth is flat" church, adjusted itself in order to survive in a changing world, so too will Islam as it's followers find real 'truth'. So long as you're a ditch digger far removed from the population the easier it is to believe in more simplistic and uncompromising beliefs because your life is more simplistic, void of any necessary reasons to compromise.
The wave will crash as it always does. The tide will ebb. The great rules that were written in stone will reveal themselves to have been written in sand all along and as the tide recedes they will blur and we will have to re-write them again.
I support the right to arm bears.
