BY CRYPTO
I’m not just anti-Islam, I’m anti all religions. I see them as propaganda engines that encourage the worst type of relativistic thinking – the same relativistic thinking that led to every dictatorship in human history.
Exploiting people’s primal fears to control them is far from novel. The enlightenment freed us from that horror show and we’d be insane to let it slip away. In my view Islam is the most aggressively virulent religion at this current time, that’s the only reason I single it out. It also has a significantly decentralised leadership structure that makes it particularly threatening. All religions are simply sophistry + allegory + fallacy masquerading as profundity.
If you go back in time – over 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000 years – all human conflicts are fought over land, people and resources. Ideologies and other belief structures are used to motivate young and naive men to fight on behalf of protected elites who rarely get directly evolved in the fighting themselves. Moral hazard applies here in the same way it does in centrally planned economies.
With this in mind, it’s pointless to claim that one country, tribe or government are to blame for anything since that changes depending only on how far you go back until the information is so unreliable that it’s impossible to tell “who started it” anyway.
What is true however is that some groups, one group in fact, have been responsible for an explosion in human progress in just the last few hundred years. This was the group that subscribed to enlightenment thinking that began in 18th century Europe and continues today.
Obviously the concept of “progress” is also subjective, but personally I think technology, electronics, flight, space flight, satellites, the Hubble, JWST, iPhones and so on are incredible leap forwards. If you don’t, then I’m sorry but we’ll never agree. I’ll throw myself behind technology every time.
I do believe humans are catastrophically damaging the environment but if we’re going to fix that at the current level of a 7.5bn human population it will be with technology and this is not the subject of this piece. We need to steer away from the culture of consumerism and narcissism and embrace the ecosystem we are all part of.
So then, you can call the enlightenment a set of ideological values if you wish but it simply is not. It’s actually the first time in human history that humans set ideology aside and turned to scientific reason and scientific method backed fact based critical thinking to solve problems and progress. An explosion of science, creativity, invention and progress followed – those who deny this are simply locked in subjectivity, and probably by some religion or faulty ideology they were taught as a kid.
Once you have locked yourself in subjective reasoning you can only release yourself with objectivity, which of course, by then, you lack.
So the argument against Islam is simple…
One should not picture different types of Muslims – they are simply on a spectrum from submissive to aggressive, and Islam is designed to make the males aggressive and the females submissive. It’s that simple, there is no mystery or profundity to the Koran, it’s simply just one of those little dictator’s guide books – all dictators have them, and generally they insist the information within is prioritised over all other information. A child can see the ridiculousness of such claims. Sadly many adults can’t.
People are wise to criticise and push back on collectivism/ socialism/ communism/ real fascism and relativistic/ subjective thinking wherever they find it, being in a religion or government or any group trying to consolidate power over free peoples.
What is under threat in the West now is our precious enlightenment thinking – and reason itself. The way to protect it is the rule of law with a focus on property rights and violent crime, minimal government and real free markets. It’s really that simple.
You can follow Crypto’s writing here and on Twitter at @guerrillacrypto