Sciatica Blogging

It is another day of debilitating pain here, so another recommendation for alternatives.  Oddly, something at Salon,  where Haroon Moghul begins a worth while article about the disaster of "the West's" encounter with "Islamic" radicalism with a point I've made in response to the assertion that "The Nazis were Christians":

Imagine a group of people who rape.  Enslave.  Maim.  Murder.  Ethnically cleanse.  Extort.  Burn.  Behead.  But then imagine this—they don’t lie?  Can’t lie.  Won’t lie.  That’s what Graeme Wood’s recent Atlantic essay, “What ISIS Really Wants,” really wants us to believe.

Yeah, there's no one who is more believable about their motives than people who do those things, right?   I mean, why wouldn't they lie about their motives, their high moral standards?

While I will leave it to others who know Islam to defend Islam, the similar libel against Christianity always involves the actions of people who are violating the very heart of the Gospel which are, then, used to characterize Christianity and the entire body of Christians, attributing violence, oppression, slavery, etc. to the teachings of Jesus and others whose entire teaching was opposed to them.  The intellectual dishonesty of that nearly ubiquitous practice comes in tandem with the ever renewed indulgence granted to atheism and secularism when their adherents do the same things but which have no defining prohibition in those ideologies.

The only honest intellectual standard for judging those things has to be is if the defining ideas comprising the religion or ideology permits or encourages people to commit depraved, criminal acts.  If they don't then people who profess a belief and adherence to those intellectual frames are personally and collectively guilty of hypocrisy and lying about their belief and adherence, if they do permit them, as atheism clearly does, then the basic ideology is, in fact, deficient.

That the modern, Western, practice in assigning guilt is exactly backward is related to its disastrous encounter with Islam, though racism, bigotry and anger at people who have been very successful in resisting Western domination plays a part in it, as well.  I think it is exactly the content in Islam that has fueled the resistance to Western domination is at the bottom of our failed imperial domination of those people and which is the basis of the present reaction to it.  It's not as if the West hasn't been able to fully accommodate the oppressive features found in those countries elsewhere, as the ease with which the American and European governments have worked with, coexisted with and encouraged dictatorships in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere proves.   It is as true that the atheist regimes of the last century were quite able and willing to do business with some of the most depraved of governments, including those in the middle-east and elsewhere.

It is a fact that the Reagan administration got along perfectly well with Saddam Hussein in his war with the more resistant Iranian Islamic government, supplying him with weapons, intelligence and encouragement even as he was committing atrocities against any number of people.  And it was quite willing to try to work with the Iranians when it was useful in mounting the illegal war against resistant Central American liberation movements, favoring some of the most murderous dictators of the past half century.   The same is true for virtually every administration in our history, so, secular government has had no problem on that count.

I could go on, news to no one, but my leg is throbbing and I'm going to have to take something.  I will try to not write while I'm hopped up on pain killers.

You might find this Youtube encounter between David Bentley Hart and Terry Sanderson of the UK National Secular Society on  worth listening to while doing the washing up.  It's in five parts, unfortunately.  

Speaking of D.B.H. someone was upset that I linked to a piece published in First Things, implying that because I did that I was buying everything that was or ever has been published there.  What a ridiculous way to run a life of the mind, as if entire and complete agreement was even a real possibility.  If you're going to reject everything someone said because you disagree with something they said you're going to find yourself living in the most radical of all solipsisms, even rejecting yourself as your ideas change.