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Islam's Golden Age

Jesus the Man, Jesus the Myth

Islam: tolerating intolerance?

Zionism

Does God Bless America?

The Right to Bare Arms

Anti-Semitism: the Big Lie

Islam: tolerating intolerance?

Respecting God

Who is the first man in the Bible? The first real man? Adam is obviously an allegorical figure. So are Cain and Abel. The first real character is Ancestor.

Who? Ancestor, the direct translation of Abraham. Doesn't that sound like an unlikely name for a mother to give her baby? Doesn't it stink of myth? Abraham has been associated with the first human city, Ur. The whole of modern culture traces itself back to that patch of earth on the banks of the Euphrates river where the grasses grew seeds big enough to feed families with bread all year long. This was the cradle of civilization. This is where the explosion of technology we are still experiencing really began.

The religion of Abraham is one of the first of the new breed of modern religions that suit agriculture, civilization, division of labour and inequality. There is no mystery at all why a religion from this part of the world should have gone on to evolve into the powerful sets of religions we see today, quite the contrary, it would have been very difficult to imagine things any other way. True religions are carried in full bellies wherever they travel. True religions expand with the culture and technology that nurtured them. Show me any exceptions. Show me the religion of a hunter gatherer people catching on with farmers. Show me an Inuit religion spreading on the great plains. Show me a mystical meditative religion that came down from the mountains of Tibet to the fertile valleys of India or China. While you might come up with a list of a few converts you will not be able to demonstrate any whole societies that took on the religion of a “backward” people. People seem to have a natural tendency to listen to the truths of people with the fuller bellies, larger ships, stronger armies and better guns. Whether they chose to listen or are made to listen is a point for historians to quibble over but the evidence that they have listened is everywhere.

When was Islam the fastest growing religion on the planet? (Fastest growing by conversion rather than breeding.) It is no coincidence that this was the time at which the Arabs were at the height of their economic power and the height of their scientific culture. When Europe was languishing in the dark ages the Arab world was where it was at, they were the inheritors of all the civilization held together in the great library at Alexandria. While Europe was studying its navel and arguing about how many angels could dance on a pin the Arabs were being relatively civilized and were gaining converts across Asia and North Africa.

Any rational neutral observer of Earth a thousand years ago would have put his money on Islam being the first world religion. Only the effect of opening up the Americas gave the advantage back to Christendom. Few people will ever admit that their beliefs are anything other than entirely logical and coherent. People will claim that they listened to all the voices and picked out the voice of truth. That is utter nonsense. We do not pick religions either randomly or rationally. They are picked for us by circumstance. The religion that you hold so dear is not true, it is not true for you or objectively true. You did not choose your religion, you inherited it.

Of course you can use the same argument about my belief system. Atheism is transmitted memetically as any other system of belief is. I was able to develop a belief system based upon respect for truth, questioning all assumptions backed by a sense of morality because of the culture I have grown up in. I am not a rebel, I have not rejected huge chunks of our society's basic values despite the fact that we live in a culture that pays lip service to respecting the rebel. I have adopted a subculture that respects freedom of thought as being one of the highest values. This has been relatively pain-free for me compared to for example, a white woman from Mississippi taking up Islam or a Peruvian becoming a Hindu. Atheism is respectable in England, if not in most of the intellectually hollow middle of America. Whilst I can claim some credit for my choice of atheism I have not had to struggle against the tide too much, nowhere near as much as atheists in Texas or Poland. But that does not matter, the truthfulness of a proposition is not affected either way by the number of people who adhere to it or the level of sacrifice they endure to propound it. You could martyr a billion nuns and they would still be just as misguided.

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

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