The Nigerian Village Square - The Dangers of the Ideology of Islamofascism

The Dangers of the Ideology of Islamofascism

Thursday, 14 September 2006

THE DANGERS OF THE IDEOLOGY OF ISLAMOFASCISM

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES

A political ideology is a belief system on how man and his society ought to be organized; it is a worldview that says: this is the nature of man and this is how his government ought to be organized.

An ideology is a value system and is not objective. It is a value preference that appeals to certain individuals but not to others. For example, some people are conservatives and some are liberals, or communists or fascists or corporatists or mercantilists. Each of these ideologies seems to make sense to its adherents but may not make sense to other persons.

For example, conservatives believe that human beings are by nature selfish and take advantage of each other. (See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.) Building on their presupposition of the nature of man, they, therefore, want a strong government to make sure that people respect each others lives and properties. As conservatives see it, the primary function of government is to protect individuals from each other; domestic and international security is the primary function of governments; it is not for governments to do for the people what they ought to be doing for themselves, such as provide themselves with economic well fare. The bottom line of conservative ideology is that the government should provide the people with a strong military, police and judicial and penal systems, that the government should arrest, try and punish law breakers and that that is just about the only legitimate function of Government. (See the writings of John Lock and Edmund Burke, key conservative theorists; Locke on Limited government and Burke on the need to respect past traditions that have worked for society.)

Liberals, on the other hand, have a more positive image of human beings and their governance. They tend to see people as naturally good but corrupted by the circumstances of their living. In his social contract, the arch liberal, Jean Jacque Rousseau writes that man is born free and good but is everywhere in chains and made bad by his society; he longs for the day that man would revert to his natural innocence, as he visualized the Indians of North American, noble savages, are. Liberals seek to use the government to make people live the good life hence they do not mind big government that provides welfare services for the people. Liberals seldom pay attention to national security issues just as conservatives only grudgingly pay attention to welfare issues. Liberals often ignore the real issue that bloated governments are a threat to civil liberties; governments that can give you everything you want can also take them away; they can oppress you.

Fascism is an exaggeration of conservatism and sees the nation-state as primary over the individual. Fascism believes that the individual ought to serve the nation, rather than the nation serving the individual. Fascists believe in wars as instruments for serving national interests and feel that the individual is obligated to serve the interests of the state; they consider it an honor for the individual to die for his nation-state, and do not hesitate conscripting individuals into the military and shooting to death those who refuse to serve their father-mother land. Adolf Hitler was a strong proponent of this view of man and his society.

Socialism is an exaggeration of liberalism and accepts that the state ought to be used to take care of the people, regardless of the disincentive that ensues when society provides most of the services that people need. As socialists see it, the state ought to control the means of production to prevent wealth from being concentrated in few people’s hands, hands that would become oppressive of the poor.

Corporatism and mercantilism can be subsumed under conservatism whereas communism can be subsumed under liberalism.

Corporatism seeks to marry the state with the business class so that both works for the good of the state. Mercantilism uses the power of the state to make sure that international trade favors the state.

Communism believes that human beings are so good in nature that individuals would willingly work for the good of the whole: from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. Communism is based on hypothetical speculation of what human nature is, not on empirical observation of actual human beings; actual human beings, as Adam smith demonstrated, and our experience verifies, tend to be motivated by self and seldom social interests.

Conservatism and liberalism are essentially the two mainstream political ideologies in the Western world; the others are of academic interest.

RELIGION

Religion, like political ideology, is based on belief. Religion is based on faith on the unseen that is hoped to be real. From the perspective of pure reason, there is no evidence for God’s existence and therefore what religion believes in, God and his heaven, is delusion, that is, belief in that which is not true as true. True or not, however, human beings do believe in God and the hereafter. Wherever human beings are found, they have religions.

Some claim that religion exists in human society because human beings are conscious of their impending death and finitude and would like to believe that there is another world that they go to when they die. In other words, that religion provides the people with sweet illusion that there is another life upon their physical death. As it were, the idea of God and his heaven are like wish fulfillment of what cannot be attained in daily living; are fantasies that seem to gratify people’s desire for living forever.

Science and its methodology insist on proving a thesis before it is accepted; science does not see any evidence for the existence of God and heaven, or hell. As far as science is concerned, the human sense of self and thinking are epiphenomenal, that is, are produced by their physical brain and ends with the death of the human brain. When our bodies die our sense of self and mind dies with it, there is no hereafter!

Since none of us alive on earth has died and returned from death, never mind the claims of near death experiencers, we do not know for certain whether life exists after death. It is, therefore, probably best we did not make categorical assertions on God and the hereafter. What is salient is that belief in God and heaven is exactly that, belief, not something that is verified by reason and science.

Regardless of whether God and his heaven exist, or not, human beings do believe in their existence. Human beings do live as if there is God and heaven; human beings believe that upon their death that they would go to their creator and his abode. Indeed, some human beings see this world as mere preparation for the hereafter world.

Religion either makes sense to one or it does not. Apparently, it makes sense to many human beings, for poll after poll indicate that over 90% of humanity believes in some sort of God and his alleged spiritual world.

There are many religions. The major ones are Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. These religions have many followers world wide. These followers swear that their religions provide them with the truth. However, it should be noted that what one religion believes is true may seem utter foolishness to other religionists.

Islam is one of the major religions of the world. Apparently, this religion was founded by a man called Mohammed (570-632AD). Mohammed was born in what is now called Saudi Arabia and as a young man worked for a rich widow called Khadija. Somehow, he ended up marrying his employer and that freed him from toiling for a living. He became a rich young man married to an old woman.

It is reported that young Mohammed had lots of time in his hands and to kill time would go to the hills around him to meditate; that he would sit in a cave for hours on end and meditate on God. It is said that at some point he was visited by the angel Gabriel, who told him that he is to teach a new religion called Islam (total surrendering of ones ego-self to Allah, God, and since God is defined by Mohammed, surrendering of the self to Mohammed and his apostles).

Apparently, the angel dictated a message from God to Mohammed and since Mohammed could not write he had his friend, Abu-Bakr write it down. The message from the angel Gabriel became the Holy Koran.

Mohammed subsequently embarked on teaching this new religion to his fellow Meccans and ran into opposition and fled (Hajira) to Medina. At Medina, mythology has it that he had better luck and gathered followers around him. Apparently, he trained his followers in marshal arts and with the sword they returned to Mecca (Jihad) and put the opposition to the sword.

Mohammed used the sword to convert people to his religion. In effect, Islam, right from the beginning, does not eschew using force to convert non-believers, called infidels. This point must be emphasized, for the sellers of modern Islam market it as a religion of peace. A religion that began in war, by logical necessity, cannot be called a religion of peace. Islam’s modus operandi and frame of reference has always been war and conquest of unbelievers and taking over of their lands.

(It should be noted that Mohammed’s wife, Khadija, was past child rearing age when he married her. One wonders what role Mohammed’s desire to have children and the fact that his wife could not bear children for him had to do with his rationalization of many wives? Did he do so because he wanted to marry another wife, one that could give him heirs? Was pragmatic necessity transformed into a religious principle? Mohammed recommended four wives for his male followers. Divorce is very easy in Islam; men can discard their wives with flimsy excuses and marry others. What this means in reality is that some Muslims marry more than the four wives their leader permitted them. Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed, married twenty wives and seared fifty four children! It is reported that he did not have much interactions with some of these children! No wonder these abandoned hence emotionally crippled children seek a surrogate family in criminal gangs, such as Al Qaeda, just as fatherless boys seek surrogate families in

Los Angeles street

gangs! One does not think that it is appropriate for any man to have more than one wife and three children, irrespective of his religion. Children need to be nurtured, psychologically and materially, not abandoned by men who use religion to rationalize their probable addiction to sex and multiple sex partners. Oriental potentates used to have harems serving their sexual needs.)

The followers of Mohammed proceeded to use the sword to convert surrounding people to Islam. Within a century from its inception, Islam had conquered much of what we now call the Middle East and North Africa, from Arabia to Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and the surrounding Turkistan regions; from Egypt to Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In the 700s Islam swept into southern Europe; Islam conquered Spain and went as far north as Southern France before the Frankish Germans stopped its march upwards. In time, Islam swept south and got as far as West and East Africa, China, Indonesia and other parts of Asia.

The goal of Islam was, and still is, to convert the entire world to Islam. Apparently, its chief rival, Christianity, had other plans and the two titans fought each other for the domination of the minds of the people of the world. The Crusades were fought to liberate what Christians called the Holy land from the Muslims. These two world religions fought themselves to a standstill until 1918.

Somewhere along the tine, the Turks were converted to Islam and, in time, became the dominant agents spreading that religion. The Ottoman Empire, at one point, got as far as the gates of Vienna. The Turks took Islam to as far as China.

Things stood standstill until Christian Europeans broke out of their insular European world and discovered West Africa in the 1460s and America in 1492. Somehow, Europe embraced reason and gradually shelved its religion. The scientific method of Francis Bacon triumphed over the superstition of belief in an unseen God.

The triumph of Science in the West gave the West the instruments to finally defeat its rival for world domination, the Muslims. The First World War (1914-1918) saw the defeat of the Ottoman Empire (which included much of North Africa and the Middle East).

The European conquerors divided the Ottoman Empire between themselves. The French and the English essentially took over the Middle East.

Muslim Arabs, apparently, did not take too kindly to Christian Europe’s rule of their lands and fought for independence; Europe quickly off loaded her Middle Eastern empire.

Muslim Arabs, in the meantime, felt humiliated by their defeat by Christian Europeans. Apparently, they rallied around their religion and started off where they had stopped with their goal of converting the entire world to Islam.

As Christian Europe and North America increasingly jettisoned religion, the Muslims resurrected their religion and want to convert the Europeans to Islam. Apparently, Muslims are convinced that their religion is better than all other religions and want to convert the entire world to it.

Whereas the scientific class in the West writes that there is no God, or, as Richard Dawkins argued in his recent book, the God Delusion, that belief in God is belief in what is not true, a delusion, Muslim Arabs not only believe in God but want to convert the West to their God. Folks like Dawkins want to eradicate the superstition of religion and free mankind from that shackle while Muslims want to return mankind to that superstition and shackle. The battle between West (science) and East (religion) is thus drawn. These two will fight to death; one of them will emerge the conqueror of the world.

The followers of Mohammed, apparently, see him as the seal of the prophets, the last prophet whose religion is the best religion there in the world and want to convert the rest of the world to that religion. Muslims see the Islamization of the world as their holy mission, a mission worth dying for. Death in that course is said to be rewarded with God’s paradise.

SHARIA: ISLAM’S JURISPRUDENCE

Islam, over the years, developed a system of laws called Sharia and believes that it is the best system of laws there is in the world; in fact, Muslims have no regard for Western jurisprudence and want to replace it with Sharia. The goal of fundamentalist Muslims is to impose Sharia law on the entire world.

Sharia law is very strict and, among other things, calls for stoning to death of adulterers, cutting off the hands of thieves, clothing women in sacks so that they do not arouse men sexually, and preventing women from participating in the work force.

The adherents of Islam want to convert the entire world to Islam and its Sharia based legal system. However, given the preponderance of Western military, economic and political power in the extant world, most Muslims grudgingly tolerate other religions, waiting for a time that they would be able to convert the entire world to their religion.

A sect of Islam, the Wahhabi, sprung up in Saudi Arabia in the 1700s; this sect teaches a strict version of Islam and particularly has a missionary zeal and believes that the entire world ought to be converted to Islam. Members of this sect are intolerant of other sects of Islam and other religions.

The Saudi Arabia Wahhabi sect of Islam is funding the establishment of Islamic Mosques all over the world, including in Europe and the Americas. With Saudi Arabia awash in new found oil money, Wahhabism is on the march, intent on converting the infidels of the world to Islam.

Merely funding Islam, apparently, is not good enough for the radical elements in Wahhabism (and its Pakistani version, Deobandism) and they want to use “shuck and awe” terrorism methods to force the world into converting to Islam. These radical Islamicists join terrorists groups and sacrifice their lives in the service of their religion. Apparently, they believe that if they destroyed themselves and other people in the service of Allah, that they would arouse fear in the rest of the people and that out of fear of harm and death that the people would convert to Islam. In other words, they want to use intimidation and other terrorist means to convert people to Islam!

If using terrorism to convert folk to a religion seems antithetical to the mission of religion, which most people in the West understand as love and peace, we must recall that the founder of Islam, Mohammed, used similar terror tactics to convert his known world to his religion.

Arab Muslim terrorist of today are not that much different from their ancestors; they are following their folk’s well trodden path in converting non-believers to their ethnic religion. Islam has a fourteen hundred years tradition of using the sward to convert non-believers to it, and once converted to it, judges them worthy of death should they seek to leave the religion of Islam.

ISLAM AS A POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

Islam requires its followers to conduct their religious practices in Arabic language, to read the Koran in Arabic, to face Mecca (the east) while praying, five times a day, and to make a pilgrimage, at least one time in their lifetime, if they can afford it, to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. What these requirements mean, in practical terms, is that Muslims are supposed to be Arabiscized and made to accept the leadership of whoever is in political control of Mecca, (Saudi Arabia).

In effect, Islam is a religious cum political instrument used to get converts to accept Arab ruler ship. Islam is a means of arabicizing the world.

There is no other conclusion to be drawn from examination of the above key requirements of Islam other than that it is a means of political control and a means of enculturation to Arab world view.

(Considering that the Arab world view is stuck at seventh century levels of civilization, it is interesting that folks want to live thusly. The world has moved forward towards science and technology, yet the zealots of Islam would like to take people back to this more primitive stage of human evolution! If in doubt, see what the Taliban Muslims did in Afghanistan: reduce people to living like primitives! Women were practically deprived of all civil liberties and reduced to chattel slavery; any adult male was given the right to publicly chastise, including flog any woman who dared show her face uncovered in the public; the women’s place is in the backyard and the Talibans made sure that she stayed there. Feminists, where are you when you are needed the most? Are you only useful in calling Western men abusers of women and too cowardly to address Arab men for fear that they would break your necks or permanently shut your male bashing mouths?)

In the best of circumstances, Islam is a theocratic religion. It does not accept the separation of religion and state. Originally, Islam was ruled by a Caliph, Mohammed’s successor, and at present, Muslims want the whole world transformed into a caliphate where the heirs of Mohammed, or whoever claims to be such, rule it.

The goal of Islam is world caliphate, a theocracy where one person, Mohammed’s son, rules both the state and religion.

The Shi’a (Islam has two dominant denominations, Sunni and Shi’a) are awaiting the reemergence of Mohammed’s lost son, the fifth Imam, to come rule world Islam, the Uma; Sunnis accept a non heir of Mohammed as potential Caliph. Either way, the Caliph is supposed to be all powerful and rule the world through Sharia laws.

As can be easily seen, this political cum religious arrangement called Islam, even if shorn of its current radical elements, is a recipe for totalitarian-authoritarian- dictatorship!

RADICAL ISLAMOFASCISTS

Radical Islamofascists are struggling to transform the world into a totalitarian-authoritarian polity where they superimpose their understanding of God’s wishes on mankind.

God’s wishes are not known to each of us individually, it is told to us by self claimed messengers of God.

A few persons claim to have been given the job of speaking for God and they proceed to speak for him and expect all of us to accept their utterances as God’s messages for us.

Since we have not spoken to God, and God has not spoken to us, we, therefore, have no way of ascertaining what God’s true wishes are. Thus we have no choice but to accept what the folk who claim to have been spoken to by God tell us is God’s messages for us, or reject what they tell us.

But how do we know that those messages are in fact from God? There is no external means of testing the veracity of these folk’s supposed messages from God, and for all we know, these self proclaimed messengers of God may well be psychotic and have hallucinations and take them as God’s messages to mankind.

How do we know that even God and or angels exist? We are to accept that they exist because religious “authorities’ told us that they exist? We are supposed to assume that these self anointed messengers of God are credible because they claim that they are? Human beings our names are gullible.

A world ruled by religious theocrats and zealots is a world of totalitarianism and authoritarianism of the worst kind, for no one can argue with a religious (insane) person who claims to hear God talk to him!

Islamofascism is really a political ideology that potentially is used by psychotics to impose their insane views on man and his governance on the rest of the world.

Nazism and communism were bad but not as bad as Islamofascism, for with those two, we could, at least, argue with their purveyors as to what is the truth since their concepts of the truth were derived from human thinking, but with madmen hearing voices from God how can we argue with them? Nazis and communists were probably personality disordered persons who were nevertheless still somewhat amenable to reason, albeit distorted reason; they could still accept the findings of science but Islamic fanatics disdain reason and science!

Islamofascists are probably insane men hearing God talking to them and cannot operate in the world of pure reason and science. These people are the most dangerous threat to democracy, capitalism and freedom as we know it.

Let us not make a mistake as to what we are up against; we are confronted by a new political ideology in the guise of religion. This new ideology, like other ideologies, is not based on reason but belief and faith. Unlike the other political ideologies that tolerate some individual choice, Islamofascism does not permit the individual to decide for himself what is true or not, but uses the sword to intimidate him to accept its views of reality.

This ideology is not only fascistic but terrorist. If we do not appreciate what it is up to, and like the Ostrich hide our heads in sand, by the time we wake up, we would have been reduced to slaves of the theocrats of this new politico-religious dispensation. Our freedoms would have been taken away from us, and, worse, the world would be returned to seventh century dark ages.

Our beloved science and technology would be destroyed as the Caliph would place himself on judgment seat, deciding what is to be studied by scientists or not. This new world order is worse than any political arrangement that human beings have ever come up with.

Therefore, it is the task of all men of goodwill to rise up and fight this new force of darkness (ignorance). Those who like light (knowledge) must arise and shine light on this new source of human darkness. We cannot afford to sit on the fence, undecided and vacillate, for if we do, rapidly unfolding world events would decide for us how we should live.

We must all rise up and fight the Islamofascists, for they are the very devil they project to other people.

SCIENTIFIC CULTURE VERSUS TOLERANCE OF RELIGION

I tolerate the existence of religions; however, I am not a religionist. I am interested in a world organized along the scientific method, a world where we use science and technology to understand and master this world and make living as pleasurable as is humanly possible.

I do not see how religion helps us to understand phenomena. But man seems more than his reason; there seem something mystical about him, what it is, I do not know. I am, therefore, willing to live and let religionists live. I would even say that religion is necessary to root out some of the absurdities of secular humanists.

Secular humanist thinkers often embrace self defeating behaviors. In the extant West, for example, every behavior is accepted as appropriate behavior and political correctness is used to browbeat folk into accepting what in their judgment is not appropriate behavior. We have routinized deviancy and made normalcy deviant. This sort of thing makes decent persons angry and they find home in totalitarian religions.

The West has approved homosexuality and it is only a matter of time before it approves pedophilia. Indeed, there is already a North America boy-man society that advocate sex between men and children, some as young as six years old. These insane folk tell us that in ancient Greece men had boys as their sex slaves and therefore that such life style is natural. These beasts ask us to suspend our rational judgment as to what is right or wrong and embrace their self destructive, bestial life styles. (Self destructive because every time a man puts his penis into another man’s anus he risks contracting bacteria, virus and fungus; homosexuals are disease ridden freaks of nature; in them the death wish is most pronounced; these folks see life as meaningless and purposeless and mask their ennui through their idiotic idea of sex.)

Therefore, as we fight Islamofascism, we must make it clear what we are fighting for: we are not fighting for a world where certain absurd human behaviors are worshipped as normal when clearly they are not. We must use pure reason to decide what is normal and expect human beings to conform to them. If we fail in doing so, we alienate men of goodwill and they seek refuge in fundamentalist religions, Islamic or Christian. They then strive to impose their fundamentalist religions on society.

Eliminating superstition from society does not mean embracing stupidity as normalcy.

RAPID SPREAD OF ISLAM IN THE WEST

The West, particularly America, is suffused with religion. The American constitution guarantees freedom of speech and religion, so people are permitted to pursue their religious proclivities even if it means saying that they worship witches.

This laissez faire attitude towards religion permitted all sorts of weirdoes to open storefront churches proclaiming their exclusive connection to God and their ability to save mankind. All sorts of people who are probably deluded and ought to be receiving mental health treatment run amuck claming to be ministers of God and bamboozling the impressionable with their snake oil wares.

Muslims died and went to heaven when they came to America and recognized that they are free to open shop and try to convert whomever they want to their religion and that the American constitution permits them to do so. Thus, they set out to manipulate that very constitution and use it to establish themselves in America.

Today, Islam is the most rapidly growing religion in the West. Just about every city now has its own mosque. You can hardly walk down any major city street without seeing Muslim women attired in their dreadful sacks. Islam is spreading at an alarming rate in America and Europe.

This all seems innocuous until we pause and consider the implication of the Islamization of the West for Western civilization. We blindly permit a theocratic world view to spread in our midst, unaware that it is aimed at destroying the very open democratic society that allowed our society to be what it is.

The irony is that while the West permits these people the freedom to evangelize their religion, conservative Muslim countries do everything they could to stifle the existence of other religions in their midst. In some of these countries, some one could go to jail for merely possessing the Christian bible. Indeed, to convert from Islam to another religion is considered a crime worthy of death. Apparently, once Muslim, the individual is now a Muslim slave and is not permitted to ever change his mind about that religion and decide for other ways of living.

It is truly amazing that the West has permitted the spread of Islam in its midst, unaware of the seeds of self destruction it is planting. These Muslims will soon breakout from the inner city ghettos, where they currently are confined, to the suburbs and convert middle class Westerners to Islam. This is so because despite Westerners rejection of the religions of their fathers, they are yearning for purpose and meaning in their lives, purpose and meaning that traditionally religion gave them.

Science and technology does not give people meaning and purpose for living. Besides, only a few persons are involved in the scientific business. Science is not yet so wide spreads that it offers every citizen the opportunity to participate in its proceedings hence obtain a sense of belonging and fulfillment from it. Only a handful of persons enjoy all that science has to offer, whereas over 90% of the population have no where to belong to but old fashioned religions.

People who belong nowhere but seek belonging are ideal candidates for the type of close nit community, Ummah, that Islam gives them.

Islam gives people a sense of belonging to a group but takes away their individuality. Individuality, as Eric Fromm reminds us, is a source of pain, pain which is reduced when folk give up the freedom of having individuated selves. Human beings can be made to become like cows and exist mindlessly like cows chewing grass on a pasture.

Whereas we must have freedom of religion, we must find a way to teach that some religions are simply primitive and ought to not be patronized by civilized persons. One does not see why the state should recognize, say, Wicca, when we know that there are no such things as witches and wizards. We can tolerate traditional religions like Christianity because their vague notions about God apparently give folk some consolation in a world without any self evident meaning and purpose.

ISLAM IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD

Islam is growing even at more alarming rate in other parts of the world. It is growing very rapidly in Africa and Asia. Left unchecked, Islam is probably going to conquer all of Africa in the near future. This would mean converting all 800 million Africans to Arabia’s influence. The West would loose whatever influence it has in Africa.

Saudi Arabia is awash with petrol dollars. It is using some of that money to fund the teaching of Islam in all parts of the world, including the Madrasas schools where children’s minds are filled with religious instruction rather than instruction in the sciences and mathematics. Children spend their days chanting verses from the Koran and being taught to hate non-Muslims, to grow up to go strap bombs on their bodies and blow themselves and passers by to smithereens. All these are done in the name of God; God indeed. It is more like these things are done in the name of the devil, except that there is no such thing as devil outside folk’s heated imaginations!

Such religious learning does not add a worthwhile thing to the improvement of mankind. Only science finds cures for the diseases that afflict mankind, not chanting passages from any so-called Holy books. Folk used to die from plagues while praying to their God to heal them and, of course, since he does not exist, he could not heal them.

Perhaps, Saudi Arabia could contribute to the development of the Islamic world if it built schools and universities where science and technology are taught rather than waste its money on teaching an anachronistic seventh century world view, and, worse the programming of children’s minds to grow up and go destroy their lives and the lives of other people.

It is us, human beings, who invented our God while deluding ourselves that he created us in his image. Since we think that we need God, it is about time that we reinvented him and made a different God, a God of love.

Religions ought to jettison their archaic God that teach hatred and teach about the God of love. We invented the God of hatred now we must invent the God of love, if we want to live in a loving world.

THE MISTAKE OF THINKING THAT RELIGION IS IRRELEVANT

Scientists generally stay out of the business of religion, as if it is beneath them, that they could not bother with it, that is, at best, for the ignorant masses. The fact is that if something is not done religious fanatics could destroy our scientific civilization. Islamicists would restrict research (see the politics of stem cell research and cloning where Christian fundamentalists oppose research on; that is nothing compared to what the Mullahs of Islam would do to our freedom to pursue knowledge to wherever it leads us.; common sense tells us to research everything that is researchable without seeking permission from religious authorities).

Psychologists who claim to understand human thinking and behavior, in the main, stay out of religion and when they talk about it; they make fun of religion. Consider Freud’s supercilious attitude to religion.

The fact is that human beings are creatures that ask: who are we, where did we come from etc. As long as science and pure reason cannot give people definite answers on these existential questions, people will seek some sort of religious answers to them.

What science ought to be doing is trying to provide the people with some sort of solace, as philosophy used to provide solace to the educated classes. Science makes a mistake in assuming that the masses can live without religion.

Karl Marx called religion the opium of the masses and proceeded to attempt to replace it with another opiate, the nonsense called communism.

Science ought to provide a scientific conjecture on what happens when we die. Pure reason tells us that there must be some sort of intelligence in this word and that since, as physics teaches, energy is not destroyed but merely changes form, that that intelligence is also eternal, perhaps in different forms?

Science ought to teach some hypothesis on intelligence/spirit without making it definite. As scientific knowledge changes ideas about that intelligence is undated. We cannot afford the present childishness of evolutionary biologists, with limited information, making grand pronouncements to the effect that our selves and thinking are only epiphenomenal; obviously that is as superstitious as religions postulation of the existence of God. We simply do not know but we want to know.

WHY FASCINATION WITH RELIGION

Human beings find themselves living in a world of separation, space and time. Somehow, they can imagine the alternative to their world. Their world is a world of separation and hate and they can think of a world of union and love; they can think of a world where there is no space and time, and matter, a world where all are unified as one (this is taught by Hinduism and Buddhism).

Religions see space and gap between people and know that this separation is at the root of human suffering; they figure that if we closed the gap that separated people that we would reduce their suffering.

Religions teach people to close the gap and space between them and other people. Hate separates people; love closes the gap that separates people. Indeed, love is union; love is the glue that binds people together.

Religions teach people that separation is illness (sin) and that if they closed the gap that separated them that they would be healed; separation is sickness and union is health.

This all sounds enticing but the problem is that this is idealistic philosophy. Despite conceptualizing the closing of the gap, living in the world of union, in the here and now world, we still live in the world of space, time and matter. Teaching idealism (altruism) does not eliminate realism (our ego based selfish world).

To be in this world we must be selfish and live in separation. At best, we see each other as the same and equal and work for our common good. We can improve our world by stressing our sameness and common interests. Union is a useful myth that serves common social good but it is nevertheless not self evident. Alfred Adler taught social interest as if it is self evidently true when what is self evidently true is selfishness.

We probably need some religion teaching folks that they are the same and coequal and urging them to work for social interests, for such teaching generates social harmony. Nevertheless, such teaching does not eliminate the reality of this selfish world.

Idealism does not change the world. Moreover, it costs a lot of mental energy to pursue and maintain (ego) idealism, maintain what does not even exist. It does not take much energy to maintain the ego real self, which which does, in fact, exist in the temporary world.

ISLAM IS NOT A FRIEND OF AFRICANS

The purveyors of Islam present it as a universal religion. In fact, they claim that Islam is a friend of Africans and African Americans. These people have convinced many African-Americans that Christianity is the religion of their white oppressors and bid them to see Islam as an ideal alternative, as the religion of their liberators. Nothing could be further from the truth than this.

Didn’t the prophet himself have African slaves? A religion founded by a slave holder is indeed a liberating religion!

Arabs were as oppressive to Africans as Europeans. Arabs enslaved Africans from about 900 to 1900 AD, a period of one thousand years. Today, Arabs in Sudan and Mauritania have African slaves. Arab Janjaweed militia in Sudan makes a sport of shooting at life African targets. (See Francis Bok, Escape from Slavery; this book shows us the extent of Arab hatred and killing of Africans in Sudan.)

Islam exists to propagate Arab cultural values. Islam is not an African religion, just as Christianity is not an African religion; neither religion promotes Africans interests.

If an African or African American is of a religious mind set, he ought to explore African religions.

Be that as it may, we are no longer in the age of religion. Mankind has entered the age of science and folk ought to study science rather than waste their time exploring superstitions.

In so far that there is always the element of the unknown in our lives, folk ought to approach it through science, what we might call “Spiritual and Secular Science” rather than from the perspective of belief and faith.

Extant religions are mostly escape from this world’s harsh reality. It is about time folk stopped escaping from the reality of this world. What adapts to this world is science and technology.

A sound psychology, not mumbo jumbo is useful adjunct to science. Consider the book, A Course in Miracles, written by a Jewish clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman. It presents sound psychology in metaphysical language and those who embrace it waste years studying it only to find out that, like most metaphysics and religions, it is all talk and no delivery. It is an escape from the world of the here and now; it leads to not doing what folk need to do to adapt to the realities of this world. It’s over emphasis on forgiveness sounds fascinating except that if one practiced it one would die.

In this world, it is sometimes necessary to fight back and defend ones self when one is attacked by other people. If Arab Muslim terrorists attack us, we must fight them and not forgive them, for to forgive them is to allow them to live another day to commit more outrages against humanity.

If you forgive the murderer, the rapist and the pedophile, you permit him to live another day to commit more crimes. Forgiveness does not lead to cessation of the forgiven engaging in criminal behaviors. In which case, you are now responsible for the crimes they commit.

What we need to do is arrest, try and jail criminals and while incarcerated try to rehabilitate them, and if they are not rehabilitable, kill them. Punishment is sometimes necessary in this world. Blanket forgiveness is not productive.

Of course, we need to forgive one another. Our world, as Hinduism teaches, may be an illusion to be forgiven, so that we leave it and return to a different, spirit, world. But in as much as we want to live in this world, illusion or not, we must defend our selves and sometimes defense entails preemptive offense against potential enemies.

CONCLUSION

Islamofascism presents itself as a religion but, in actual fact, it is a political ideology. It is an ideology that serves Arabs interests.

Not really, for true Arab interests lay in science and technology not in seventh century religious mumbo jumbo.

Islamofascism has convinced young Arabs to strap bombs on themselves and go immolate themselves, along with innocent persons. Apparently, these terrorists act are done in an effort to get even with the West, to use intimidation to arouse fear in its people and out of fear get the West to do what serves Arab interests.

In the meantime, little is been done by Arabs to develop their economies and people and bring them to Western standards.

It is science and technology that would transform the Arab world and bring it to par with the West, not return to a nostalgic past Arab glorious civilization.

The West has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire Arab world, today, not tomorrow. It is, therefore, counter productive for Arabs to keep trying to provoke the West into eradicating them.

We live with the specter of young Arabs immolating themselves, along with other people in misguided efforts to control political policies through intimidation and terrorism. The rest of the world cannot afford to give in to the intimidation of these Muslim terrorists.

If we give in to terrorists’ demands we have reinforced their behaviors; behavior that is reinforced is repeated, so terrorists feel emboldened to engage in more acts of terrorism.

If we want to stop terrorism, we must cut off the heads of all terrorists. Capture and kill terrorists. There death does not matter much for they are of no relevance to science and technology, what really matters in the extant world.

We cannot permit Arab arrested development to return human civilization to seventh century levels. We must move forward forever but backward never.

Having observed that science and technology is our salvation, yet something in me tells me that there is an unknown aspect to us. What that aspect is, I do not pretend to know. Therefore, we must tolerate religions. But we must help religions to grow up and become religions based on science, not superstition.

We need some conceptualization of what people call God and the hereafter; even if they are imaginary, for they help give people some mental peace.

In as much as we ask existential questions, we need some sort of spiritual psychology rooted in secular psychology to make peace with the unknown.

By spiritual psychology, I do not mean escape from the realities of the physical world. One is not interested in escape from physics but adaptation to physics with an understanding that life may be more than physics.

One does not have Islamophobia or Islamophilia. Ones attitude is live and let live. If Islam contains itself in Arabia, its natural home, one has no problem with that. What one does not want to see happen is have Islam shoved down ones throat. At any rate, ones interest is science and technology, not religion.

We need to understand that Islam is a political ideology and not kid ourselves about its intentions; we must deal with it realistically. We need to prevent Islam’s goal of transforming the world into a theocratic society, a Caliphate ruled from Mecca. We need a secular, scientific, democratic, capitalist society where freedom of choice is respected in most areas of social living.