Pussification in America: Political Correctness is Gay

and that's why I think you can judge other cultures, because culture isn't dna or skin color it's all man made.

http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/tvtk/ch30.htm

Mohamed Islam: What is meant by "a concept of history"?

Abdel Wahab El Messeri: Any human writing is not a reproduction of reality. Even a news report includes certain information and excludes others, based on a certain philosophical outlook of the writer. The same with history. When an historian writes the history of say, Ancient Egypt, ( or Modern America, or 19th Century Europe ), he has data that fills the city of Cairo. He will not publish all this information, for that would be an archive. The writer decides what to include and what to exclude. So he picks and chooses determined by his own philosophical back ground to construct a history

For example, a history of the USA from the standpoint of White Settlers will be completely different from one written by Native Americans. The latter may concentrate and elaborate on genocidal massacres. A white historian will start of with the Declaration of Independence, and ignore a thousand years of beautiful Native American history

MI: The concept of history depends on subjectivity and the world outlook of the historian. What different world outlooks are there? What is the Islamic view?

AWM: Lets look at a few different views:

Cyclical Views: History goes in cycles. So there is no meaning. Things happen in a cyclical, nonsensical, meaningless way. There is no God or purpose behind events. This is the Greek view. Nitschean view is also cyclical , it is the modern cyclical view. E.g. Sprangler.
Providential View: History completely guided by God: controlled by Him. That either a group or the human species is chosen by God. There is a chosen people with this view, eg. Judaism.. This is similar to the cyclical view in that there is no human input at all.
Secular Deterministic View: ( Hegalian, Marxist views ) History is propelled by non-human forces, economic motives.Frued: eros, sexual drives. Hagel: The idea of the absolute state. Conflicts within matter that manifests itself through human society.
In all three views the idea of the autonomous human individual who can choose, who is responsible, and who carries moral burdens disappears altogether in a variety of determinism either cyclical, materialism, or providential. In all three there is no freedom of the will.

MI: That brings us to the Islamic concept. Is there an Islamic concept? If so, how did it originate and develop?

AWM:There is an Islamic World Outlook, a philosophy, a concept of history. It is based on a basic duality. God created the world, but does not dwell in it. He is removed from it.He cares for it, and guides it, but is always beyond it : Transcendental ( Muazza ). It is not dualism but duality.It is not God versus the world, but God beyond the world.We can interact with Him. God has granted us autonomy ( Fitra ) rights and drives. He has given us a mind to judge. He gave us a message, and a burden. We deserve to be the center of the universe. He left us free to choose, after giving us guidance, a covenant. He gave us all the tools. It is all up to us. He has given us history. History is the realm of freedom. We can save or damn ourselves...

MI: What do you mean by the movement of history?

AWM:According to the Islamic view it moves basically through the human will, not guided by laws of nature, but laws of God, and helped by nature, being an open book. From the secular materialistic point of view, history moves by some materialistic power, e.g. means of production, or the state moving history forward. The characteristic of all the materialistic ideas is that they all have an ending. So a secular messiah, e.g. Robespiere, Stalin, Hitler, Fukuyama, all claim, here is paradise, here is the end of history.

With Islam there is no end in history at all, except the day of judgment, which is outside history. In Judaism the day of judgment is within history. In Christianity the second coming is the end of history and is also within history.

In Islam there is no end in history. God is external to history, he guides history, but is not in it, he transcends it. In Islam history lasts forever, and within its realm man has freedom to choose.

http://www.missionislam.com/homed/response.htm

This link also has a discussion of the differences between an Islamic syncretism of Supernatural and Natural versus the Western "secular materialism". Its way too long to post here. The debate within Islam has been all about rejection of the materialistic Western secularism for Islamic values that include acceptance of Allah as the primary mover of history. Its no different from the debates within Western society between the religious and the secular.

McCheese_sl said:

That said, I will never agree that stoning a girl to death because she was raped is ANYTHING but completely shitty.

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Missing the point, and sort of implying that I would agree that this is okay behavior, its not and I don't.

This happens because the governing bodies in these regions are weak, or built up entirely of religious organizations because these societies are not as developed as the West (in part, in many cases, because of the West's imperialism, mind, especially in Africa and the Middle East), you're conflating a religious practice conducted by the most radical members of a society in a nation with a weak centralized authority and no history of suffrage yet occuring, and trying to conflate that to the entire culture, or broader culture.

It would be akin to looking at the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church members, and pretending that all of American culture behaves that way, or accepts their behavior as valid or good or acceptable, simply because we allow the behavior to go on, because in our legal system, those idiots have the right to free expression.

No one, not even anthropologists, believe that stoning a girl to death because she was raped is acceptable behavior, and no one is making the argument that we should accept that kind of behavior. In fact, anthropology has been at the front of the women's rights movement for most of the past century.

But you can't understand WHY that behavior occurs, if you don't TRY to see it from their perspective. And guess what? You aren't going to find a way to convince them to STOP the behavior, until you learn to address it in culturally relevant ways. Which will require a dialogue with those people. Which will require us to actually try to treat these people like they exist and have relevant and real concerns and world views created within their cultural contexts.

Which you aren't doing the second you say "They stone girls to death for being raped, therefore they are barbarian subhumans who simply cannot be reasoned with in any way".

You can't reason with people if you don't try.

And during the entire time the US government has had boots on the ground in Afghanistan, teams of anthropologists have been over there, trying to create the sort of dialogue and cultural exchanges which would allow for us to be able to exert influence and pressure on these people to modernize some of their cultural systems. But its hard when you're trying to make nice with people who just had their village razed to the ground by an airborne AC 130 weapons platform.

As long as they feel we are their enemy, nothing we can say or do will change their attitudes towards things like rape. Why do Islamic males stone women to death for being raped? Can you even answer that question? Because before you can stop it, you need to understand why its occurring in the first place. You need to understand, from their point of view, how the world works, why this is acceptable behavior to them. Otherwise you can't address the behavior in culturally appropriate ways that will convince them to stop.

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, bro, and I apologize if the way I typed that it appears that was what I was doing, it was not intentional. Rather, the conclusion that "This culture is bad, therefore it is barbaric and cannot be reasoned with" is the conclusion reached historically when one culture judges another culture by its behavioral practices. What did the Romans call the Germanic tribes to the North? Barbarians. Why? They weren't "civilized" to Roman standards. Romans literally thought these people had no homes and lived like animals, in retrospect, it turns out that the Germanic cultures had large cities, and built more roads than the Romans did (though out of wood, so they did not last as long as the Roman brick constructions did).

That's what we do in Western culture today. We look at shit like Afghan villages killing a girl for being raped, and we project. We think these people are basically subhuman. Neanderthals if you will. Incapable of being reasoned with.

And of course, if that's the attitude we go into a discussion with these people with, is it any surprise that they would reject anything we have to say?

I don't think we really have a disagreement at this point. I think you're kinda saying what I'm saying, but the problem is I'm coming from this from an academic viewpoint, and terms like "culture" have very specific meanings in those contexts which lead to a more complex view of the discussion as it is being laid out.

The only Arabs who are materialistic as fuck are the rich and powerful leaders.

All them poor people see materialism is the source of their ills

And yes, in churches all around America even today they lament the idols we surround ourselves. Luxury cars, beautiful women full of plastic, televisions and the internet.

The thing is we're so secular now that those religious people aren't being heard any more.

Which is what Islam rejects. And I probably should have used the term militant Islamist rather than Arab, that was a mistake on my part for which I apologize.

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

Regardless of the situation a culture/small tribe of people are in, some actions are inexcusable. Tolerance isn't needed when practices that just cause human suffering are used, and shouldn't. Sorry, some cultures aren't worth preserving. Studied, yes.

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The vast majority of real cultural diversity died out over the last century. Most of the hunter-gatherer tribal cultures that once existed are gone, same too with most agriculturalist and pastoralist nomads.

Preservation isn't even on the table for the most part anymore. Its simply not possible. Modernity has washed it all away. Even now, across Africa, the few remaining tribal cultures are collapsing, as more and more young men move to the cities to try and find work, leaving the aging and the women behind to tend fallow fields and survive drought after drought as best they can.

And that's sorta the point. We can't look at Afghans stoning raped women to death, and come to the conclusion that all Islamic or Arabic culture is invalid or wrong or immoral or unworthy because some hard liners in a tiny village somewhere who had virtually no education, do not view the world from a modern style viewpoint got a mob riled up and did something stupid and wrong and then justified it based on their religious values.

Do we blame all of Western civilization for shitty bankers blowing up the world economy? Are all Westerners to blame, and their culture to blame, for the mistakes of a few bad people? Of course not.

And the same can be said for other cultures. We should not extrapolate our disgust or dislike of an aspect of a culture onto the entire broad population body. This is unfair.

Most Arabs and most Islamists do not think stoning a woman who was raped to death is a good thing. Some do, because they basically have been taught their whole lives a specific interpretation of a religious document that they do not have the capacity to see in another light. You raise a young boy up in one of these madrassas for decades, he's going to come out believing the Quran is literally the word of God, because he has no context to see the world in a different light.

And we all know once someone is inculturated and set in their ways, its going to be very hard to alter that, especially if they're older than about 25 or 30. For people in some countries, that will be over half their life believing one way. Its very very difficult to change that. Try and convince an 80 year old die hard Baptist Preacher that Darwin was right, you'll see how hard it is to change those types of attitudes.

Trollface_sl said:

If possible, I'd like to import some of Islamic culture into America
and marry little children.

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8 year olds, dude.

Tanoomba_sl said:

So when can we stop tolerating the 1%?

Instead of bitching about what brown people are doing, how about we fix our own culture?
We've got more than enough injustices going on every day inOUR OWNculture. Playing "holier than thou" is not only pointless, it's hypocritical.

Ironically, the flaws in wealth-obsessed western culture have a huge impact on the rest of the world, much larger than any impact they could have on us. Dismantle the 1%, reduce the income gap, stop fighting pointless wars and concentrate on the health and education of our own citizens, and maybe then we can think of judging other cultures as "inferior".

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Exactly the point. Depending upon perspective, it wouldn't be very hard to find ways to describe Western civilizations as one of the most corrupt, most indecent, immoral and unethical in history. Which is exactly what the Nacirema thought experiment tries to illustrate, and that's why its given to students in sociology, anthropology, etc. in most universities in the country.

Perspective is really neat because of the way we allow our individual perspectives to define our existences. Its like how they put blinders on horses during races to make them focus ahead and not become distracted by the other horses racing with them. Our cultures build blinders on our own world views that makes it very easy to criticize others, and much harder to criticize ourselves.