Soren wrote on Dec 23
rd, 2014 at 10:57am:
Karnal wrote on Dec 21
st, 2014 at 1:49am:
The Tamil Tigers invented the suicide vest. The Hare Krishnas stockpiled arms at one point and believed a prophecy they would take over America by force. The Kali cult known as Thugees robbed and killed travellers in 19th century India. They were a huge problem for the British.
Buddhists? I can’t think of any. Taking a human life is very bad karma for Buddhists. The same goes for Hindus, but they’re more flexible. There is a whole caste devoted to war, the Kshatrias, and they’re one down from Brahmins. Sikhs are also quite martial and don’t mind fighting for a cause. Sikhism is a crossover religion between Hinduism and Islam.
But no, I can’t think of anyone as brutal or as dogmatic or as stupid as the Arab Salafist schools. These ones take the cake. This thinking is enticing to fundamentalists. They have one thing the equally fundamentalist haters on sites like this lack - they’re prepared to die for their cause.
They’re dangerous, and they’re not going anywhere. If anything, they’ll multiply. The more shades of grey that get offered up in an increasingly pluralist, morally relative and globalised world, the more the kick back from those who want black and white. Respond in kind, and you give them what they’re after.
And so your response is relentless relativising (aka spineless apologetics) because that's a poke in the eye for the fanatics?
The properly pluralistic answer is Napier's to the Hindus wanting to persist with their little cultural custom of sati. "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Accommodating Muslim and other cultural pathologies - your pluralistic relativising - means that the cultures that do not believe in pluralism - wahabbism, salafism, for example - become dominant. The most intolerant cultures are not embracing tolerance and pluralism. Allowing them in is mad. Letting them globalise themselves is mad. Tolerating intolerance is mad.
So, Soren, you'd prefer a homogenised world? Where everybody is a pale imitation of the sanitised Western culture you glorify so much?
Suttee was a terrible custom but it was India's. You don't think it was wrong for the British to destroy Indian culture when they invaded and conquered the sub-continent?
Would it have been better for the Indians to have come to the decision to end this cultural practice themselves?
And that is the reality of what you preach. You have no tolerance for diversity, even when it is practised within the law of the land as it is in Australia by the overwhelming majority of migrants. When one considers that even the British were immigrants and refused to assimilate to the customs of the Indigenes, it's rather ironic don't you to have their descendants (and their fellow travellers like yourself) declare that all new migrants must conform to their ideas on behaviour?
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