Post: #51

(01-05-2016 06:29 PM)nek Wrote:  

(01-04-2016 08:15 PM)Saga Wrote:  Given the timing of their contemptible actions it seems likely that the Saudis (in addition to their usual geopolitical scheming) want to undermine the fragile detente between Iran and the US by blatantly instigating a confrontation and forcing the US to choose oil over decency as it always does.

(01-04-2016 06:57 PM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  Lets be honest here, Shia v Sunni is what this is all about. I say let them fight it out and we do business with the winner.

Shia Islam is far more tolerant towards other religions than most Sunni institutions are. Of all the problems that Islam is causing in the west, very few (if any) of them come from Shia sources.

I have an honest question but I'm worried it'd get me in shit here but here it goes. Do you think if Arabs were another religion on the large scale (I know there's Christian minorities and what not), that things would be different? For instance, if the socioeconomics were the same in the region but everyone was a different religion, would things be the same? I only ask b/c you're last paragraph got me thinking about this since the main Shia group is Persian, ethnically different than the Arabs.

Very, very difficult to tell. Catholic/Orthodox Christianity had the benefit of grafting onto the remains of Western/Eastern Roman Empire, respectively. The Romans were some of the best civic administrators the world has ever seen, and their thought processes were oriented towards practicality: they were superb civil engineers but shit at chemistry and metallurgy thanks to this bias. And the Western Roman Empire at least -- not sure about the Eastern -- had the benefit of its population being essentially homogenous or at least a combination of white ethnicities that didn't (apart from the Irish) didn't have that much of a problem getting along as a people. On top of that, Christianity also grafted onto itself the schools of philosophical thought the Romans had captured along the way, including most importantly Greek thinking and the gang of three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Christianity as originally built and the Christianity that migrated across into Rome were somewhat different things. It started originally as a Jews-only club, but St. Peter (one suspects somewhat at the browbeating of St. Paul) extended it to cover everyone -- Jews and gentiles alike. And that's before you get into the offshoots and the Gnostics and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the rest of that shit. Still: Christianity is not Islam. The commandments are different, the backgrounds of its founders are different, the thrust of the messages are different. Mohammed was a former salesman and later a warlord; Jesus as best we can tell was a carpenter and later itinerant rabbi who wound up crucified for the equivalent of Jewish heresy. Christianity doesn't really create an entire system of law and a complete code for life; Islam does.

Sam Harris notes the most crucial difference between the two is that Christianity preaches salvation from an internal transformation in its adherents, Islam preaches heaven only being accessible to those who go through an external transformation (blowing self up = 77 virgins, etc, etc). Compare and contrast the CIA FOI docs we've seen where the 1996 CIA assesses your average Ay-rab as being completely concerned with external validation for his actions, with his status in society.

So in short - no, I don't think you'd see the same thing were the whole region Christian, but religion, culture, society, and the twists of history all mingle together and make it difficult to winnow out what the change would be. Frankly it's all that fucking oil in the area that makes the difference. Once that stuff runs out or Mr Home Fusion reactors are produced, they'll be back on camels and walking on dirt rather than gold in a decade.