Democracy and Intolerance

EGYPT: Muslims protest Coptic Christian governor in Qena | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times: "Thousands of mostly Muslim protesters swelled through the streets of the Egyptian city of Qena on Friday to demonstrate against the recent appointment of a new Coptic Christian governor.

Crowds gathered Immediately after prayers outside the city’s mosques, chanting against Gov. Emad Mikhael and Prime Minister Essam Sharaf: “Oh Sharaf, say the truth … you’re being unfair to us or not?” and “Oh freedom where are you ... Mikhael is standing between us and you.”

Mikhael, a police general who served under former President Hosni Mubarak, is the only Copt among 18 new governors named by Sharaf on April 14. The decision was met by anger and exasperation from the city’s Islamic extremists and ultra-conservative Salafi groups.

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Democracy will bring out the worst in any people - Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.

The people of the Middle East should learn from the (brief) democratic experience of the world. The democracies unleashed two major wars in the previous century. The first has been described as the "most democratic war in history" by historian J.M.Roberts.

The question of whether democracy promotes violence is an old one and goes back to Thucydides (his answer was 'Yes'). Two thousand years later, Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides to reveal the horrors of democracy.

The free world in history stands in sharp contrast to the subjugation of the rest of the world by it over 500 violent years. Where there was parliament, there was violence inflicted mostly on foreigners.

China could have conquered the world, and started out to do so, but then stopped. The Portuguese took up where they left off.

In Bangladesh, lynching - absolutely unknown during dictatorship - has become so commonplace, nobody even notices. In 2007, the country nearly experienced civil war between the two political parties, and the west had to call in the army to restore sanity.

We must remember that it's a western idea - democracy - that's causing all the mayhem.

To Dance Upon The Air

http://www.opednews.com/articles/To-Dance-Upon-The-Air-by-Iftekhar-Sayeed-091231-260.html

(click above for article)

Five former army officers will hang within the next few weeks in Bangladesh, raising deep questions about a people's right to protection from a tyrannical executive in the context of John Locke's political philosophy.

Excerpt:



"Seven High Court judges refused to hear the lower court's verdict: they declared themselves 'embarrassed' without explaining why. The names of these High Court judges should be engraved in gold – not golden – letters in the premises of the High Court. To any student of law, the reason for their refusal was transparently obvious – they did not wish to embroil the judiciary in a moral issue that had no legal redress without, at the same time, politicizing the judiciary. The distinction between law and morality has been clearly drawn by Immanuel Kant. The best illustration of the discrepancy was provided by Chief Justice Taney. A devout Catholic, he had emancipated all his slaves; yet, when the Dred Scott case came up, he had to assert that 'a black man has no rights'. This decision undermined the prestige of the Supreme Court: yet Taney was merely stating the law, keeping his deeply held belief that slavery was an evil to himself. The seven judges of the Bangladesh Supreme Court similarly, no doubt, wished to draw a line between morality and the law: this, they felt, was a moral issue, not a legal one, certainly not an open and shut case of murder. "

A Defence of Religion

A Defence of Religion


(click link above to read)


Certain western thinkers use rationality as a ground for the superiority of western civilisation, a ground that gives them the moral authority to look down upon, and manipulate, the "irrational". It may come as a shock to them to learn that we are all irrational, equally human.


Excerpt:

Hermes Trismegistos was believed to be Moses' contemporary: his writings gave an alternative account of creation, one in which man played a more central role. God, according to Hermes, had made man fully in his own image – not just as a rational animal, but as a creator in his own right. Man can imitate God, and he can create like the Creator, through alchemical applications – doing away with disease, want and old age. "It was a heady vision, and it gave rise to the notion that, through science and technology, man could bend nature to his wishes. This is essentially the modern view of science, and it should be emphasized that it occurs only in Western civilization. It is probably this attitude that permitted the West to surpass the East, after centuries of inferiority, in the exploitation of the physical world. ("science, history of." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, document.write(new Date().getFullYear()); 2008.) "

Retracing our steps a little, we shall recall the heliocentric preoccupations of Copernicus: these were directly influenced by Hermeticism. Inspired by Platonic mysticism, Hermeticism emphasized the source of light, the sun. The 15th century Florentine translator of both Plato and Hermetic writing, Marsilio Ficino, composed a work that very nearly idolized the sun: the young Copernicus was heavily influenced and went back to his native Poland to work on the problems of the Ptolemaic astronomy.

Therefore, the leading minds of Europe – Paracelsus, John Dee, Comenius, J.V.Andreae, Fludd and Newton – sought in alchemy "the perfection of man by a new method of knowledge" (Eliade, Volume three, p. 261 ).

It would appear, therefore, that modern science would have been quite impossible without religion as a source of inspiration; pace Bertrand Russell, religion contributed more than the calendar to civilisation.