Hacker News Reader

Comment by hacker42 | Hacker News Reader

I think addressing cultural flaws more directly could make such social programs more effective.

Calling them cultural flaws and saying they need to be addressed is one of the worst first steps you can take, but setting aside that there are already many Muslims integrating into Western society without having directly addressed the those issues.

Simply allowing them to participate in Western society is enough to sufficiently "address" those issues, as many will naturally gravitate towards more progressive and liberal lifestyles.

I have seen many Muslim women driving, walking outside, and showing their faces without incident, but I think it's important to point out that there are plenty of non-Muslim cultures that punish unmarried women for public displays of affection (including simply being present with a non-relative male).

Why not call the flaws what they are? The diffusion of values seems to be a very slow process, if it works at all given the ever growing Muslim population. The percentage of third generation Muslims in Western countries who still don't really oppose ideas of violence and misogyny in the Quran and who would prefer to return to a social order of the lifetime of Muhammed is astonishingly high (~30%), and Muslim fanatics in the Middle East are also often highly educated. They know about Western values, but they don't value them. Why should they, given that our view is all wrong to them?

It boils down to the simple question whether value diffusion is faster than they breed and escape possible upcoming droughts and whether there really is potential for a major cultural clash. Some people say it's obvious in one way or the other. I really don't know. I am also not convinced by anything I'm writing, I am just trying to get some confirmation or disconfirmation of these sort of ideas.

And what would be the percentage of Christians in Western countries who don't really oppose ideas of violence[1] and misogyny[2] in the Bible and would prefer to return to a traditional social order?

[1] http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=21

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10635510/Women-...

There is a difference in the percentages and arguably in the degree of accepted violence and actually lived misogyny. There is definitely a difference in the extremes (Islam is currently the only ideology to produce suicide bombers in such large quantities). There is also a difference in that the Bible is regarded to consist of interpretations of God's words, whereas the Quran is regarded to contain a direct transcript of Allah's words.

And what would be the degree of accepted violence by Christian extremists, historically?[1][2][3][4] Can we even begin to compare it? Subtly narrowing the definition of "violence" to "suicide bombers" alone serves a political agenda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_antisemitism

Back then the inhibition level for violence was much lower than it is today, even in the Middle East. Also the Christian culture went through various changes, i.e. the French revolution and enlightenment, which have never occurred in Islamic cultures. Even the kind of enlightenment in the Golden Age were deeply motivated by religion and were hence inherently unstable and also limited.

I am talking about the cultural difference today, not in the past, about aggression and harmful traditions occurring in reasonably stable and educated middle classes. Note, that I am not trying to whitewash the past of Christianity; both sets of beliefs are bad in that they have or had the potential to produce fundamentalism and badly informed decisions, but I am just arguing for a qualitative difference between Islam and Christianity (especially today's Christianity and Islam), i.e. one is much worse than the other. Today's Christianity does not produce anything as Islam does in other troubled regions such as African countries, even though these people would be in their 'right' to take vengeance for e.g. centuries of slavery, right?

Literally Christians have been the most violent people of the 20th century by orders of magnitude.

But motivated by greed and (geo)politics, rarely by religion.

The last sentence in my previous comment was not very clear. What I meant to say is that there are many non-Muslim African countries which have suffered from Western exploitation, yet we don't witness the kind of religiously motivated violence as in Islamic countries with comparable histories. This is an indicator for different dispositions caused by different sets of cultural memes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com