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Fundamentalist Islam's cargo cult
My take on the radical fringe of Islam is that it's a sort of cargo cult.
I think that fundamentally most people everywhere want prosperity and security for themselves and their families, and a sense that they're respected. The Islamic world once had all of those things. For the period from, say, AD800 to AD1400, Islam was one of the world's two ( Read more... ) -
Addendum
It may take me a while to reply to the comments on my last post as our capitalist utopia is unable to provide me with working ADSL... -
In defence of capitalism
In a recent post on her Livejournal, Ashley said:
I'm trying to figure out... are there any... traits and characteristics inherent to capitalism that are both unique and redeeming.
The real question should be "are there any traits or characteristics inherent to systems other than capitalism that are both unique and redeeming?" The answer to that ( Read more... ) -
Moral systems as tools
One of the deepest and hardest problems in philosophy is the relationship between the "world of values" and the "world of facts". The latter is the everyday world which can be investigated empirically, for example using the methods of science. In the world of facts the issue of the truth or falsity of statements is if not entirely unproblematic at ( Read more... ) -
Conversions
Someone over on that OPFOR thread asserted that conversion to Christianity in the Roman Empire was not coerced and conversion to Islam under the early Caliphate was. I took issue with this:
Although Constantine's Edict of Toleration was the high point of religious toleration in the Roman world, it didn't last for long. His heirs soon attempted to ( Read more... ) -
A brief comment on Islam then and now
Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings recently pointed out a post at OPFOR about the defeat of the Ottoman attack on Malta on September 11, 1565. The conclusion of that article was the same sort of anti-Islamic sentiment I've seen in plenty of other places:
The lessons for us today, almost five centuries hence, are equally important. The same ( Read more... ) -
Three pearls
This week, we've had a fifteen year old student visiting us on a work experience placement. He spent a while with the systems engineers, the network manager and the web designer, and then yesterday it was finally time for him to spend a few hours with me and Lisa. It turned out that his ultimate goal was to become a programmer, and so I was given ( Read more... ) -
The Pirenne Thesis and the End of Antiquity, Part 2a
As described in the first part of this essay, the Roman Empire had survived the strategic crisis caused by the rise of Sassanid Persia in the third century AD by comprehensively reorganising its military, political, economic and social structures. Following this restructuring, Rome once again flourished in the fourth century. However, unfortunately ( Read more... ) -
Locality, determinism and causality
A physical theory is local if it doesn't allow faster-than-light influences.
A physical theory is deterministic if a total knowledge of the current state of a system whose behaviour is governed by the theory exactly determines the future states of the system (or, more weakly, if the current state determines the outcome of all possible future ( Read more... )
