being in a straitjacket doesn't earn you merit.

Submitted by Mohammed Waza Khiddif Id'ullah (Australia), Feb 10, 2015 at 00:52

Let me posit an alternative explanation, which is also incomplete: The Muslims are justified, in some respects, for looking upon Westerners as sinners and hypocrites.

Their position is hardly laudable. If you are held in he vicelike grip of fear because big scary allah is going to get you if you transgress the sharia - the of course one consolation will be to look down on people actually enjoying their lives

There's no envy there: Why should a Muslim envy someone for being spiritually and morally inferior to him?

But they are not - that is just his/her perception of course. Basically they are living up to a set of bizarre rules . It is amazing that muslims think that '5 pillars of islam' is going to bring about a form of moral order better than the Bblical 10 commandments.

I was wrong in those posts, in saying that this was a "European" phenomenon. Actually, it is a Northwest European phenomenon: South and East Europeans are generally against homosexuality -- and perhaps less tolerant as well (I haven't researched this last point). On the other hand, South and East Europeans have very corrupt societies, which Northwest Europeans do not have.

So is this a racial thing - Anglo-celtic-nordic vs latin/slavic - or a religious thing Lutheran vs Catholic/Orthodox? Overall character traits are very noticeable when you go to Europe - I've spent many months in northern Europe - and the difference between latin and scandinavian societies are very marked.

And the Arabs? Take a look at this UN-generated map of AIDS. AIDS is very prevalent in Christian Sub-Saharan Africa, but virtually absent in Muslim-Arab North Africa and the Middle East. It's also prevalent in Buddhist Thailand and Myanmar, but not so in Muslim Indonesia and Bangladesh. These differences are not due to chance coincidence:

Note that Islam allows underage marriage, multiple wives - and also other practices apparently.

One can definitely find a cause-and-effect relationship: AIDS in Christian Africa is spread by condoned sexual practices that are forbidden by the Bible; and a general lack of AIDS among Muslims can probably be attributed to their prudishness.

You've not supplied stats on Aids etc in muslims living in the West. Nor taken into account the fact that people in many of the countries shown have much shorter lifespans than Westerners - so there will be fewer cohorts presenting with Aids in their 50's, 60's and 70's. Also - sub-Saharan Africans can be Christian - but also muslim and animist.

For every point I bring up about Muslims doing the right thing, of course, someone could come up with a counter-argument. Muslims cut off the hands of thieves,

Of course. If you live in a society that straitjackets all expression through fear of repercussions - you'll ed up with a sick and repressed people - who just want to take out their frustrations on all the 'sinners'.

In a truly free society - you must have the freedom to do the wrong thing - and accept the consequences of course. People learn from their mistakes - but must be allowed to make the mistakes in the frst place.

What occurred to me, is that the distance between the entangled particles is irrelevant: The particles do not transmit information to one another: The information is intrinsic to them.

They become linked - so although they may be 5 light years apart - their reversal of the spin of either 'particle' will alter the spin of the other instantaneously. So - in some way - space becomes irrelevant - everything is as accessible as anything else on some other level.

The objects do not "communicating" gravity to one another. Rather, the law of gravity operates in all the objects; it is part of their nature.

My understanding is that gravity is the effect of mass bending space-time.

This all brings us back to John 1, which states that everything in the universe, as we know it, was made by the word (i.e. a specific piece of information) of God. That "word", in our observable universe, includes all the laws of physics.

Hindus would understand it as being the primordial vibration. Some quantum physicists would describe the superstring soup in which we live and move and have our being.

There is no philosophical reason, moreover, for all matter to obey, say, the law of gravity. It would be philosophically just as valid, to have a universe in which the "law of gravity" worked in the opposite direction, causing things to fly apart. That might not promote life, though, as gravity does -- which is why I say that there is a wisdom behind all the laws we are governed by: a wisdom that facilitates what we know as "life".

This is getting into the theory of inflation and the 'multiverse' Which some suggest leads to a multiplicity of universes - in fact an infinity of universes. In our particular Goldilocks universe - everything is 'just right'. There's just enough gravity (and dark matter and energy) to allow the formation of galaxies and stars, the ratios between sub-atomic forces that allow the interaction of particles/waves to form matter is just right etc. And several other 'coincidences' that have occurred - so that out of the infinity of possible universes - we just happen to live in this one - and this is what we see. I don't subscribe to this theory - but some cosmologists do. Some more honest ones just admit they haven't got a f^#king clue.

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