Answer to abdellah

Submitted by answer_to_abdellah (United States), Feb 23, 2006 at 18:16

abdellah, asks:

i see a lot of blame to islam and muslims , i have one question if someone could answer then i will believe that islam is religion of terrorism.

why islam is the most growing religion in the world?

ANSWER: It's really very simple Abdullah. NEVER commit the sin of taking statistics out of context or confer meaning to a statistic beyond the parameters of what can be factually accessed. Islam is counted to be the most "growing" religion in the world because of the rate of addition of persons who call themselves Muslims is increasing faster than the rate of say "Baptists" or "Malaysian Frog worshipers". The increase in numbers is coming from mostly new births - not from new converts to the faith. The western world witnessed a huge increase in population growth following World War II. Until recently higher infantile death rates in developing countries and the third world have limited potential population explosions. Increases in Western medicines and better nutrition are largely responsible for decreases in infant fatalities in Arab/Muslim nations. Added to that are the still consistent young ages which Muslims reproduce and the shockingly high numbers of children they have compared to western nations and you have now an "Arab" world baby boom similar to what the US went through post World War II.

In short - Muslims are breeding like bunnies and their children are living instead of dying, just like what happened in the US and Europe one and two generations ago.

The solution to the problem is education and true equality of women and men instead of mere lip service. Better medicines and better education in the western world and better access to family planning options quickly stopped the practice of teenage girls running off and getting married and popping out 7 kids before they were 30 in the hopes that 3 or 4 of them would survive to reproductive age. That isn't the case everywhere in the world. Unfortunately many "developing" countries only bother importing the part that concerns "medicines" and ignore the options of education and family planning. Families stay poor and ignorant and shoulder the burdens of financially supporting 7 - 10 children that mostly all survive. Their children aren't dying from rubella and rickets anymore. I guess when you have 10 kids you can afford to let a few of them go blow themselves up. When you only have one or two children, the parents put as much money into educating their children as possible and pay serious attention to "career" choices that put those children in harms way.

Eventually, the Arab population explosion will find itself aging and those who considered themselves deprived as the result of being reared with 9 other hungry mouths will choose the option of controlling their own family sizes and the rate of "increase" you are pointing to as some phenomena of religious success will turn in the other direction.

Population, while steadily growing overall historically, always makes adjustments to keep itself in check. Whether that's mass starvation from lack of food sources, war or disease or increases in the percentages of homosexuality or personal choice to limit owns own reproductivity to manageable numbers. Arab nations, regardless of what they want to believe, are no different than anyone else and equally subject to the natural laws of humanity. Arab nations have historically chosen "war" as their method of choice.

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