Re: "Who will guarantee..?.". Ans: threats!

Submitted by MelM (United States), Dec 9, 2006 at 21:39

Can Islam be permanently diverted from jihad? I think the rest of the world will have to monitor and contain radical Islam as needed. So, I guess I'm advocating a "defeat and contain" strategy. We'll have to stop any attempt to rekindle "world jihad." Islam will have to know that any such attempt will not succeed: this is vital. Hopefully, Muslims will reject the murderous and opperssive parts of Islam just as the other religions have done and learn to like the results.

But, can any of the religions be guarenteed to remain content with their fangs pulled out and their claws cut? When I was a kid, I had no idea there would be an explosion of the marginal "evangelicals" in the U.S. Now, they want to wreck natural science starting with evolution and are working 24/7 to break down the wall between church and state. And, this is a problem world wide: I even have a bookmark for a Web site trying to combat Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, for example.

Unfortunately, there will always be a risk that dogmatists will want to return to the "pure religion". So, in the longer range, only a new and very strong Enlightenment will first marginalize, and finally put all the cults into the history books where they belong. Reason is the "anti-toxin" for religion. Everyone must face the fact that unreason is extremely dangerous to life and freedom--and this goes as well for the secular forms of unreason: someday humanity will escape from the nightmare that unreason has made of too much of man's history. I can see the escape starting but I'll not live to see it completed.

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