I'm curious Dafydd, did you read Steyn's book?

I think the more interesting aspect of his argument was the birth rate part; in a few decades, even if the West (in Europe, at least), are ready and willing to fight the good fight, there simply won't be enough of them left to do so. In some cases, he makes it a question of whether population tension or economic collapse will be the first to come.

Not that I can characterize Europe's muslim populations. If, let's say France, becomes majority muslim, will that France resemble the France of today? Will a majority of those muslims become westernized and liberal/secular?

I don't know. I'm not optimistic, though.

Dafydd, I'm impressed by your reasoning and knowledge on most subjects, but not on religion and religious history. The reasoning behind the dismissal of many of the verses in Exodus isn't that they *actually* require a stern disapproval, but rather that they have no bearing whatsoever on a modern situation (they were given explicitly for the purpose of purifying the covenental "children of Israel", along with other commandments with similarly explicit reasonings). In other words, both slippery liberals and strict textualists can agree that the command to kill does not apply to us. (I'm also unimpressed by your interpretation of the reformation as transforming Christianity into something peaceful -- as much as I like it, the reformation did nothing of the sort; but Christianity started out not merely peaceful, but absolutely pacifist.)

But what of Islam? The command to kill is a vibrant part of its history, as interpreted by its only great prophet. One can perhaps get slippery and liberal... Perhaps, for a while (until it turns one's brains to mush and destroys one's ability to reproduce either physically or mentally). But anything else you do, whether textualist or historical or pragmatic, leads back to killing and gaining wealth through conquest.

Hal:

I'm curious Dafydd, did you read Steyn's book?

Yes I did. Surprised? I have the impression you assumed I hadn't.

I think the more interesting aspect of his argument was the birth rate part; in a few decades, even if the West (in Europe, at least), are ready and willing to fight the good fight, there simply won't be enough of them left to do so.

The argument is specious, because he makes a number of assumptions whose sole purpose is to justify his predetermined conclusion. For example, in calculating European population projections, he doesn't count immigration -- because he assumes all immigrants from "Muslim countries" will necessarily be on the side of the jihadists.

• Steyn uses a static analysis to guess at future birthrate trends.

He assumes that a declining birthrate will never turn into a rising birthrate, because he never analyzes why the birthrate dropped in the first place... which I believe to be rampant secularism.

Oh, he mentions that; but he doesn't take the next step: Asking what might reverse that. And one prime possibility is a rising renaissance in faith in response to confrontation by an alien faith -- in this case, Islam.

In other words, as Moslems push in Spain or France, the populace tends to push back... and one natural way to push back is to regain one's own forgotten faith in traditional Christianity (call it "reactionary revivalism," if you like). We see it in France and Spain with the revival of Catholicism, concommitent with the rise of conservatives like Sarkozy and ultra-nationalists like LePen. We see it in Germany, with the Christian Democrats back in power.

We even see it in Iran, with the fascinating revival of Zoroastrianism -- despite the death penalty it carries.

(I'm not religious, by the way; but I believe society must be for it to survive in the face of this kind of sustained ideological assault, whether from socialism of Islamism.)

• Steyn uses static analysis to imagine an extended lifespan as simply spending longer as a feeble, old man on welfare. He does not even consider the possibility of people living to be strong and vigorous, even at age 150 or older.
• He simply equates the total number of warm bodies with wealth, ignoring the exponential increase in information -- which correlates much better with wealth (America is much richer than India, for example).

• He talks about the decline of population in the "developed world" from 1970 to 2000... but it's clear he's not including either China or India; which means, I suppose, that he expects them to remain frozen in the wealth-generation timestream.

But those two countries -- which together make up about a quarter of the entire population of the globe, and neither of which is Moslem -- have rapidly expanding economies, and are becoming freer, more capitalist, and more democratic every decade.

Steyn makes the same mistake that a lot of conservatives make. They accuse liberals of always pointing out problems but never offering solutions.

Steyn points out a number of problems in the West which are indeed challenges; and in the last chapter, he has a page and a half of suggestions, some of them very good.

But -- a page and a half? In a 200+ page book? For God's sake, shouldn't a careful development of those ideas have composed the bottom two-thirds of America Alone?

If he had just cut the snark to about 25% of what he wrote, he would have had plenty of room for a truly helpful examination of what we could do to prevent us going down the road that Europe is on, and even how to round Europe up and herd them back to the straight and narrow path.

Then maybe he would have gotten the serious reviews he whines about not receiving; and I can't imagine his sales would have suffered. (It probably would have sold better; there are more optimists than pessimists among American readers.)

Thomas P.M. Barnett spends most of the Pentagon's New Map discussing solutions; and he has just published a new book, Blueprint for Action, which is almost nothing but.

In fact, there are a huge number of ideas for winning the wider (I mean much wider) war for civilization against barbarity... and Steyn doesn't even suggest the most obvious action item: re-Evangelizing Europe.

It doesn't even matter what sect; we should be sending all manner of evangelists into the continent -- so long as they are Jews or Christians, the religions of the West. (Though where you'd find Jewish evangelists, I don't know.)

We should commission short but truthful histories of Catholicism, Lutheranism, Protestantism, Judaism, and other religions -- even Islam, and remember, I said truthful histories -- translate them into a bunch of languages, including Arabic, Pashtun, and Farsi, along with every European language, and distribute them as best we can. Certainly send out viral copies via the internet, disguised by randomly generated subjects and return addresses.

Yes, I mean Judeo-Christian evangelical spam to inundate not just Europe but the ummah as well!

And for that matter, I'll bet you could find some courageous believers with special-forces training who could be airdropped into Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan and start converting Moslems.

Our culture is powerful and resiliant; Steyn mostly only sees the fringe trappings, such as government officials. When he notices the real people -- as when he praises the passengers on Flight 93 -- he always seems to treat them as aberrant in some way; but in fact, that is the norm.

The norm has merely been suppressed for a few decades (during the Cold War, mostly). But it's a gas cannister under increasing pressure.

I think it better to cap it with a nozzle than just sit around waiting for it to explode willy nilly.

Dafydd

Wtanksleyjr:

Dafydd, I'm impressed by your reasoning and knowledge on most subjects, but not on religion and religious history. The reasoning behind the dismissal of many of the verses in Exodus isn't that they *actually* require a stern disapproval, but rather that they have no bearing whatsoever on a modern situation (they were given explicitly for the purpose of purifying the covenental "children of Israel", along with other commandments with similarly explicit reasonings).

W, I would caution you against assuming that if I don't mention something, it's because I'm ignorant of it.

I'm well aware of the ratinalization and justification of why we no longer must obey all 613 mitvahs in Tanakh, or why we don't go on crusades and such. And they're very good rationalizations, particularly those of my own people, the Jews: via the Talmud, we have hundreds of years of experience explaining away everything that no longer suits a modern world.

But that's not how the Jews and Christians saw things as recently as the Middle Ages... long after the Nation of Israel ceased to exist.

Christians certainly read quite literally those biblical verses about killing witches right up into the 18th century.

And riddle me this: Orthodox Jews who keep strictly kosher today -- how many also send their wives and daughters away to special buildings during the menstrual cycles, to avoid touching or interacting with them and becoming "unclean?"

Heck, how many Jews even keep strictly kosher these days? Certainly not I; I'm completely secular.

Or to get really devious, how many hire a gentile boy to come round and turn on lights and such on the Shabat, so they don't themselves violate the rule against working?

I think you missed my point: Such accomodations with modernity are not a cheapening of religion; they are its maturation. Islam's problem is that it's immature; just in sheer timeframe, Islam is as old as Christianity was in about the year A.D. 1400 -- when witches were still burnt and hanged with great abandon, and the one holy and apostolic Church was still both militant and thoroughly integrated into the secular authority: You could still be executed for apostasy, heresy, or even sometimes blasphemy.

Today, most Moslems around the world practice a very much less totalitarian faith than that practiced -- or at least preached -- by the jihadists.

Were the West to decisively prove that jihad doesn't work, and maintain the proof over the next few decades, I'm quite sure that the number of more or less moderate Moslems would grow tremendously; while the percent of extremists would correspondingly shrink.

And mental elisions, reinterpretations, and other accomodations will rapidly occur, just as they did under Judaism and Christianity.

And you know what? The rationalizations they offer will be just as compelling as those of the Jews and Christians.

Dafydd

Holy cannoli. Reptile on a rampage! I love love love your optimism and the way you boldly think figure eights around conventional wisdom.

Couple of random comments:

I was quite shocked and actually relieved to read your comments about Steyn's book. I haven't bought it and don't to, especially now that you've confirmed my suspicions. I am weary and wary of all the talk of demographics, which seems to be perverted by so many people with extreme agendas these days.

Incidentally, are you aware that Mark Steyn is an ordained Baptist minister?

The re-evangelizing of Europe is profoundly important, and it is happening, however gradually. I personally know an American Evangelical family from Georgia on a semi-permanent mission in Germany -- 3 or 4 years on. The periodic news I receive is very heartening.

As for "Judeo-Christian spam" -- what a terrific idea. Lots more nutrition than the canned stuff.

Finally, have you heard about the book No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan? My husband is just about finished with it, and from his comments, it seems Aslan expands upon your themes about the reformation, maturation, etc. of Islam. I have a feeling you'd be impressed by his writing and arguments.

Dafydd, thanks for the excellent reply... Actually, I think your replies to the comments in this post are as interesting as the post itself.

BUT... I think I may have miscommunicated one of my points, probably because I failed to make the explanation general enough. I didn't intend to claim that there are Jewish and Christian justifications for not following the letter of the law that are persuasive. I meant to point out that the Mosaic Law seems to have been given from the start with the presumption that its followers would attempt to think about it in order to find the principles behind it in order to follow them.

It's interesting that the Jewish Law contains not just commandments, but situational explanations for many of the commandments -- and even in a single book, we find the circumstances change and the application of the law is said to change (for example, the Law originally required any animal killing to be done in the temple; later, this is modified to support settlement in a larger land -- allegedly, before the land was ever settled). As far back as history reaches, we find the Jewish people exploring those reasons to find the principles behind the laws.

Now, I certainly can hope this is a universal human characteristic, and not merely something specific to the Jewish tradition (and strongly encouraged by the Christian tradition, of course). The problem is that it doesn't seem to be universal, or at least the claim that it's universal is deserving of some support from those making the claim. It remains that a simple quotation from ancient Jewish scripture can justify obedience to the principle rather than the letter of the law (when the letter was given explicitly for obsolete circumstances); where's the justification for that in the Islamic scriptures? On the contrary, there's almost nothing to allow such interpretation. The Islamic scripture, unlike the Jewish, isn't a document narrating progressive revelation to a growing people; it's a singular divine dictation. And unlike the Jewish document(s), it doesn't give reasons for most of its rules.

Christians certainly read quite literally those biblical verses about killing witches right up into the 18th century.

They did so -- but not *up to* the 18th century; rather, they did so in fads and dribbles, most of them fairly late. They certainly didn't do so in the very early church; as I mentioned, they were utter pacifists up until they became a controlling force in the Empire, except for schismatics such as the Donatists (who attacked using clubs, because swords were "obviously" forbidden).

(By the way, I suspect that the doctrine of utter pacifism was a cause for much of the abuses that followed Christians gaining political power -- in much the same way that the phrase "war is hell" can justify committing any immoral act as part of war because you believe that war by nature cannot be made any worse. But I digress.)

My point is that the things you cite as characteristic of immature religions are simply not so... They're characteristic of ancient ones, not young ones. Ancient religions get entangled with the state; young ones fight it. The religion of ancient Israel was old when the Law was given (they were already older as a people than America is now).

So can you justify that either Islam itself, or people universally, will be likely to eventually "mature" to justify disobedience to the written law of Islam?

At last someone cuts through the demographic doom and gloom.

You know, 100 years ago people gripped about the Irish and Italians coming to America. How they would "over breed" and swamp the American Demographic. Seems laughable now.

The worst thing that can happen to the Jihadis is to start actually, seriously, threatening the west. My example is that a fly is buzzing around the room, but everyone is too lazy to get a fly swatter and chase it down. Everything changes when the fly lands on someone and bites hard.

What is the line from the song? "Pop will eat itself?" Only if there is nothing else on the menu. Islam currently is and will continue to be consumed for the foreseeable future.

I'm interested in your suggestions (in the comments, not the post) that the West will (and must) adapt to the pressure of Islam not by collapsing, but by rediscovering its own religion -- and evangelizing the Moslems.

This is fascinating. Have you made a post discussing this in more depth? Will you (please)?

It also seems to somewhat weaken, or at least equivocate, your confidence that the solution to Islam will come from within itself, if you also believe that the solution must involve evangelization by Christians and Jews.

Wtanksleyjr:

It remains that a simple quotation from ancient Jewish scripture can justify obedience to the principle rather than the letter of the law (when the letter was given explicitly for obsolete circumstances); where's the justification for that in the Islamic scriptures? On the contrary, there's almost nothing to allow such interpretation.

You're looking at it the wrong way 'round.

It's not a mathematical proof; reinterpretation isn't derived logically. Rather, you start with the conclusion, then try to find some way to justify it... which can always be done.

I think I have it: Rather than compare interpreting the Koran (or Tanakh) to a mathematical theorem, compare it instead to the Star Trek game.

You've watched the original show, right? When it was first on, I was a kid; and one of our favorite pasttimes was to take some completely illogical element of the show, assume it to be logical -- and then concoct an explation for how it could possibly work that way.

For example, the Enterprise is orbiting a planet, clearly well outside the atmosphere. The ship loses impulse power... and it begins "spiraling down" into the planet. (We knew we began outside the atmosphere, because Scotty kept warning it would hit the atmosphere in another eight minutes, and then "she'll break up for sure!")

Given that (a) ordinary objects in orbit do not require engines to stay there, and that (b) the Enterprise does, yet (c) there cannot be any logical error in the show, explain.

My answer: The warp engines actually alter the geometry of spacetime. At warp speed, this allows the ship to move quickly; but at sublight speeds, the fields create drag, which is more noticible the slower you go.

Thus, when you're very, very slow -- like in planetary orbit -- unless you maintain impulse power, the drag, via conservation of energy, will slow your orbit... hence you spiral down into the planet.

If you completely shut off your warp engines, the drag would stop; but it takes too long to shut the engines down, so that's not an option: You must fix the impulse engines, or she'll break up for sure!

See how it goes? I'm sure anyone who ever watched any incarnation of the show played the same game.

So think of reinterpreting the Koran as the Star-Trek game:

1. The Koran is always right;
2. But it says to do X, and we need to do Y;
3. So clearly, we're just not properly interpreting those suras correctly... they really mean Z!

This is true for all religious reinterpretation in all religions. Sometimes it's easier, as with Mosaic law... but it's always possible: It requires only ingenuity, which all human cultures have in spades.

Dafydd

Wtanksleyjr:

It also seems to somewhat weaken, or at least equivocate, your confidence that the solution to Islam will come from within itself, if you also believe that the solution must involve evangelization by Christians and Jews.

Not at all; most Moslems won't convert. They will change Islam itself to make it more reality-based.

Here, let's attack this from the other direction. In any time and place, there is an optimal range of religiosity for a culture. When the culture has moved outside the ORR in either direction, it creates destructive forces.

If the culture is not religious enough, you get a lack of belief in the future, hence a lack of interest in sacrifice -- and ultimately, a lack of interest, therefore, in breeding. Everybody would rather party like it's 1999.

But if a culture is too religious, you get a distrust of science, hence a culture that refuses to solve its physical problems (no need to plant crops because God will provide manna), a refusal to take personal responsibility for anything (insh'allah), the refusal to abide by civilized rules of behavior (Allahu akbar!)... and you're left with the conundrum that the only way to survive is continuous expansion.

There is always a limit to such expansion -- you run up against another, more powerful culture; or even if you conquer the world, the world itself is finite... and lacking basic science (which requires free inquiry, which is forbidden because it might conflict with scripture), you can't colonize other planets.

Thus, eventually, you hit a hard wall, and your culture is no longer able to sustain itself and collapses.

Hence, there is always a socially evolutionary pressure pushing any culture back into the ORR. In a society with a Type I error, this means pushing them to be more religious; in a society with a Type II error, it pushes them to be less religious.

By evangelizing some of the Moslems, we introduce more pressure to rework Islam itself to push the culture back inside the ORR... because the introduction of new ideas always makes it harder to maintain exclusivity over belief within the whole culture (which is why cultures try to isolate themselves from other cultures -- as the Jews did with dietary laws, dress codes, speech codes, behavioral codes, and so forth).

In the end, we do not need to obliterate Islam; that's impossible in any event (even Mark Steyn agrees). What we need to do is introduce enough reality into the system that it's forced back into the ORR.

And we also need to introduce more religiosity into our own culture, so that it, too, is forced back into the ORR -- from the other direction. There are two dysfunctional societies glaring at each other; the solution is to make each society more functional... at which point, they'll become too interested in living la dolce vita to want to fight each other.

It's structurally the same as solving the problem of two empires fighting continuous warfare (think of England and Spain in the 1500s-1600s) by democratizing each and making each more capitalist; a capitalist democracy is too interested in creating wealth to start a war: Reforming the social "infrastructure" automatically reforms national behavior.

Is that a more lucid explanation of what I mean?

Dafydd

Interesting read; comments too. I was at the Gathering of Eagles with my fellow veterans, so my attitude about the future of our country has improved somewhat with the turnout I saw. But I don't have much faith in most Americans supporting the long war necessary to defeat the Islamicfascists. During the struggle against communism, there was an agreement on the need and usually on the policy to combat the “enemy”. Those days are gone and now we have a foreign policy rift since we are in a hot war, not a war of words and ideology. Sacrifice, ha, that is for others. I don’t know what it takes to get America’s citizens on a psychological war footing, but I’m not as confident as you that it is possible.

AMR:

But I don't have much faith in most Americans supporting the long war necessary to defeat the Islamicfascists.

They don't need to support anything. The people need merely to refrain from actively fighting for surrender.

All that is necessary for good to triumph is that selfish and mindless men do nothing.

(By the way, I'm not sure how old you are; but I can assure you, there was no "agreement on the need" or policies to combat Communism during the Cold War. It was just as bad as today -- with the parties in the same positions they now hold... except Democrats owned the House and usually ran the Senate... and spent a lot of time in the presidency as well.)

We live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy, thank heavens; the president has tremendous plenary powers to wage war almost on his own.

Throw in a Congress afraid, for political reasons, to actually kill American troops by cutting off their funding in the middle of a war (and they should be afraid to do that!), and any president can wage war virtually indefinitely, so long as Americans suffer no catastrophic battlefield defeat.

Just watch; in the end, Congress will give Bush a clean emergency supplementary funding bill, just as he demands. First they'll try to pass one larded with pork and with micromanaging the war; but when that fails, they'll slink back and give him the clean version.

Dafydd

Dafydd, yes, your presentation of a possible future makes sense. And I certainly agree that a more liberal interpretation of the Koran and Hadith would be easier to live with than the current strict interpretation. And best of all, I have to entirely agree that a 4-pronged offence is better than just a single attack (the 4 prongs: fight them, evangelize them, liberalize them, and correct ourselves).

I think we'll win. I'm optimistic.

And I guess even the partial success of one of those will help us more than not trying. I don't see how liberalizing them (even from the inside) could "work" in any complete way; but it could definitely make things easier for the other parts of the task (because even though most won't allow themselves to be liberalized, some will -- and they will have more success, and they will eventually set laws).

So, therefore; each man (and woman) as they have the ability:

+ men of action: defend our nation and fight them.
+ reasonable men (especially Moslems yourselves): explain to them reality, and make it clear that the current interpretations do not conform to it.
+ religious men: work on their hearts; show them how God has revealed Himself.
+ all men: work on our own actions. We've created a society that any sane society must fear; we waste our people's cultural strength and wealth, and from the outside, anyone can tell that a poor nation which adopts our practices would collapse, not because of spending but because of rampant social disintigration.

Do I read you right?

(And thanks for the clarification.)

A note: it's significant that while the Koran does not (to my knowledge) include any instruction that claims that re-interpretation is reasonable (unlike the Torah and New Testament), it does make it clear that Allah's later sayings can contradict and obsolete his earlier ones. A question is, in what order were which sayings written? THAT information is not present in the Koran, and so is open to reasonable question.

Wtanksleyjr:

I think I agree with everything you just wrote above. With one possible minor exception: I'm not entirely sure, but it almost seems as if you think I'm Moslem.

I'm not; culturally, I'm a Jew, but I'm completely secular and agnostic. (Note: not atheist.)

But if that's not what you meant above, then we're in 100% agreement!

Strange, is it? A self-professed secular agnostic believes that it's vital for civilization that most people in a society be fairly religious... and believe in a specific kind of religion: what Dennis Prager calls "ethical monotheism."

My understanding of ethical monotheism is that a person believes in a theistic God (like the Judeo-Christian God) -- omniscient, omnipotent, and the personification of Good -- and also that the highest priority of that God is that people behave ethically and morally towards one another. (There is a necessary element of subjectivity here, naturally.)

All but the most extreme and bizarre sects of Judaism and Christianity are ethical monotheisms by my understanding of Prager's definition; most forms of Islam are not... they're monotheistic, all right, but they by and large believe that Allah's highest priority is converting people to Islam; and His second highest is ritual worship. Both of these priorities supercede ethical treatment.

But some forms of Islam are ethical monotheisms; which means the task of all EM-Moslems is to convert the rest of the ummah to their version of Islam; and your point above about liberalizing Islam boils down to helping the EM-Moslems in their task.

Any German Moslem who reacted angrily or violently to that German judge's ruling that the Koran gave a husband the right to beat his wife is a good candidate for our aid.

Another good candidate is Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, from an Arizona group called American Islamic Forum for Democracy. The AIFD is raising money to serve as a legal defense fund against any passenger on the "flying imams'" airplane who ends up getting sued by the imams for reporting their suspicious behavior.

Power Line has a link to an interview with Lt.Cdr. Jasser here; it's 15:43 long, but it's imperative that we all listen to men like him.

If we are to win the war against global jihad, the Jassers of the world will be our greatest asset.

Dafydd

Yup, Dafydd, it sounds like you agree 100% with me (since I don't think you're a Moslem; I was addressing all men in my 4 points of action). So as someone else once said, I am "never first, but always final." (I think the person who said that originally was plagarizing my version of the quote.)

Seriously, though, thanks for clarifying.

Dafyyd, a related Must See interview from 60 Minutes last night... jawdropping, encouraging, and very, very revealing on many levels. Most shocking is that it aired on CBS... I have to give Bob Simon a lot of credit. The complete segment can be viewed online.

Jihadist Renounces Violence
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/23/60minutes/main2602308.shtml

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