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“Finally, Wright briefly but ably surveys the evolution of Islam. He argues that Islam also reveals the adaptive nature of religion's responses to local conditions. (The more recent emergence of Islam—Muhammad died in 632 CE—permits a reasonably clear picture of the historical setting in which this faith developed.) When Muhammad resided in Mecca, he was a politically powerless prophet who, like many prophets before him, antagonized the rich and suffered the ridicule of the people. Under such circumstances, Wright says, the optimal strategy suggested by game theory for a religion is clearly one of tolerance and conciliation. And, Wright points out, those parts of the Koran that date from Muhammad's Meccan years are frequently conciliatory. Indeed Muhammad reaches out to, and expresses a degree of tolerance for, Jews and Christians ("To you be your religion; to me my religion.")

“But when Muhammad relocated to Medina, factual circumstances changed radically and rapidly. Muhammad's now numerous followers grew into a staggeringly powerful political and military force. Given these changed circumstances, Islam had fewer practical reasons to pursue a strategy of tolerance and the Koran, Wright says, began to sometimes speak in a less conciliatory tone. None of this, he insists, should surprise us. Nor is it unprecedented. During difficult or turbulent political times, the Hebrew Bible (in Second Isaiah) and the New Testament (in Revelation) also grew less tolerant of other beliefs.”

related material
islamic authoritarianism
the nature of cult recruitment - jihadi bombers
socialist religions

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belloc on islam

From chapter 4 of The great heresies by Hilaire Belloc, 1936

“Both in the world of Hither Asia and in the Graeco-Roman world of the Mediterranean, but especially in the latter, society had fallen, much as our society has today, into a tangle wherein the bulk of men were disappointed and angry and seeking for a solution to the whole group of social strains. There was indebtedness everywhere; the power of money and consequent usury. There was slavery everywhere. Society reposed upon it, as ours reposes upon wage slavery today. There was weariness and discontent with theological debate, which, for all its intensity, had grown out of touch with the masses. There lay upon the freemen, already tortured with debt, a heavy burden of imperial taxation; and there was the irritant of existing central government interfering with men's lives; there was the tyranny of the lawyers and their charges.”

What interested me was Bliar and Brown the Clown have produced the conditions in the UK that Belloc claimed left the door open for the success of Islam among the pagans!

end note

1. Hilaire Belloc, 1870-1953.
   A Frenchman who become a naturalised Englishman and was a M.P. for a while.
   He was fiercely Catholic.

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the web address for the article above is
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on conquest by infiltration - islam in the uk

“Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.”
—
“Although [the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board]’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.”
—
“ ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’ ”
—
“[...] the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.”
—
“The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

“In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.”

Melanie Phillips is becoming more organised and less hysterical. This time, she lays the case out well and forensically.

Conquest by infiltration and by threat from a foreign power is a tactic in which internationalist Europe is not experienced or sophisticated. Naturally, the Left as always believe only in appeasement. They have no ethics of their own, beyond vain parochial fashion.

They are usual useful fools of Marxism.

Islam is much more sophisticated, and naturally the Left cannot cope. How can an intellectual cypher like Hazel Blears be expected to understand. She couldn’t be trusted to run a play group, and the rest of the ‘New’ Labour Party is hardly much better.

Meanwhile, the pseudo-sophisticated whining goes on about an America with its far more vital society.

“It’s drowning all your old rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.” [The Oracle of the Dog, in The Incredulity of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)]

Or, as Cammaerts paraphrases it:

“The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”

It is about time Britain woke up to this reality.

Or, as Etienne Gilson puts it:

“Religion has its own work, which is to educate people who are too dull to understand philosophy, or too untutored to be amenable to its teaching. This is why religion is necessary, for what it preaches is fundamentally the same as what philosophy teaches, and, unless common men believed what it preaches, they would behave like beasts. But theologians should preach, not teach, just as philosophers should teach, not preach. Theologians should not attempt to demonstrate, because they cannot do it, and philosophers must be careful not to get belief mixed up with what they prove, because then they can no longer prove anything. Now, to preach creation is just a handy way to make people feel that God is their Master, which is true even though, as is well known by those who truly philosophize, nothing of the sort ever happened.”

The sheep-like population needs leadership, not the pseudo-sophistication of pseudo-academic Socialists wasters like Gordon Brown the Clown.

It’s one thing to empty the churches, it is quite another to abnegate responsibility and to leave the poor in spirit adrift in confusion.

From a Syrian exile; she has made several YouTube videos:

Links from Laudahn and simple.language

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