I doubt these posts will make me popular.
I'm a little too sensitive and pragmatic for a world with the problems we have. I share with the jihadists a rejection of the unpleasantness of those with different values. The only difference is that my interest in eliminating them from the geo-political world is based on my non-religious disgust with fanatisism based on superstition and theirs is religious disgust with those who fanatically reject superstition. The reallignment of a few words is all that separate us.
I don't reject god, I do believe that organized religions don't fit well in my theory of physics.
Religiions evolve. Islam has evolved to allow violence. It has also evolved to reject science to protect it against the unfaithful. These two things work together. This isn't to say that all muslims are violent. It is, however, the case that the religion was designed by a milatarist for his own purposes of conquest. The rejection of science came later as teh opportunities to question superstitions have increased.
Most religions have an air of conquest in them if they are viral, that is if they seek to bring in others and, in the extreme case, eliminate them. Religions of this type are a disease of the mind to the extent they are grounded in unquestioned faith. Faith is important on every level, without faith we have precious little of anything. When faith is unquestioned it is fanatisism. We are, however, dependent on faith in our personal relationships, often disappointingly so. That works both ways.
The movements counter to faith are also diseases from the perspective of the religions. The virus has to destroy logic to survive within a person to ssupend belief in the words of the movie makers. We are primitive enough to easily suspend belief, without that there would be no fiction writers.
Christian religions have evolved to adopt tollerance. They did not start that way. Both have a common birth from Judaisim which is a less advanced religion of conquest. Both evolved to be religions of conquest, but while Islam has adopted a more violent direction, christianity has evolved to be less violent.
Tollerance is naive, but noble. The more tollerant a religion, the weaker it will become. The fundamentalist movement in christianity is an effort to fight against logic just as the fundamentalist movement in islam is to ensure the spread of the religion against science. It is science and not christianity that is the operational force that is strengthening the radical brach of islam.
In a country built on tollerance we can question religion easily but we also tollerate hate and where one group seeks to create chaos and warfare between religions (of science or faith) tollerance battles with fanatisim.
The weapon of christianity is a poor weapon against fundamentalist or radical islam as long as tollerance is in place. The only real defense is science.
Our current political elections reflect the war between tollerance and fanatisism.
If you tollerate a religion up to the point of violence and not beyond, then you are basically treating the religion with anti-biotics to which it will eventually become immune. The result in this case is terrorism, but social viruses and biological viruses are creative.
The crusades of Islam have been replaced with terrorism in this case and in some cases with migration. The disease analogy would look at the middle east and parts of africa outside the middle east as a boil which builds an infection that bursts letting forth the less virulent strains with the virulent ones loose on the world. The reason that these areas are infected is not because of anything special about them, but because the weaponized version of the religions has excluded or driven out science in the name of driving out dissent. It is an extremely biological analogy that appears to work very well.
Erradication is a nice concept, but it means rejecting humanity in favor of safety. It is like making drugs illegal, you replace one type of immorality with another (prisons, loss of privacy and the ultimate over-reaching centralized power of the nazis). Like drugs, the real solution is in education and obtaining a population capable of learning and helping one another. That is schools, compelled science lessons would do more to eradicate fundamentalism than anything else.
Unfortunately, the more dogmatic a religion, the less inclined to education it is Any religion is going to require faith to stand up and the more illogical the religion, the more it has to force faith and reject education. Often, religions like the Muslim and Christian religiions have embraced and rejected science depending on the level of enlightenment. When they get enlightened enough they start to fail and then there is a counter-movement of the disease portion rejection science increasinly to protect the foundation.
Historically, plagues of religion (pick one) have been survived and they've burned themselves out, surprisingly disease like, and no less toxic. This is reflected by the Muslim past religious outbreaks, the dark ages and the crusades . The west has reached the point where science has weakened religion and you can see counter-movements ignoring climate change (warming is just one possible aspect), denying reproductive self determination, a religious designation of life compared to a practical one. In the middle east while much of the technology has been rejected; bomb making science and weapons of individual or mass destruction have been adopted wholesale. This death is not for a logical reason, it is soley based on faith based. There is no evidence relied upon, no logic, just killing, enforcing belief based on belief where the "faith" is in a god that could force belief if it really existed. Rather than challenge this, the faithful just kill others.
I'm not saying I don't have faith in science (up to a point), I'm not saying I reject god (the idea that there is nothing godlike about g-space is inappropriate, but it also ensures taht anything in o-space is not god based since it's predetermined and happens at one time as a result of equation imposed in g-space. Given this concept, why is everyone killing everyone else.
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