The Perfection of Islam

By Eldritchfan

If you will forgive the lapse into poetic language, our enemy was born when those cave men huddled around their campfire heard the crack of thunder and the flash of lightning, and that first shaman stood up, pointed at the clouds and said ‘I know why that happened, and what the gods are telling us.’

Most likely, the gods were telling them to go kill all the residents of the neighboring cave and take their stuff.

Of course, religion has changed a lot since then: it’s gotten more refined.

Earliest man saw the world in anthropomorphic terms and so postulated agency everywhere. Their narratives represent attempts to place random events in a rational framework. It also represented the flawed base assumption that humanity and its actions were central to the universe and so projected the fasces principle as cosmic law.

With the advent of writing, mere oratory recital was set down and preserved. With that came the concept of scripture – that certain narratives were sacred and unalterable solid ground in this ever-shifting world.

With developments in technology, it was only a matter of time before another concept arose: that of empire, with a common language and roads to unite diverse lands. However, there was also the need to unite imperial subjects culturally with a sense of common identity. The best method of doing this? Religion.

In the case of Rome, the religion was Christianity, which outlasted Rome. And you know what? It could’ve been worse.

Christianity’s worst traits were mitigated and its doctrines influenced by classical thought and beliefs. Even as classical thought helped rationalize those myths and Greek culture and common language and Roman roads allowed for the spread of a single religion over an enormous area.

Furthermore, Christianity’s early status as an oppressed religion meant it could not be overtly violent. The brutal conquest of Christ the King had to be cloaked in metaphor or regulated to some far-future, near-mythical dream plane.

I despise religion in all its flavors, but in a contest between Christianity and Islam I am forced to favor Christianity, not because it is perfect, but because it is flawed and these flaws have carried unintended consequences.

Catholic Christianity played a part in holding European civilization together after the fall of Rome, as well as preserving knowledge and history (the knowledge and history they approved of).

Most importantly, it was valuable in helping beat back the Islamic jihad, and the Crusades despite being undertaken for irrational motives (Holy Land? Has there ever been a more stupid concept?) had the unintended consequence of revitalizing the Western intellect with the classical literature plundered from the Islamic world, and which the Muslims had themselves plundered.

Later, the Protestant movement rejected earthly church hierarchy and conceived the notion of sola scripture. That this happened about the same time as the rise of independent nation states and individualistic merchants within those states is not a coincidence I think. In any case, the rejection of temporal authority was a valuable contribution to the fight against tyrannous kings – a revolutionary aspect that Martin Luther loathed.

Protestant Bible idolatry had a few other benefits. Protestant Christianity spread literacy, circulating the idea that people should read and should want to read. And people wanted to learn to read in order to better hear their Master’s commands. However, literacy also opened people’s minds to all myriad of written sources, not just the Bible.

Furthermore, the Protestant ‘Reformation’ made another inadvertent contribution to Western intellectual development.

Lee Harris argues* that the need for various Protestant sects to debate their interpretations of the faith with each other and with Catholics** created a climate of reason by encouraging logical thought. Of course, logical thought was only approved of within limits and punished by blasphemy laws if it dared venture beyond, but still there was a much shorter step to full rationality.

Amid this conflict of papist and Protestant, king and merchant, some few were able to squirm free, find shelter and plant and cherish the seeds of the Enlightenment.

Another benefit of Christianity and Judaism is that as a result of the diverse hands and agendas that have gone into them there are diverse interpretations of the texts. And though all of them are ultimately unpalatable, the fact of diverse interpretation makes argument, debate and thought necessary.

Personal freedom was never the popular goal, nor the goal of the first Protestant and Catholic apologists. There was no reason why the public thought it should be the goal. That came later. By accident***.

To expand, while they are politically anti-authoritarian, they are metaphysically authoritarian, and so while Christianity may be used against individual tyrants, it will always support tyranny, because they worship the ideal of tyranny. Individual tyrants simply don’t measure up.

A pity, from the Protestant point of view, that we do not know who the Elect are. Then we could simply grovel and submit to them.

In his book, The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer said the Protestant movement was in reaction to the growing freedom and individuality of the time. A reaction against it. In the end, he concluded that if Martin Luther, John Calvin or any of the popes had access to the technology of the early Twentieth Century they would have ushered in a regime of genocide and tyranny to match anything from Hitler and Stalin.

As a caveat, I’ll specify that in practice there is no difference at all in terms of pure Christianity and Islam in terms of oppression.

In the absence of any other vector and, Christianity acted – to some extent and against its own basic premises – as a carrier for the beneficial ideas that had helped shaped it and in turn made its truly loathsome doctrines more palatable.

If Christianity is a prison, it is one that is flawed in its construction and still has the tools of release lying around, and if we and our descendents must live in a prison, the most we can hope for is one they might someday escape.

Sure, it would be nice if instead we could all go secular, but looking at the lay of the land I just don’t find that likely.

With all that in mind, it is inevitable that something like Islam would arise eventually develop, given the proper conditions. There is a hideous purity to Islam. You hear it in the very name: Submission. It is the perfect refinement of the fasces principle so bumblingly expressed in other faiths.

Islam benefitted from the flawed fasces memes of other faiths, and those flaws are elegantly eliminated in its construction.

Islam represents the perfect manifestation of the fasces principle in any ideology with the possible exception of Mormonism.

Ann Coulter once said Christians are perfected Jews. I go further: Muslims are perfected Christians.

What Christianity fumblingly gropes for, Islam refines and perfects. In Christianity, it is vaguely hinted at that deceit for the good of the faith may be justified and warfare may be necessary. In Islam, they are fully-formed doctrines. Wars over interpretation will not be accompanied by a climate of reason: the principle of abrogation renders issues of interpretation null and void. Islam will not inadvertently spread literacy: the Koran is in Arabic and must be read in Arabic, so learning to read will open no other doors****.

Protestant Bible idolatry merely claims their scripture is inspired, but Islam is able to take it to the next level entirely by claiming their text is a literal translation of a book existing on a heavenly plane.

As Neal Stephenson wrote in Snowcrash, scripture-based religion fulfills all the conditions of a virus. It is a set of instructions complete with a final overriding command: copy me and spread me.

The Koran is memetic perfection.

A perfectly designed virus of the mind, complete with defenses to fight off the countervailing memes of freedom and tolerance.

A perfection of the perversion first cobbled together so clumsily by that first shaman. The last link in a chain to bind the mind to the engine driving humankind to self-obliteration.

The only modern faith to make such claims is Mormonism, Islam’s Western counterpart and, I believe, potentially every bit as dangerous.

My own greatest fear – my worst case scenario – is that in the event of a civilization-wide collapse and reversion to barbarism, Islam (and/or Mormonism) will have its ascendency, and once established, it will rule what remnants of the human race remain, and from that fall, we will never rise again.

*And thus Harris’ later stance in this essay: http://www.lee-harris.org/2508/revisiting-the-stupid-party proves a betrayal of all the points he had previously made. It is also why I loathe Harris with a particular passion. He knows full well what he’s doing.

**Especially in secular countries, where there is no recourse to force or blasphemy laws to threaten dissent.

***The ugly truth that I’ve had to accept is that most people simply do not want to be free. Individual self-determination only underlines the individual’s limits, physical, mental and temporal. The rise of capitalism and the notion (true or not) that it’s actually possible to better your lot in this world and leave your children in a better position, helped.

****As Sam Harris said, Spain translates more books in a year than the Arab world has in 1,000: http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/663.cfm