ninme

I’ll stop there before Peter smacks me.

So, Bubblehead linked to this essay by Orson Scott Card, and he said basically everything I’ve said, either here or in my rants to Peter (still too messy to lay out as coherent thought), except for the whole mormon thing. I’m not mormon. But I am Catholic and Catholics have had their share of burnings and being forced to convert or leave countries. Bubblehead found a different section to quote and comment on (see below), but this part just cried out for coherent expression (as you’re not likely to find here):

The Riots of the Faithful

I know that crowd. I’ve heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don’t think correct thoughts all the time. You know — the citizens of Heartland. Those poor sentimental fools who stood in line to see The Passion and who like Adam Sandler movies and who get tears in their eyes when they see the American flag and whose hearts break a little when it burns.

And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite.

Osama isn’t much worried about Christianity. Why should he? If a Muslim converts to Christianity in a Muslim country, he’ll just be killed. Christianity, despite our apparent numbers, has been reduced to nothing more dangerous to Islam than a swarm of gnats.

It’s a lot harder to keep dirty movies and atheistic Western ideas out of Muslim lands. That’s the established church of the West these days — liberty without responsibility, filth praised as “edgy” and virtue despised as “bourgeouis.”

If the Islamists ever ruled the world — and only a fool thinks that history offers some guarantee against it — then America’s unpatriotic elite will realize …

No they won’t. Whom do I think I’m kidding? They’ll still blame it on Bush or the Christian right or the oil companies, because the central tenet of their belief is that their side can do no wrong.

Wow. That sounds just like “my country, right or wrong.” Only instead of a country with borders, they have Smartland, the nation of people who know far better how to order the world than those ignorant unwashed masses of voters that keep electing morons who can’t pronounce “nuclear.”

They’re fanatical Smartland patriots. So fanatical they don’t hesitate long enough to get their facts right before running a story that seriously weakens America’s position in a deadly war that has already blown up the two tallest buildings in the capital city of Smartland. Because they haven’t recognized yet that Smartland only exists as a parasite, sucking the blood out of the Heartland that they have such contempt for.

So Bubblehead says, which, what can I say, is brilliantly* put:

Here’s my theory on the whole thing: Yes, Islam was once a vibrant religion, and created a “modern” society out of desert nomads in a single generation. But honestly — can anyone come up with anything useful that Islamic society has produced in the last 500 years? (Algebra was before that.) They didn’t even invent suicide bombing… (not that that’s useful, although I do have to give them credit for coming up with the concept of using suicide bombers against undefended inanimate objects). James Michener, in “The Source”, said that the Arab armies couldn’t win a war (in this case, the Israeli War of Independence) because of the nature of their society — if a supply column leaves Cairo headed to the front, supplies would never reach the troops; it’d be sold off to the commander’s relatives before it even reached the Suez. A religion that teaches that everything that happens is because of God’s will eliminates the needs for its’ followers to even try anymore — “hey, I didn’t invent this new item because God didn’t want me to”. “If God had wanted me to show up for work, I would have.” “I can base a large part of my economy on selling pirated software because God would stop me if it was wrong”… (I’m thinking Malaysia here). Now, I’m not saying that all Muslims are like this, but there are enough that it forms a critical mass that changes the nature of society, and we have seen the results.

* That should make up for making fun of his movie preferences last night.