Islam and terror

I've returned from Scotland, with a pile to do at work and my home ADSL modem has packed up, and my girlfriend's laptop has as well, so I am restricted to dialup at home on my laptop.

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I will write later about Scotland, Britain and many other things on my mind (such as the UK's mindless obsession with being control freaks, how friendlier the Scots are), but for now I wanted to post a link to an ARI Op-Ed about Islam and terrorism, given I was on holiday for 9/11.

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The real reason behind the terrorist threat that besets the USA, UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Egypt et al, is the promotion of Islam and a refusal by the West to openly and proudly assert the values of the Enlightenment of reason, freedom and individual rights.

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As Edwin A. Locke and Alex Epstein state:

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if we are to identify the fundamental cause of the terrorists' actions, we mustunderstand at least two fundamental premises of the religion they kill for.

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First, Islam, like all religions, rejects reason as a means of gaining knowledge and guiding action; it holds that all important truths aregrasped by faith in supernatural beings and sacred texts. The Koran explicitly states that knowledge comes from revelation, not thinking.(Christianity in pure form entails a similar rejection of reason, but it has been heavily diluted and secularized since the Renaissance.) Islam advocates the subordination of every sphere of life to religiousdogma, including the legal system, politics, economics, and family life; the word "Islam" means literally: submission. The individual is not supposed to think independently but to selflessly subordinate himself to the dictates of his religion and its theocratic representatives.

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We have seen this before in the West--it was called the Dark Ages.

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Second, as with any religion that seeks converts, a derivative tenet of Islam is that it should be imposed by force (you cannot convince someone of the non-rational).

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That is it - they continue in stating that many Muslims reject fanaticism and are law-abiding and peaceful people but this is because "they have accepted some Westernvalues, including respect for reason, a belief in individual rights,and the need for a separation between church and state. It is only to the extent that they depart from their religion--and from a society that imposes it--that they achieve prosperity, freedom, and peace."

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Literal Islam, like literal Christianity (that is taking what is in the Koran and the Bible as being "truth" and "morality") is evil - it results in government and people that engage in evil practices. Take the battle in Pakistan to reform the rape laws that currently require FOUR witnesses to observe a rape before a women can even charge a man of rape, otherwise she faces a charge of adultery - for which SHE will be punished - so a woman gets punished for being a rape victim by the state! You have to wonder how feminist the feminist leftist moral equivocators in the West really are?