John Quincy Adams on Islam

And he [Jesus] declared, that the enjoyment of felicity in the world hereafter, would be reward of the practice of benevolence here. His whole law was resolvable into the precept of love; peace on earth – good will toward man, was the early object of his mission; and the authoritative demonstration of the immortality of man, was that, which constituted the more than earthly tribute of glory to God in the highest… The first conquest of the religion of Jesus, was over the unsocial passions of his disciples. It elevated the standard of the human character in the scale of existence…On the Christian system of morals, man is an immortal spirit, confined for a short space of time, in an earthly tabernacle. Kindness to his fellow mortals embraces the whole compass of his duties upon earth, and the whole promise of happiness to his spirit hereafter. THE ESSENCE OF THIS DOCTRINE IS, TO EXALT THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE BRUTAL PART OF HIS NATURE.

(Adam's capital letters)(John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
By Samuel Bemis (New York, 1949) :267-268) His comparison with Islam:

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”

(Ib. :269) (I traced this down from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam
By Robert Spencer :83)

Another contrast:

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. No in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?’ They said this to test Him, so that they could have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with His finger. But when they continued asking Him, He straightened up and said to them, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,’ Again He bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So He was left alone with the woman before Him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She replied, ‘No one, sir: Then Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” (John 7:53—8:11)

“There came to him (the Holy Prophet) a woman from Ghamid and said; Allah’s Messenger, I have committed adultery, so purify me. He (the Holy Prophet) turned her away. On the following day she said; Allah’s Messenger, Why do you turn me away? . . .By Allah, I have become pregnant. He said; Well, if you insist upon it, then go away until you give birth to the child. When she was delivered she came with the child wrapped in a rag and said; Here is the child whom I have given birth to. He said; Go away and suckle him until you wean him. When she had weaned him, she came to him...She said; Allah’s Apostle, here is he as I have weaned him and he eats food. He (the Holy Prophet) entrusted the child to one of the Muslims and then pronounced punishment. And she was put in a ditch up to her chest and he commanded people and they stoned her. Khalid bin Walid came forward with a stone which he flung at her head and there spurted blood on the face of Khalid and so he abused her.

(Ib. :75)

It seems there is no redemption when it comes to tyrants and slaves of the Prince of this world. I suppose people could argue that such a story is an accretion of folklore to the Islamic texts, religion and tradition. But basic facts and numerous observations* could be made to demonstrate that such a story fits into a broad pattern of Islamic history combined with attitudes towards the feminine that exist to this day.

There are other examples of inversions between the advice of Christ and the advice and actions of the self-defined Prophet, although the second tries to establish and claim similarities anyway. (You can read the Quran for yourself here.)

*For instance, one example that eventually got some coverage in the American Old Press:

Saudi media, in a rare criticism of the kingdom's powerful religious police, have accused the force of hampering efforts to rescue 15 girls who died inside a blazing school in Mecca a week ago. The al-Eqtisadiah daily said firemen scuffled with the religious police after they tried to keep the girls inside the burning building because they did not wear headscarves and abayas (black robes) as required by the strict interpretation of Islam.

(Toronto Star
March 18, 2002 Monday Ontario Edition
NEWS; Pg. A13
Saudi Arabia)

Islamic civilization?

Whatever happened to it. I was going to write about it but I've only read one book on it and half read another tangentially related, along with some journal articles. It seems to me that to describe it one would have to explain the decline of Islamic civilization to its rather pathetic state or at least speculate on it. Maybe in the future I'll venture a hypothesis, if we're not all killed over a cartoon first. It is tempting to believe that civilization is good but it is probably for the best that Islamic civilization has declined, come to think of it. One might think or believe the Wester myth that civility and civil rights are indelibly linked to civilization and so education and literacy are the key to all, but actually history shows that civilization is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for civility.

It seems to me that to explain a decline of civilization you have to look to what defines it, i.e. language. So that's what I would try to look into in Islamic civilization. The pollution of language is generally the way that civilizations and Empires tend to rise and fall, e.g., the Roman Empire began mixing a little copper in the coin, a little more copper in the coin, and so on until its “word” was no longer as good as gold. Instead it was devalued and contained less value or meaning. It all seems to rely on the spirit and meaning of things even as people continue in their daily business with nary a thought about it. I.e., for credit to exist you have faith that someone will pay you back in the future and a contract may as well be a covenant, while things are done in good “faith” and so on. Money can be the root of all kinds of evil because it’s all quite religious.

Well, it would take a book to try to describe how the past came to be the present with respect to Islam. It seems to me that the future is bundled into the information of the present, although the whole system may not be closed. I have noticed that most of the ancient prophets claimed to see beings of light who are not bound by the system, interesting to note that light is the best way to communicate information. I wouldn’t say information derived from supposed revelation is necessarily of God. You could almost perform a study and have one person claim a form of revelation to see how many imitations there would be. But I do believe that some religious traditions were begun by an actual revelation of information, just as the original witnesses claim. It is interesting to note the impact of information technologies on such traditions, e.g.:

More than five hundred years ago there was a revolution in information technology; Johann Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press for the Roman alphabet. This made possible a further revolution, a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. Down to the Middle Ages, oral transmission was the normal way in which knowledge was passed on. Knowledge was stored up in men; the art of memory was amongst the most highly prized of arts; scholars were masters of mnemonic tricks. But, the advent of mass-produced printed books steadily reduced dependence on oral systems of transmission, until they became mere traces in our language and our values; we still talk, for instance, of auditing accounts, we still worry about the loss of the arts of memory in educating our young. Gutenberg’s press also accelerated a revolution in human consciousness. This is, of course, the particular insight of Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner, who perceive a transformation of human consciousness as it moves from oral to written speech, as it moves from a consciousness dominated by sound to one dominated by visual space. Knowledge became less warm, less personal, less immediate and more cold, more abstract, more intellectual.
It is hardly surprising that Francis Bacon named printing, along with gunpowder and the compass, as one of the three things that had changed ‘the appearance and state of the whole world’. A host of major historical developments are associated with it: making the Italian Renaissance a permanent European Renaissance, pressing forward the development of modern capitalism, implementing western European exploration of the globe, transforming family life and politics, making possible the rise of modern science and so on. But, amongst the most important of the ramifications of print was the transformation of the religious life of western christendom. Print lay at the heart of that great challenge to religious authority, the Protestant Reformation; Lutheranism was the child of the printed book. Print lay at the heart of the Catholic counter-offensive, whether it meant harnessing the press for the work of the Jesuits and the office of Propaganda, or controlling the press through the machinery of the Papal Index and the Papal Imprimatur. Print, and the enormous stimulus to literacy which the desire to read the Bible gave, was at the heart of that slow change in northern European Christianity from a time when a Church building and its decoration might be read as one great iconic book to one which was increasingly focused on the Bible, the Word, which many could read and all might understand, because at last it was in their language.
[…]
[In contrast:] Print did not begin to become established in the Islamic world until the nineteenth century, four hundred years after it began to become established in Christendom. Where Muslim regimes still wielded power, but were threatened by the expansion of the West, such as Egypt, Iran and the Ottoman Empire, presses were started up in the early nineteenth century but not widely used until the second half of the century. It is not until the years 1870—1890, according to Mehmet Kaplan, that it is possible to see the Ottoman elite beginning to be transformed by book knowledge.

( Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print
By Francis Robinson
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Special Issue: How Social, Political and Cultural Information Is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed. (Feb., 1993) :231-232)

Islam

I think I may write some on how Islamic civilization came to its current state:

"This is not a protest, this is a warning," said Khalid Kelly, 39, an Irish national who converted to Islam five years ago. "Stop murdering our women and children. We gave the same message before 9/11. We are now saying to insult our
Prophet means death. We are being attacked and an attack against our Prophet
will mean death."

Abu Jihad, 43, who was born in Pakistan, added that the cartoonist and the editors of the papers should be killed. "It is very clear: Anyone who insults the Prophet must be beheaded. Remember van Gogh?" he said, referring to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh who was murdered in 2004 for his controversial film about Islam. "Whoever did it, bless him. Islam is peace but you see there will only be peace when Islam is implemented across the world. In the Prophet's time anyone who insulted the Prophet was beheaded. The same should happen now."

(The Globe)

The immediate reaction of the Leftist mind in America when it comes to Islam is to try to conflate all type with stereotype to try to prevent and smother other minds from making even the most simple of judgments. Its main concern seems to be sitting in judgment on stereotypes instead of focusing on the fact that nobody should have their head cut off over a cartoon.

Yet it is a historical fact that Abu Jihad's idea of Islam has Islamic text, history and tradition behind it. That's probably why there has been no Islamic reformation, if one goes back to the traditional formulation or the information in the texts there is virtually nothing there to reform to and so next to nothing for possible reformers to work with. Note the ignorance and the canards typical to the American Left with respect to Islam, apparently they are waiting on a reformation that will never come from within the information of Islam itself.

The wisdom of parasites?

I was going to write something about this weaving the metaphoric Blind Watchmaker and the feminine Mother Nature that Darwinists sometimes speak of against the metaphoric feminine Wisdom found in proverbs and reiterated by Jesus. There is a warning about throwing the pearls of Wisdom before the swine that whine, these half-wits that try to engage in denying the good half of all wit and wisdom. So I do not know, I suppose I lack the wit to know how to use knowledge, which would be wisdom. It would be easy though, as I do know that the patterns of thought and associations for such metaphors are written all over the thinking of those with the urge to merge.

Instead of going all craaazy with metaphors I would note this, the empirical evidence stops with this sentence: "It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well." From there on the text is theorizing and verbal images that degenerate into "One could easily imagine..." and "...it's not hard to envision..." that indicate the way that the Darwinian mind is so often "overwhelmed" by evidence drawn from its own vain imagination. It is easily overwhelmed.

One might say that such a mind exists only in its own imagination anyway, so it should not be surprising that it feels its way along blindly based on patterns of images that come into its brain, like a cockroach that is enslaved to a wasp of the malevolent feminine.

I'll be nice.

For Jason, I think I'll leave out where I've worked and lived, as well as movies I could watch over and over. Who actually watches mooovies over and over? As far as living, as far as I can tell I was a possibility in the mind of infinite Intelligence that transcends and finished painting the picture of Nature...it is finished indeed, bits of me were in a vast Cosmic "Big Bang," the possibility of me came together thanks to the Romance of a little Yin and Yang coming into the picture, then I lived for a time in my mother's womb, and so on. But just as I cannot remember such things, I may not be remembering much more. A lot of the picture depends on one's reference frame in it, I suppose, as it is that frame of reference that matters to a person.

Four TV shows I love:

From limited observation I would say that four TV shows worth loving cannot be found, although I watch Lost on occasion.


(The New Yorker, 1951)

Four places I've vacationed:

Hatteras, Idaho, upstate New York and Florida.

Four of my favorite dishes:

My mom's fajitas, Thanksgiving dinner, spaghetti, and things she makes up...except that dreadful weird plant salad she made this week in a moment of creativity. Creativity doesn't always work out, but one has to try to know...and besides, some people like things that others do not. It's that subjective element to life.

Four sites I visit daily:

Lexis-nexus, Google, sometimes Two or Three and the Delawarean blogs listed on the right but saying I visit them daily is pushing it. Maybe weekly...

Four places I would rather be right now:

Windsurfing in Maui, Hatteras, Virginia or Florida...which I will be soon.

Four bloggers I am tagging (so they will all have a good reason to post):

I would do this[Link removed by request, now aren't you curious?], this, this and this one since this whole exercise seems rather like Xanga. I think I could get into that though. So dearest dearie diary, there are four things that I like, oh how I like them. It's like this, like...and then I was like, like this other thing that I like, can't quite make the metaphoric connection to! Imagine that...but how nice I am on this mighty fine day, which I like!

[Edit: That is a good post. I haven't been keeping up with blog reading lately. I've been reading about other things like the origins of Life and so on, even as the possibility lurks that much of Life will be burned in a nuclear fire. I would note this, it may be a good thing that scientists, for all their claims throughout history and now the claims about genetics, still basically do not understand Life that much. It may be good because greater knowledge always seems to lead to the possibility of greater Good and greater Evil, especially greater evil in the name of the greater good. Scientists of the technically proficient barbarian sort have never demonstrated much care in using knowledge to give people bigger and bigger weapons. I.e., if Darwinists were really correct in their utterly inane "Darwinism is just like the theory of gravity." argument then one could expect armies of Ape-men on the horizon with their adaptations for warfare predicted and made manifest just as sure as people can predict the trajectory of a bomb given the theory of gravity. But you shouldn't expect that any time soon, if ever, because Darwinists are pulling their inane claims out of remarkably thin air. There is also the possibility of great good. But we're getting to the point now where great evil will result in global death from which there is no coming back and learning, like children, by trial and error as we typically do. It seems we must always try to eat the fruit and only then realize our error, trial and error.]

Nomogenesis

On evolution by law vs. "chance," alternative hypotheses often delve into the evidence that the Darwinian mind has not focused on, as it does not fit.

E.g.

Berg’s book is a serious, encyclopedic, well reasoned argument against Darwinian ‘evolution by chance’. Although Berg assembled his evidence more than forty years ago, evolution cannot meanwhile have eliminated the host of plants and animals, of every family and phylum, whose inconvenient habits described herein still need explanation. His bibliography and index of species and authors fills seventy pages.
For Berg, the crucial question is how variations arose. That chance or ‘random recombination’ alone could produce enough ‘fit’ forms for selection to work on seems to Berg incredible, and for good reason. His survey of the living world includes many variations that are neither random nor beneficial. He notes leaf galls which are not disorganised cell masses but mimics of the plant’s normal seed pods, cites multiple cases of similarly coloured plants and/or animals in given regions. He punctures the fallacy of selective evidence: for example, a toothless egg-eating snake whose vertebral processes serve as ‘esophageal teeth’ is a poor example of evolutionary providence, for other, non- egg-eating snakes have similar structures. And how, he asks, did this snake survive while waiting to become adapted? On the other hand, he finds many evolved structures which are unused, unusable, or even apparently detrimental: teeth which in many fish genera first develop at spawning season, when the time for feeding is past; crossed mammoth tusks which could not have functioned; winged insects which never fly, vegetarian insectivorous plants, and sailed fish which prefer to swim, to name but a few.
For Berg, this evidence supports development which proceeds according to an inner law—writing now, he might say 'programmed'—regardless of consequences. He distinguishes this law from teleology, vitalism, mechanism and other nineteenth century notions, and substitutes the concept of nomogenesis, or ontogenetic [the way that organisms or embryos develope and grow] and phylogenetic [the way that organisms can be traced back from descendant to ancestor] development by laws predetermining the organism’s response to stimuli. Whether these laws are inherent in the stimulus or in the respondent or in both is not always clear. This is less the fault of the author or translator than of the reader, for I had constantly to remind myself that Berg wrote long before the concept of programmed DNA molecules. Although his concept of nomogenesis needs some revision in terms of modern molecular biology, his data and reasoning demand serious consideration.
Although Berg says little specifically about man, the primates and human evolution, anthropologists need to understand the biological principles he discusses. Soberly considered, the post hoc explanations of the evolutionary status or selective advantage of many structures are somewhat weak.* Rather, it may well be that each taxon, including ours, has its built-in potentials and limits for variability and for response. The exploration of these limits and the mechanisms by which they operate will do more to advance the understanding of human variability, ancient and modern, than the too frequent assumption that if a structure is common it must be advantageous, with subsequent rationalisations about its utility.

(Reviewed Work: Nomogenesis: Evolution Determined by Law. by Leo S. Berg; J. N. Rostovstov
Reviewed by Lucile E. St Hoyme
Man New Series, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), :652)


*E.g.,

What might a non-locomotor benefit [for bipedality] look like? A stimulating suggestion is the sexual selection theory of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, of the University of Oregon. She thinks we rose on our hind legs as a means of showing off our penises. Those of us that have penises, that is. Females, in her view, were doing it for the opposite reason: concealing their genitals which, in primates, are more prominently displayed on all fours. This is an appealing idea but I don’t carry a torch for it. I mention it only as an example of the kind of thing I mean by a non-locomotor theory. [A theory, so it's probably just like gravity or somethin' according to the Darwinian mind...] As with so many of these theories, we are left wondering why it would apply to our lineage and not to other apes or monkeys. [Not to mention men and women at the same time, but that's not the first time that Darwinists have made historical claims based on little more than hypothetical goo that merges and blurs itself into any evidence. Then the half-wit mind is "overwhelmed" by all the mountains of evidence...and so on.]

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :91)

Darwinian tales are somewhat weak, to say the least...but wait, that little thing is not a tail at all! Yet it is quite a tale the way that things evolve into something else by chance. In the Information Ages it may be that some little tales of deformation and supposed formation just don't have a chance anymore...so much for the little tails, they were amusing though.