Muslims are trying to silence criticism of Islam. If their campaign succeeds it will greatly advance Islam’s jihad - its war to impose universal Islamic rule. The victory of Islam would put humanity under a death sentence, because our survival depends on the criticism of ideas. The greatness of the West began with the idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race literally to the skies. Religions are the most dangerous sets of ideas because they are the most dogmatic. Dogma chains and cripples the mind. It denies knowledge and prevents discovery and innovation. The only possible form of argument between opposing dogmas is violence. Religions must be questioned. Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) are wrong. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of Reason in the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas. Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: Marxism, environmentalism, political correctness - above all Islam which absolutely forbids criticism. The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced. Islam holds the very opposite, and is now the major threat to the West. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently. And criticizing it includes mocking it. Any idea that requires a law to protect it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 21:20:56 +0000
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