November 12, 2002

More casual anti-Western-religion "thinking," this time in the first paragraph of a book review by Mr. Peter Kurth:

"The next time someone tries to persuade you that Islam (for instance) is a 'backward' religion, you can refer them to Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's 'Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World.' The Goldstones' rousing title reflects both the style and confidence of their work: Bigots don't stand a chance against this brisk and wonderfully readable account of perfidy and murder in the Protestant Reformation."

While Mr. Kurth has discovered the 16th century crimes of Protestantism--say it isn't so!--he is apparently entirely unaware that heretics are still executed today. By Muslims.

This small fact, I think, properly reveals this paragraph--with its disingenuous "for instance"--as a portrait of politically correct self-indulgence. It's certainly fashionable and rhetorically satisfying to cry tu quoque and point at Western religion's past sins. But the key word here is "past."

When the major modern centers of a religion still practice as a matter of law the kind of atrocities that the West has spent the past 400 years successfully eliminating, I call that religion "backward." It's the very definition of the term. Show me evidence of real reformative progress in Islam, and I'll reconsider my "bigotry."

This is a sterling example of a peculiar attitude common in some circles of thought: the past sins of a culture/religion/country render present incarnations of that culture/religion/country morally impure, which in turn means that the culture/religion/country is unfit to make judgments about other cultures/religions/countries, to take action in the world, or to act in its own interests in any way.

Of course, such thinking only applies if the culture/religion/country in question is Western/Judeao-Christian/American. Only the Western world is held to such a standard of unattainable moral perfection, because--after all--the sins of other cultures are simply justifiable responses to Western oppression.

Mr. Kurth gives the book, with its graphic portrayals of the Big Bad Evil That Protestants Did, a glowing review.

Anyway. Off to get me peepers examined so I can get a new driver's license, and to purchase replacements for the then-new eyeglasses which I set down somewhere the first night I spent in my new house, and haven't seen since. In fact, I haven't seen much of anything since. Ba-dum-bum!