simonshack wrote:At this point, some readers may ask themselves: "why does Simon Shack so often defend Muslims? Is he a Muslim himself?"
Nope, I'm not. Nor am I a Jew - a Hindu, a Catholic, a Jesuit, a Scientologist - nor ANYTHING AT ALL! Let me spell this out...once again:
I AM NOT ANYTHING AT ALL - other than a (completely independent / unaffiliated / nation-less) person living on this planet.
Knowing you personally, dear Simon, I can say that your position of openness is born of the fact that you are an intelligent, sensitive and loyal person with a big heart. But I think it's also a consequence of your Christian upbringing.
I mean, even if you are not - and weren't educated as - a traditional Christian, you have grown up in a family and in a society deeply influenced by Christian values like respecting and loving other people, and even your "enemies". I'm sure your parents and your teachers have taught you that we are all human beings of equal value, regardless of our superficial differences.
Of course you have spontaneously embraced these teachings since they were in tune with your good nature, because we all know there are people who, having received the same "Christian" conditioning, have done terrible things nonetheless, and some or even many of them could be among the "perps" or their accomplices, no doubt.
We all have dark sides that can become dangerous, if only we feed them, but at least our kind of conditioning doesn't encourage them. On the contrary, it openly condemns them, while at least another conditioning I have pointed at seems to encourage them all right.
And of course I'm aware of the fact that even Christ's message of mutual love and respect has been distorted by the Church to the point of producing terrible evils, especially in the past, but the Church has very soon become a power structure, and we know that power can distort and corrupt anything, if not handled with a strong moral compass.
Nevertheless, the message of Christ as contained in the Gospels is still an essential part of our Western moral compass, also for atheists who, even though they don't believe in anything beyond the material dimension, still recognize that we are all human beings to be equally respected.
And the funny thing to me is that we seem often almost ashamed of acknowledging our Christian conditioning, while other people, who maybe have received a more racist or supremacist kind of conditioning, seem much more proud of it, and feel strongly united by it, particularly at the expense of others.
Could they interpret this as a weakness of our conditioning and maybe encourage it? And couldn't such an encouragement (remember the importance of media control here) be part of their "divide and conquer" strategies? It seems to me a reasonable question. Because it may be much easier to control a bunch of people without a precise identity, even if they are numerically a majority, than another strong, cohesive group united by values that are directly opposed to yours.