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The Left and Islam, vs. The Right

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necrovore

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Earlier I wrote in the thread about whether collectivism or religion is the greater evil.

Seeing Biden's disastrous pullout from Afghanistan has led me to wonder something again that I forgot about in that thread: why does the Left seem to get along so well with Islam?

I've seen this cooperation before, because of the Left banning books critical of Islam, such as a bestselling book called Mohammed's Koran, by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson. (Amazon banned this book and I had to go to a lot of extra trouble to get a copy of it.) Leftist censorship has also targeted the cartoonist Bosch Fawstin on numerous occasions.

The Left and Islam are both Primacy of Consciousness, but different consciousnesses. So why?

It seems interesting to me that some on the Left are saying that the Right is "just like the Taliban" (and that's true, in the sense that both the Right and the Taliban believe in the primacy of God's consciousness), but the Leftists are saying it as if to excuse their cooperation with the Taliban -- while cooperation with the Right remains inexcusable. Why?

I think I discovered the reason: all people who choose to believe any variant of the primacy of consciousness choose it because they want consciousness to have primacy over existence.

A person who tries to believe that their own consciousness already has primary over existence soon finds that their consciousness is thwarted. What I said before was that they try to change ideas in their own mind, to see if some other ideas cause reality to conform. Maybe some of them do that, but begin to realize after a while that it is fruitless.

But the idea of an existence that doesn't answer to consciousness at all is still abhorrent to them. So they might prefer to believe that existence answers to some other consciousness than their own -- some consciousness which might change its mind, or might be persuaded, or perhaps can be forced, or at least will assume the burden of doing all their thinking for them. That, they think they can deal with. If they can't be the ruling consciousness, then they can persuade, or force, or ride the coattails of, the ruling consciousness, and get the same results.

So it's just plain second-handedness, of the Peter Keating variety. Everything in their minds comes down to persuading or forcing some other consciousness, or else, just letting another consciousness (even an imaginary one) do all the work. They won't dare try to deal with reality on their own.

The problem that the Left and Islam have with the Right (and with America) is the same problem: "worldliness," i.e., the insistence that one should deal with reality firsthand, that people can actually do that, and that people can properly be expected to do that.

The American Right tolerates a lot more "worldliness" than Islam. This is why the Enlightenment "sense of life," which is implicitly a primacy of existence perspective, still survives in the Right, whereas in the Left (and in Islam) it is almost completely gone.

It is the fact that the Left and Islam both hate this sense of life, and the reality underlying it, that unites them. They both hate worldliness because they'd rather deal with a consciousness (whether society or Allah) than with reality, and they regard the ruling consciousness as more real than reality itself.

(It should be noted that the Left's love of Islam is unrequited. The Left approves of Islam's hatred of "worldliness" but sort of laughs at their religiosity. Islam, on the other hand, though grateful for the help they get from the Left, is just as willing to kill the Left as the Right. So they probably plan to kill the Leftists last.)

--

The Right still has some severe problems, and they have been worsening over the decades.

Some Christians allow that it's okay to be "worldly" up to a point, because reality, they claim, was made by God. However, it's only up to a point: many of them are anti-conceptual mentalities, who are only willing to accept "worldliness" up to a certain level of abstraction, but no further. They reject whole fields of knowledge like calculus and science because they would rather believe in the book of Genesis than run the risk of obtaining knowledge that contradicts it. I've seen that firsthand. The result is that their knowledge of reality can't exceed the medieval level.

Some Christians claim that reality has been corrupted by sin or Satan or the like, and they often use that excuse to declare war on various aspects of reality that they don't like.

Both Islam and the Right's less-worldly Christians hate other religions in proportion to how different those religions are from their own. That's also a characteristic of the anti-conceptual mentality.

The anti-conceptual mentality is also a form of second-handedness: it's the belief that thinking should go only so far and no further, because once you reach a certain point, another consciousness is supposed to take over for you. I think this is the product of not having confidence in one's own consciousness -- not having confidence in reason.

I suppose some people who reason incorrectly, and find their incorrect reasoning thwarted by reality, decide to give up on reason altogether. (Some people might also give up on reason because their correct reasoning is rejected by other people, and they aren't sure of themselves.) They may not give up on reason after their first conflict, but they might do it after a few such conflicts. They learn the wrong lesson from their problems. They decide that thinking is dangerous or a fool's errand and that they will let "someone else" worry about it, so they embrace the primacy of consciousness.

They're afraid of thinking for themselves. They're afraid of getting it wrong. (And they decide that, if they close their eyes, they don't have to see the problem!)

Propaganda preys on this, of course.

In the physical realm, the Right rejects the "something for nothing" mentality of the Left. They are aware that you have to work in order to eat. However, their mistake is that they still embrace "something for nothing" in the realm of cognition: they need to be taught that you have to do cognitive work to acquire knowledge, in the same way that you have to do physical work to acquire food or goods. Knowledge does not come from God. It has to be built up from reality by a process of reason, which has to be checked for correctness. Objectivism provides a complete picture of how to do that. Christianity not only doesn't provide such a picture, it rejects the idea that one is necessary.

Edited by necrovore
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6 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

You'd have to be clear about what the right and the left means in this thread.

Maybe I should just say that by the Left I mean the "American Left" and by the Right I mean the "American Right."

6 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Pulling out of Afghanistan was a priority for the previous administration too.

True, but the pullout was done in an extremely careless, and even contemptuous, fashion.

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Left and Right are broad, sweeping umbrella terms that include different kinds of people.  Any widely practiced religion, such as Christianity or Islam, is a broad umbrella that includes different kinds of people.  I mention this because you speak of Muslims wanting to kill people.  Some do and some don't, as is true of Christians, Rightists, and Leftists.

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1 hour ago, Doug Morris said:

Left and Right are broad, sweeping umbrella terms that include different kinds of people.  Any widely practiced religion, such as Christianity or Islam, is a broad umbrella that includes different kinds of people.  I mention this because you speak of Muslims wanting to kill people.  Some do and some don't, as is true of Christians, Rightists, and Leftists.

I'm talking about ideas, not people. Often people hold mutually contradictory ideas.

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We are withdrawing from a violent confrontation from an enemy who does not believe in turning the other cheek.

Having said that, the issue of "people" is important because religion in practice is about "the interpretation of the ideas by the people". 

Most likely there are going to be factions in Afghanistan and there will be internal conflict that will cause many deaths. It's not entirely based on a particular ideology.

The most important issue to worry about is if we as a nation, are better off against Al Qaeda or not.

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Although my post was provoked by the Afghanistan debacle. it wasn't about the Afghanistan debacle...

It was actually another perspective on whether the religious or the social variant of the primacy of consciousness is the more evil. (I debated whether to post again in that thread or start a new one; maybe I chose incorrectly...) In this case, I came to the conclusion that that there is less of a difference between them than I thought before.

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4 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

We are withdrawing from a violent confrontation from an enemy who does not believe in turning the other cheek.

Having said that, the issue of "people" is important because religion in practice is about "the interpretation of the ideas by the people". 

Most likely there are going to be factions in Afghanistan and there will be internal conflict that will cause many deaths. It's not entirely based on a particular ideology.

The most important issue to worry about is if we as a nation, are better off against Al Qaeda or not.

When you say Al Qaeda , do you mean a threat this nation faces of terrorism based on Islamic ideology in general?

Or do you mean that our occupation of Afghanistan was based on protecting America from one faction or subgroup that was powerful enough to be an equal or greater threat than the entirety of Islamic terrorism?

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5 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

When you say Al Qaeda , do you mean a threat this nation faces of terrorism based on Islamic ideology in general?

No, not in general. In fact Islamic ideology is threatening to us by those "people" who interpret it as a justification for aggression (initiation of force).

Similar to Communists who will terrorize vs. those who just vote.

Any religion can be weaponized like the Catholic Irish republican Army.

There are 1.2 billion people who identify themselves as Islamic. If they were all dangerous, we should have far more incidents than we do.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda were different in their interpretation in that the Taliban did not believe in striking beyond their border. While Al Qaeda does (9/11).

For instance look at Azerbaijan. The same religion, same Islamic sect as Iran. Yet in their war with a Christian country, Armenia, Iran did not support this Islamic country. In fact it was Israel who supported this Islamic country in the war which they recently won. It's just not as simple as ideology.

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49 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

I was asking in the context of a justification of the occupation/nation building.

And specifically about the concrete example of Afghanistan .

It's too early to tell. Historically we have been bad at negotiating sometimes. For instance In Vietnam or in Iraq. But I am hoping that two administrations negotiating with Taliban got some sort of assurance that 9/11 would not happen again. If that was the result then the occupation may have achieved something. If not, we lost a lot for nothing.

To be specific about your original question Al Qaeda is far more of a threat than Islam in General.

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57 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

It's too early to tell. Historically we have been bad at negotiating sometimes. For instance In Vietnam or in Iraq. But I am hoping that two administrations negotiating with Taliban got some sort of assurance that 9/11 would not happen again. If that was the result then the occupation may have achieved something. If not, we lost a lot for nothing.

To be specific about your original question Al Qaeda is far more of a threat than Islam in General.

It would have to be to , otherwise it was just a trillion dollar boondoggle.

Islam in general doesn’t seem to be making Europe any ‘better’. 

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2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

And specifically about the concrete example of Afghanistan .

I thought your concern with Islam was specifically about Afghanistan.

One can say any group of culturally different or dispossessed will be a drain on any welfare state. 

British feel that way about Polish immigrants too.

Ideology of a person is not static. People see better ways and they choose it.

That has been the reality in the United States. But it takes time.

If you fear that Islam is so attractive that most of us will be embracing it, don't worry.

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