| | The ultimate Huntingtonesque "clash of civilizations" isn't between today's highly illiberal West and today's highly illiberal Islamdom. After all, both coincide and agree on everything important: a philosophy of religion, an ethics of self-sacrifice, and a polity of welfare statism. Their beliefs and ideals almost entirerly cohere. Both societies and "civilizations" are intensely irrational and culturally identical in their fundamentals.
The real battle today is between the skepticist-based West of Pythagorus and Plato and the certaintyist-based West of Aristotle and Epicurus. It's highly revealing that in the 200s BC, when cultural liberalism (as I define it) was at its zenith, virtually everyone who was smart and well-educated referred to the Reasonist Aristotleian philosophies of Epicurus and Zeno (the Stoic) as "dogmatic." They were so-described not because these belief-systems and life-styles claimed to know everything based more-or-less on faith, but because they claimed to know anything at all -- even the truth of the laws of identity and equality -- based on rationality. Our Western liberal world was in profound and overwhelming trouble even then.
The current culture-clash and battle royale between the West and Islam is surprisingly insipid and close to meaningless. Only when the West has triumphed here will the real fight begin. The true enemies of sane, sober, normal, civilized, happyness-seeking, greatness-seeking people today are the Enlightenment destroyers known as Berkeley, Hume and Kant. That and their two leading-edge, direct-action, ultra-demon annihilationists: Moses and Jesus. Even "moderate" skepticist-based jews and christians today are fully capable of besting the worst islamic 9/11ist maniacs on any day of the week.
(Edited by Andre Zantonavitch on 10/19, 5:31pm)
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