Quote Originally Posted by sycld View Post
Well, you're acting as though democracy and liberalism are only restricted to Western nations. The fact is that nowadays the movement towards democracy and liberalism is a global movement. Nearly every nation on Earth has been pressured to at least give lip service to these ideals, and nations as diverse and far-flung as India, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, and Mali have either achieved very democratic and liberal government or are truly striving to do so.

The Middle East is the only region of the world with such uniformly strong resistance to modern ideals and such strong and cohesive movements to retain the archaic institutions and values that oppose liberalism and democracy. All this is because of the embrace of fundamentalist Islam.

As a matter of comparison, let's look at India versus Pakistan. Until 1947, India was a unified colony under the British. Thanks to that bastard Jinnah and Gandhi's willingness to bend to his demands, Pakistan became a separate republic from India especially for all of the subcontinent's Muslims. Most of India's Muslims moved up to Pakistan, and most of Pakistan's non-Muslims moved to India. It involved the displacement of 17.9 million people, the largest and fastest transfer of people in human history.

Now let's see how each of these states evolved. India is strongly democratic and strongly secular, with a great deal of respect for human rights, though of course there are large human rights problems that still persist. Nonetheless, even villagers have a sense of empowerment and use the political leverage afforded to them by the government to benefit themselves and their community. In addition, liberal thought and tolerance is radiating out from the urban centers and finding its way into the more rural parts of India. And, as always, people of all religions, both Hindu and non-Hindu alike, more or less live next to each other in peace.

On the other hand, Pakistan's movement for democracy has never really gotten off the ground. The central government cannot really exercise control over the population, much of which is militant and fundamentalist, and the western part of the state has become a safe haven for the Taliban. The central courts routinely and unselfconsciously make audacious decisions that flagrantly violate human rights with little or no explanation given except that it is what is demanded of Islam (according to them, anyways.)

Why is Pakistan, which is ~97% Muslim, so different from India, which is ~80.5% Hindu?

Actually, good points.

Europe used to be like the middle east in regards to opposition to progress, but something changed and the power of the church lessened. What was it about Europe that allowed for this? Was christianity more accomodating for progressive change than Islam? That maybe. Was it something cultural in Europe that allowed for it? Maybe. I think there might be a bit of both, but I think we can both agree that Islam doesn't come out of this looking too good. What we were essentially debating was how crippling an influence Islam was, I wasn't too sure that it was Islam alone...but...

And Dr Baltar, we are not interfering, check the news, there is nothing about a bunch of internet geeks making attempts to change muslim culture, because all we are doing is criticising. Call it caulture all you want, but it is fair to prepend it with barbaric or backwards, because the way humans are treated in some of those countries, especially women, is just horrific. It doesn't matter if Islam justifies it, all this proves that Islam is wrong when it comes to treating human beings.