gturner
New member
Just to update 'Gear and some of the players, Oerdin is a gun-grabbing West Coast liberal who did some tours in the Sand Box (Iraq) and got an up-close and personal experience with Islamic culture.
Any sane rational liberal would recoil in horror from Islam because on a scale of religious fundamentalism and tyranny, where Appalachian fundamentalist snake handlers might rate a 3, Islam would score an 11. Of course there are good, non-threatening Muslims, and those are the kind the West primarily used to get: Engineers, doctors, and other professionals who really didn't fit the Muslim world very well. Much of our opinion about Muslims was based on these early Muslim expats. But behind them are the legions of strongly believing Muslims who pretty much wreck any aspect of modern liberal society.
Oerdin keeps pointing this out, citing crime rates, literacy rates, and other metrics, along with expressing outrage at the insanity and the latest outrages and atrocities in Europe and elsewhere. So of course Left Forge freaks out and calls him a racist. What he is is a far-left liberal who is expressing both his heart and his head, a visceral reaction to Islam informed by first-hand experience, coupled with a cold hard look at it around the world.
Either Western culture has to dramatically regress, or Islam has to modernize (they need an enlightenment), or the two should just keep apart from each other. A little lay-Islam isn't the problem, and we get along fine with Muslims who don't take Islam very seriously, just like it was any other religion. But as their numbers increase in any area the radicals, fundamentalists, and Islamists show up and assert their dominance and influence over the local Muslims, just as they had done back home. So you end up with the almost fully Westernized Muslim kids of secular doctors and engineers demanding sharia, a caliphate, and carrying out suicide attacks.
The West's patience for this is not infinite. In fact, it's wearing pretty darn thin.
Any sane rational liberal would recoil in horror from Islam because on a scale of religious fundamentalism and tyranny, where Appalachian fundamentalist snake handlers might rate a 3, Islam would score an 11. Of course there are good, non-threatening Muslims, and those are the kind the West primarily used to get: Engineers, doctors, and other professionals who really didn't fit the Muslim world very well. Much of our opinion about Muslims was based on these early Muslim expats. But behind them are the legions of strongly believing Muslims who pretty much wreck any aspect of modern liberal society.
Oerdin keeps pointing this out, citing crime rates, literacy rates, and other metrics, along with expressing outrage at the insanity and the latest outrages and atrocities in Europe and elsewhere. So of course Left Forge freaks out and calls him a racist. What he is is a far-left liberal who is expressing both his heart and his head, a visceral reaction to Islam informed by first-hand experience, coupled with a cold hard look at it around the world.
Either Western culture has to dramatically regress, or Islam has to modernize (they need an enlightenment), or the two should just keep apart from each other. A little lay-Islam isn't the problem, and we get along fine with Muslims who don't take Islam very seriously, just like it was any other religion. But as their numbers increase in any area the radicals, fundamentalists, and Islamists show up and assert their dominance and influence over the local Muslims, just as they had done back home. So you end up with the almost fully Westernized Muslim kids of secular doctors and engineers demanding sharia, a caliphate, and carrying out suicide attacks.
The West's patience for this is not infinite. In fact, it's wearing pretty darn thin.
