Quote:
Originally Posted by Waarnemer
Since the Enlightenment its the Theistic view that got rearranged and later on with general superstition its world view got drastically undermined by biology, cosmology and genetics.
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From the viewpoint of theism, all of these are irrelevant (discoveries in biology, cosmology and genetics). They explain the exterior-material world, how it funcions and say nothing about either the question of the first mover, of the purpose of life and everything etc.
What got undermined, was the world view of pseudo-religious fundamentalists who want to explain the origin of the world on the ground of the literalistic interpretation of the Bible. I have no time to spend with them. In fact, these fundamentalists and militant atheists are spiritual brothers. Let them argue with each other all the time, if they wish to, I have better things to do.
As for the original theme of this thread, that is, the intellectual censorship in the Islamic world, it is well known and well documented. In the first centuries of the Islamic era it was directed chiefly against the Islamic heretics,
sufis and others. Later on, against all those who wanted to relax the stiff ritualism of Islam and stress the "interior" aspects of religion (man's personal relation to God, coming from heart, instead of the strict observance of sharia as main criterion for one's attachment to Islam). There was even an
Islamic humanism or proto-Renaissance, however, it lasted shortly and was suppressed from the 12th century on. Instead on independent inquiry, the stress was laid solely on details of the observance of sharia. There arose different schools who quarrelled only on what should and what shouldn't be done in everyday life and pursuit of philosophy and knowledge in general died down. Islam changed a little from those times to the day of today. Anyone who dared to question the tenets of the Four Orthodox Schools of jurisprudence, even someone who would try to interpret Koran on his own, not relying to the existing "orthodox" opnions, was heavily censored. What are the reasons of this intellectual stagnation, it is hard to say. Some attribute it to the fact that the rule of the Islamic world was taken over by Turks and Mongols (who first conquered Baghdad in 1258 as pagans, but later converted to Islam and became its propagators - I am referring to Mongols who conquered Middle Eastern lands and Russia, while the original Mongols in Mongolia retained their ancestral heathen religion), warrior tribes that needed some simplistic religion and worldview...
But it is their countries and their rules and laws, what can we do about that? Or what should we do? I personally don't care either for the fate of Dawkins' book in Turkey (or its fate in general) or for the laws in vigour in Turkey. It is their matter and I don't see how it could interest too much European nationalists.
Turkey has anyway a long tradition of censorship, but not religious one. They have laws against offending "Turkishness", according to which those who state that, for example, the Armenian genocide happened, can be judged and condemned to prison sentences. This has nothing to do with either Islam or religion in general, but with the Turkish nationalism.
The modern Turkish republic was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who was overtly inimical to Islam after he consolidated his power. He had made such statements about Islam, which could make him target of fanatics, if he lived these days. Turkish Republic was for decades very secular, with Islam repressed to the status of private matter. However, there is a process of re-Islamification going on in Turkey since 2002, when Erdogan's Islamists won the elections.