clash of cultures 5

What I do is start an email, write my post in that letter and copy and paste it into the Beaglesonian new message. A little more work, but the type is just too small typing into that little blog box.

I’m a little vague about the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, ah, it appears that wiki thinks they are the same thing, gives the dates 1650 to 1780. That ending date puzzled me a little as I did think it was still going on. Maybe those are the dates when we became enlightened, and now that we are, we just continue to be.

I don’t know if something else came up to replace it, well historians just make up this age of stuff after the fact, and then if the other historians like it, it goes into general use.

I do include that egalitarian aspect within the age of reason, because logically it just follows that no race is inferior to any other. I tend to think of the French Revolution as the apogee of the enlightenment. Well things did get out of hand, but it did include the dethroning of a king and breaking the control of the church, and bringing in the metric system and just a lot of stuff like that. I think archeology began when Napoleon invaded Egypt and brought a bunch of scientists along with him.

I’ll admit to being a little vague on all that, but I brought in France because this is where the incident happened, and I think the French are uniquely proud of their secular nature. Not that they are atheists or anything, but they take separation of church and state more seriously than we do in the US. They consider it part of their Frenchness.

And here on the other hand we have these Arab immigrants, descendants of a once mighty culture that once ruled a vast area of the mideast and Africa and significant parts of Europe, and were more advanced scientifically than the barbarians in Europe, although it has all fallen on hard times in the last 500 to 1,000 years. I am just saying that they have a pretty strong culture.

Well here we have the two cultures, each one sure that they are right. Can we settle this with reason, as is our enlightenment way?

Um, no

Because to them faith triumphs reason. We could start out with some axioms that we all agreed with, construct some air-tight chain of IFs and THENs, prove our thesis, but then they would throw in their BUT, but the book says this. At some point before the enlightenment the church allowed logical discussions, but whenever the logic drew a conclusion that was contrary to faith it had to be tossed out.

Actually I think the pragmatic way you suggest, where you just go over each issue individually is probably the best way to handle the whole thing. Women covering their heads, ok. Female circumcision, no. Women posing for their drivers license in a chador, hey I thought you didn’t let your women drive.