Islam and Universal Standards

I saw some video footage of some Muslims in the United Kingdom protesting a visit by Geert Wilders.  If I had an opinion about Geert Wilders as a politician, I would be reluctant to express it.  I think that the citizens of Holland are quite capable of making their own political decisions and might be reluctant to take my input.  In any case I think that the policy of my country, the U.S., should not depend on what role he plays in Dutch politics.  We should support free trade, not intervene militarily and allow Europeans to provide for their own defense.

What struck me about the demonstration was that a Muslim man was saying that the British police should just go home so that the mob could exact their version of vigilante justice on him.  That was his idea about how democracy was supposed to work.  He claimed that British politicians were showing hypocrisy by convicting Imams for hate crimes and racism while protecting those who insult Mohammed and the Koran.  He added that these Western politicians were killing people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This last point may have had merit, but I am disinclined to agree with him as his whole line of reasoning is one that I cannot accept.  In his mind, criticizing Islam is racist.  Perhaps the laws against hate crimes are ones that I wouldn't support for our own country.  I think we need to be cautious where we draw the line between free speech and criminal acts.  I think that we should allow just about anything that falls short of an actual incitement to violence.  Our courts have a way of drawing the line that takes into account the immediacy of any threat.  I think that is the right approach.

This Muslims failure to elicit my sympathy stems from his failure to apply any sort of universal ethical standards of the sort that I would recognize.  I suppose that technically, the rule that everyone should practice Islam is a universal standard, but if he considers this to be the case, how can he consider opposition to Islam as racist.  Religion is either a matter of choice or it is not.  You cannot have it both ways.

He seems to be expressing the idea that mob violence is an appropriate way of resolving a dispute.  How would he feel about angry mobs assembling outside of the homes of those who advocate Islam?  What strikes me as hypocritical is that he benefits from the very laws that he seems to oppose.  If mob violence were to decide such disputes does anyone really think that Muslims in the U.K. would be likely to end up on the winning side?

The problem stems from the fact that Muslims see themselves as possessing a special religion, God's religion.  The trouble here is that every religious believer in God thinks that their religion is the way that God wants to be worshiped.

I am not inclined to think that the Muslims are right.  I believe that they are mistaken, and my belief is informed by reading an English translation of the Koran.  It doesn't strike me as the sort of book that the creator of the universe would right given that it contains what appear to me to be mistakes about the nature of His supposed creation.  Any being who created the universe would know more about it than the Koran indicates.

In any case a majority of people in the world are not yet convinced that Islam is God's religion.  The Muslims don't have the numbers to pull off a violent victory over the entire earth.  Neither do they have the guns.  Guns cost money.  While I do not agree with the depiction of the Muslim world as largely poor, I would not contend that they are particularly wealthy.  In fact the per capita output of all predominantly Muslim countries taken as a whole is just about the same as that of the world as a whole.  The Muslim world is neither particularly rich nor poor.  They are roughly average in economic output.  They would need to be able to outproduce the rest of the world in order to conquer them.  They have not yet shown this capability.

Since this is the case, you would think that Muslims would be contented with trying to secure Western toleration.  I believe much of their grievance was justified.  I do not support any military intervention in the middle east or much of anywhere else.  I think that several citizens of Afghanistan have made it clear that they have very different ideas about how people should be governed.  When it comes down to it, we will have to determine how many of our lives and theirs we are willing to sacrifice if we want to use military means to press our point.  I think it is much more effective to build free institutions in our own country than to try to export freedom abroad.  The people who come here are showing us that they would like to live in our country with its free institutions.  Those who do not have shown us no such thing.

Here there is a problem that we project our own value preferences onto others.  Because we don't want to live in a society where the government punishes people for religious offenses, we assume that others don't as well.  I have heard people here express skepticism that anyone could oppose freedom.  What we have to understand is that religious freedom means that we have to allow people to practice religions that we don't approve of.  We have to permit people to insult our religions.  It's very difficult to get people to support the idea that they have a moral duty to protect those who act against what they see as the very basis of morality.  This is an idea that is not very intuitive.  Yet it is one of the ideas that strengthen our society.

In any case, if Muslims want my support for their moral grievances, they will have to state justifications that don't carve out a special status for Islam.  To me Islam is just another religion.  While I understand that it is special to them, if they want to understand me, they will have to know that it does not hold this special place for me.  When a Muslim says that I must understand that Muslims cannot tolerate it when people insult the prophet, I understand.  However, they must understand that I don't approve.  I consider their intolerance to be a moral deficiency.  Tolerance for other people's religious views is an essential part of Western society.