Friday, February 3, 2017

A Principle of Principles

Sarah Haider, co-founder of The Ex-Muslims of North America, has composed a Twitter Article, a series of twenty-one (21)Tweets, urging liberals to hold onto principle throughout this extended period of chaos coinciding with the migration of Islamic violence across the world and the unexpected election of Donald Trump to the office of the President of the United States of America.

Sarah paints a picture of Far Right and Far Left extremists using news reports of violence as further justification of their world views. Extremists view each other as incapable of change. There are moderates in both camps who attempt to meet in the middle.  They are under pressure by the wings who are calling them out as traitors for proposing moves that enable the opponents to make progress.  If this pressure on the middle continues, the only ones left will be the extremists and lines will be drawn and calls to battle will ensue.  She ends her article exhorting us to hold onto principle.

What is a principle? It is a fundamental proposition that serves as a foundation for a chain of reasoning. Is a principle, by this definition, un-provable as to “rightness”? For example, some theists adopt the principle that a book is the word of a supernatural being who has all of the answers.  They do not try to prove this proposition.  Instead, they adopt it as an article of faith.  Is this a valid principle? If not, they should ignore entreaties to hold on to it and seek a more valid principle. This implies that rational principles should be backed up with what would have to be other principles.  There should be a chain of logic throughout the building of a principle. At the basis of the chain should be a piece of evidence, something we observe to be unquestionably true.  Otherwise we live based on nothing but on the articles of faith of our ancestors.

The view on the Right seems to be supported by visible evidence.   They see the tyranny of Islam, pushing across the EU and seeking to increase its footprint inside the United States.  The moderates recognize that, trapped in the migrating crowd, are millions of folks who are trapped inside the religion by its violent shepherds, boys educated to the point of insanity in Saudi funded mosques, now grown up as imams, mullahs and sheiks, bearing arms, and, indeed, almost incapable of reason. The hideous gods of Islam are alive in their brains, they fear their burning eternal punishment and thus they kill the young and the old, without remorse, to honor their various interpretations of Gods and Allahs. If we were viewing these events on another planet, our diagnosis would be that they are mentally afflicted by irrational ideas repeating like jingle bell memes inside their heads. We would say they are in need of interdiction, capture, restraint, separation form each other and perhaps a decade of re-education.  The Right looks about the world and sees that we do not have enough institutions or professionals to incarcerate and heal the violent and finally free the people trapped in a religion they never asked for, to which they must proclaim adherence.  Even the extremists on the far Right sympathize with the women and children trapped in Islam.

The view from the Left is supported by an observation that Donald Trump is unqualified for the Oval Office and must be opposed, with riots or whatever other means are thought to have reasonable chances for effectiveness.  Admonitions of assassinations and explosions at the White House are raised with abandon.  They are serious, they mean business. They have already sounded the clarions and we see the results in the streets and on the campuses of America. Like the tyranny of Islam, the Left is not allowing objection. Opposing views are not tolerated for more than the few seconds it takes to begin speaking. They are shutting down the voices of the opposition with violence.

A new view from the Middle is becoming apparent. It is a scientific assessment, unencumbered by religion.  It appears as if the ideological content of the tyranny of Islam has mutated and evolved, invading the brains of the Left, who has had its logical defenses weakened by a few decades of general degradation of educational content in schools and universities across the land.  In other words, this is a real problem in biology, a species driving itself into ant-like battles, driven by ideologies, that can objectively result in an evolutionary benefit of preventing over-population, at the risk, in this human case, of species extinction by nuclear war. Sarah is right, we live in times of great risk, we must proceed with caution.

Mixed in here somewhere is Vladimir Putin. Yes, he can be criticized in so many ways, but if we survive this century our descendants will have a more clarified view.  Coming out of the chaos resulting from the disassembly of the Soviet Union there remained strong rational control over thousands of nuclear armaments.  None of them have exploded and it is only Vladimir Putin who has made this possible.  Now, this is viewed on the left as sacrilegious, to state anything positive about Putin. I am just quoting our unborn descendants in the future, who, if they are there at all, are not so hopelessly as confused as we.

It is easy to have reservations about Donald Trump.  The very idea he could be elected seemed so remote as late as October of 2016. But I have been sharply impressed with a few of his gut instincts and he is right about Putin: We should carefully seek to engage Russia as an ally in the goal of creating a world of peace. This is not to suggest bind faith in anything at all, much less to express the childish tantrums of blind faith from the extreme Left in that nothing possibly good can result from this.  We proceed with care and circumspection, and we seek to invite the leadership of China as well, and we get to know each other.  And, why not Mexico eventually, and that increasingly paranoid young man who runs North Korea? What is Kim Jong-Un really made of after all? Perhaps association with rational leadership is the education he needs. Must we assume it is a hopeless case? Let us learn if it is instead.

And out of this analysis arises the vision of a piece of evidence, a principle of  principles: The existence of a world of peace on earth. If such is not our goal, then we have no rational goals, all of our principles are borne of ignorance.  It is towards a world of peace that the middle must converge, and the middle must see, acknowledge and declare the simple observable moral truth arising out of the existence of thinking human beings: We are our brother’s keepers. We never needed a bible or a Quran to see this truth.  We are to allow our siblings freedom of belief, because we know they will fight for it if we restrict it.  Therefore, we all shall have it. To choose otherwise is simply to escale this current battle to its sad and pridictable denouement. And at the end of the day that is what this current conflagration is all about: Liberty and all that it implies.  All other planets live in conditions of slavery to dictatorship, or they live in risky times like ours, or they have gained entrance to that wonderful place, a beautiful world of peace.

I conclude this article with a link to Sarah’s twenty-one tweets. The reader should allow a broad interpretation as she struggles to make her points under the constraints of 140 characters per tweet.  They start here: https://twitter.com/SarahTheHaider/status/826157401363582982