George,

The catch for traditional Islam is ruling politics is a commandment in that it is conduit to ensure the Law of god [Armstrong]. Separation of church and state is a contradiction to many Muslims. In a similar way, some conserative Jews see the occupation of the Holy Lands as much a divine command as a right.

[aside:It must have been hard to grow-up in the aftermouth of Stalin.]

Have a good day.

O.

stickman,
of course, my examples of non-religious trust and belief were very rough. Nevertheless I think they can help us to understand that things are not as simple as fundamentalists - both “religious” (if you do not believe in my version of God you will go to hell) and “anti-religious” (if you do not accept my way of seeing things you are illogical, irrational, anti-scientific etc.) - see them.

You know empirically that your parents are worthy of trust and since they are nice people, others who know them will agree. But there is still something additional in your life-long experience of them, that an outsider cannot share. Something like this is faith (more exactly the emotional, irrational part of it): an insider experience, mostly life-long. Hence the Judaeo-Christian model of God as a Father, where Christianity, especially its Catholic version, has Mary as our “Mother”, apparently to compensate for a yin-yang balance in our psychological need. The rational part of faith, sometimes called “intellectual consent” draws on philosophy, and is harder to describe in a few words.

Scientists cannot carbon-date the Big Bang, neither can science prove (like you prove a mathematical formula) the existence of electrons, photons, quarks, or perhaps just strings, that they study; they have only evidence of their interaction with our senses or instruments. This impossibility, very roughly speaking, was the essense of “science wars” in the 1990s - between scientists and post-modernist “social constructivists” – triggered by the Sokal hoax (see e.g. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html). Here all scientists, believers in God, atheists or agnostics, “fought” on the same side, and one of the best arguments for the belief in a truth that the scientist can persue, and is independent of any “social construct”, was written by atheists and agnostics, Sokal included. You belonged to one or the other “camp” not according to your belief or unbelief in God, but whether you understood (or wanted to accept the word of a working specialist) what mathematical physics and ist epistemological function was all about, or not.

And no, the country I grew up in was Czechoslovakia.

Hi George,

Thanks for your comment it’s a relief. I think my skin is getting thicker specially my feet (my toes being stepped on for 2 years with no apologies). Thanks for ‘coach’ing me (pun intended: -)).

Oliver,

“The catch for traditional Islam is ruling politics is a commandment in that it is conduit to ensure the Law of god. Separation of church and state is a contradiction to many Muslims”

The statement is actual mythology.
Most Islamic modernists examine the Islamic history and conclude that (see earlier comments to Danielle) ‘combining church and state’ was a political promotion.
.
Modernists used the farewell sermon of the prophet to confirm that the prophet asked the people to ‘chose their leaders’ which is against ‘mixing church and state’.
In fact, the first 4 leaders of the Muslim empire were ‘chosen by the people’ and not related to each other. They had good leadersip qualities and were the poorest of Muslims (except for the 1 and 3 who had some assets). Religion got mingled into politics starting with Ummayyad to give legitimacy to their newly founded monarchies.
Further http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farewell_Sermon

Peace,

So, Fellow-Human, would you agree that any given state or ethnic group should NOT have an official state religion?

Do you also agree that the Legislative Assemblies representing the people should NOT give deference to any particularly religion or god and that monotheistic texts should NOT be quoted or utilised in Legislative debates, nor the divine mentioned in any form.

What about thinly veiled threats made by Rabbis, Cardinals and Sheiks? Do you feel that political lobbying by religious leaders is unwarranated, devisive and irreligious?

Fellow-Human, when you talk about the 'separation' of monotheism and the State what do you actually mean by that?

Hi George,

1. Scientists will test their theories and posit null hypotheses. Pride and obstinance aside, scientists will switch paradigms, more readily than a theist. The existence / non existence of the gravitional constant will depend on prevailing evidence; not so with the "evidence/indications for" the existence of god. If memory serves, Einstein need to be won over to QM. But he did so, in the end?

2. Yin and Yang are actually quite complex concepts. The traditional Chinese believe that much good must be complemented my much bad. Hence, seek order instead.

Posts will be short. Still busy.

TR,
What did a Cardinal recently threaten you with? (Cardinal Richelieu, could threaten people but he has been dead for over three centuries.) If you do not believe in hell, what CAN a cardinal threaten you with today? (If you believe in hell you also must believe that you will be judged on whether you followed your own, and not somebody else’s, conscience.) If you are an MP, how come you cannot make a conscience vote - after having assessed a couple of contradicting outside infos/ifluences by lobbyists, cardinals or not - without having to complain about “thinly veiled threats”?

Hi Oliver,
Thank you for the attention you paid my remark addressed to stickman. I am not sure whom you call “theist” but there are indeed people with both scientific and theological qualifications, and, of course they use different methods to study those two different kinds of knowledge.

How can the gravitational constant (or any other constant) cease to “exist”? Atheists claim the non-existence of (the monotheist version of) God but I have never heard of anybody denying the existence of numbers.

Also, I never claimed that the complementarity yin-yang (dark-light, female-male, passive-active, content-form etc.) was not complex, though I doubt many Chinese philosophers would like you to call them concepts (As far as I know, Chang Tung Sun wrote a long treatise on conception and perception, but that is 20th century, and he cites Kant explicitly). However, since the seventies, also in the West has ying-yang become a standard way of refering to this polarity, that in Western philosophy existed under several guises. I do not know whom you mean by “traditional Chinese”, I hope not Lao Tzu.

Thanks for the material for my mind to chew on.