Throughout history, immense and appalling barbarities have been committed in the name of countless gods. The Bible, for example, reports several million people as having been killed through the direct intervention of God. Curiously, only a handful are reported to have been killed by the Devil. Other sacred books such as the Koran and Torah offer similar accounts. This does not surprise me, as ignorance and fear of the unknown were normally managed through superstition, sacrificial acts, adorations of mythical figures and countless fictions. Over time science – where allowed – removed most of these unknowns.

I am surprised, however, by so many barbarities continuing to be perpetrated today in the name of baseless self-appointed prophets and gods, and these situations are particularly notorious within current Islam. The problem, in my view, is that Islam is not a religion in the usual sense (accepting separation from State), but a totalitarian social governance framework based on medieval texts postulated to be sacred and to be imposed by force by self-appointed intermediaries.

From an intellectual point of view, I consider Islam incompatible with most Western and Eastern civilization values that have been built since the Magna Carta or equivalent humanistic documents, as it submits the ideas and actions of individuals to the scrutiny of arbitrarily set dogma, prejudice and laws, often primitive and barbaric, that even oppose basic forms of rationality and human dignity. Many such situations have flourished in recent years, the violation of gay, women and children’s human rights – defined according to fundamental human morality – constituting three of many possible examples. Furthermore, human morality cannot be subject to the judgement of any religion or religious framework because morality vastly transcends religion. Morality is not owned by any religion; morality is owned by humanity and thus biology, having established its core principles through millions of years of biological evolution.

To aggravate the situation, in recent years Islam has been highjacked by wing nut extremists and fanatics feeding on support originating in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Unfortunately they have been allowed to maintain a loud voice and a wide reach – even when based in Western capitals such as London, Paris, Berlin or New York, where ideology also meets business. In fact, the financial-military-industrial complex has benefitted vastly from these extremist voices and the corresponding instability that they generate, while oppressing and killing hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.

For me, by rejecting any underlying framework of human morality inside a religious-based social governance framework with barbaric dogma, prejudice and laws at its core, current Islam represents a vivid illustration of intellectual blindness and human stupidity. But then, any other religious-based social governance framework that rejects an underlying framework of human morality, would also be similarly blind and stupid.

I wish Man were wiser than the cynics who categorize human beings according to some type A (the ins, such as the faithful) and some other type B (the outs, such as the infidel). I also wish that Muslim leaders, scholars and preachers ceased to be – in too many instances – the hypocrites that they have been by abusing Western or Eastern tolerance to preach Islamic extremism, or by choosing silence over strong public condemnation of gratuitous violence and vigorous legal prosecution of terrorists who speak in the name of Islam. I also wish that Western and Eastern leaders stop their current support for extremist Muslim preachers and indoctrination schools – even inside mosques – while also stopping using ’political correctness’ as the prevailing social language based on stupid Marxist dogma. Political correctness – the language of cultural marxism – detaches words from physical reality and well defined meanings and thus facilitates the highjacking of word meanings and subsequently of behaviors and cultures by extremists who want people to feed on delusions. In particular, Western societies should not allow parallel societies to be built inside their own societies for Muslims to follow Sharia Law, nor allow such activities to be financed by any sources.

As David Suurland stated in his book “Totalitarianism and Radical Islam Ideologies”, “The way in which Muslim extremists describe the present condition of the Islamic world is almost a mirror image of the language used by the Nazis and the Communists when they tried to convey their ‘raison d’être’ to their respective audiences. Secondly, the enemy is defined in existentialist terms according to the doctrine of loyalty and enmity. Thirdly; the group of believers, those who God, history or nature has designated as its ‘chosen’ people, comparable to ‘Volk’ or ‘class’, and its enemies are all referred to as a collective and not as a collection of individuals. This methodology reduces all the intricacies of the human experience to a simple ‘us versus them’ equation which exists nowhere in reality. Again, the same can be seen in the Marxists and the Nazis reduction of world history to simple axiomatic premises.”

We are facing very challenging times ahead as the battles of the future will be battles to control human minds, as facts get replaced by “alternative facts”, reason gets replaced by delusions and individual critical thinking gets replaced by mass stupidity. The fight will be hard and long, like all important fights in life. We should always respect other people’s culture and laws; however, we have every right to demand that our culture and laws be respected in turn.