[lbo-talk] Tell them we are democrats (was: freedom to swim)

Matthias Wasser matthias.wasser at gmail.com
Sun Jun 28 14:53:42 PDT 2009


On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 5:25 PM, <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:


>
> On the other hand, if the enlightenment is a universal value, why
> colonize?

That's an easy question, isn't it?


>
>
> robert wood
>
> > On Jun 28, 2009, at 4:02 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> >
> >> The mullahs are also speaking of universal values.
> >
> > Islam is a universal value? Why bother to convert the heathen then?
>
But this is a weird use of "universal value." If a universal value is something everybody shares, then self-evidently such things don't exist. My initial interpretation was that Doss meant this in the sense that liberalism and communism are universalistic ideologies and, say, National Socialism isn't.

I'll admit being among the ranks of people who comment without knowing anything. Which elements within Islam concieve of it as the cultural particularities of their region and which concieve of it as the literal unironic universal dictates of an omnipotent, infallible extradimensional entity (with reasonable allowances for differing or situationally-appropriate interpretations?)



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