The Western world has a history of valuing individuals since Ancient Greece, but more particularly during the Enlightenment, the Eastern world on the other hand runs on aristocracy. Valuing individuals is not just important but vital for new discoveries, Science and the like can never be a government directed initiative for the reason that the government isn't as proficient as the scientists, and that's why Western universities come complete with funding where scientists can pursue whatever proposal they submitted when accepted. Much less can be said of the East before the idea of universities spread.
In addition the Western world has it's privacy straightened it out. Ever since the Reformation, beliefs have always became a private part of a person's life, no more Inquisition or Crusades, no more apostles or heretics, the Bible has been transformed into a metaphor book, and nothing within it has to be taken seriously, except for the fundamentalist minority. Unfortunately, beliefs in the East can be more or less summed up as being public, from the Taoist gods, to Hindu deities, the beliefs may have underwent splits in ideology but never a reformation where they are meant to be kept private. In Islam it's worst, there is only word of god that must be kept, apostles get stoned to death, and liberal Muslims are seen as deviating from the true face. Even in Britain, those prophets are unwilling to lift the death penalty from those "capital punishments" in their story book.
We stand here in a divided world, the choice is between a civilisation with infrastructure developed from the Enlightenment or a less civilised civilisation with a structure not suited to maintain the current social order.
Friday, November 23, 2007
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2 comments:
Actually only in one part of Ancient Greece - Athens - were individuals valued (in the sense I presume you mean), and even then it was only racially-Greek, property-owning male citizens.
Slaves, non-property-owning males, women and foreigners were not considered on the same level as citizens.
Fast forward to 212 AD when Caracalla granted universal citizenship to all male non-slaves. Yep. Slaves and females were still excluded.
Belief in Bible literalism is still true in America, a large part of the Western World.
The East did not have Wars of Religion, unlike the West (which is why they didn't get down to explictly separate the spheres of religion and politics) since they were never as religious as the West. I don't believe there was religious persecution in the East, or at least not on a scale like in the West, so your assertion is misplaced.
Also, Islam has a record of remarkable tolerance - at least towards other Peoples of the Book, and was much more tolerant of Christians and Jews than Christians were of Jews and Muslims.
Nowhere in the world were slaves valued as much as their owners before the Emancipation, except in certain parts of ancient Greece, to point that out is to make an unfair comparison. Same goes for women, until women rights movements.
America may have religious fundamentalist but even they can't rise above the separation of church and state in the US constitution. Apparently no such law is holding most of the East from messing with private beliefs in public.
And who were the people who kept on overthrowing emperors who they thought lost the mandate of heaven? What about the fight between Hindus and Muslims after some guy decided to spread religion by the sword? Have you ever heard of the Mughal empire? And there's also those emperor worshipping samurai who fought to defend their idols to the death. The only reason why you think that the East doesn't have religious wars is because they are so poorly documented. In essence, almost every war fought in the East was religious in nature before the people were fighting for their divine leaders.
And if Islam is so peaceful why did they start attacking the Byzantine empire, and claiming Jerusalem as their holy site?
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