Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
It seems to me that evolution HAS worked over the last thousand or so years: their culture has frozen, as you say, or gone backwards. Our culture has advanced. But cultural evolution and biological evolution work under different rules. And I believe cultural evolution works a lot faster.
I think we agree with each other but just using different formulations. According to Richard Dawkins meme theory, cultural evolution can speed up if it allready has evolved somewhere else and there is a will to incorporate the new ideas. So there's scientific backing for your statement. Beating biological evolution in speed doesn't require much though. It's slooooooow.

Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
My point exactly. One facet of the extremist Islamic beliefs seems to be that change is bad. Therefore, no progress.
I'm not an historian, so maybe my facts are off a bit, but I think one can safely say that the beginning of the fall of Arab culture began with the rise of Mohammadism. Once again faith degenerated into religion and the common man suffers while the priests/medicine men/Imams/what-have-you flourish.
I think you're wrong. The spread of monotheism and the extreme intollerance toward other religions and moral codes brought with it some very positive effects. The major effect was reducing xenophobia in trade. You knew you could trust others if they followed the same religion. It's regidity and inflexibility meant stable rules for trade. This was translated to big money and win-win within each region following the same religion. This is quite measurable.

Other positive effects are the monotheistic religions holy books. The rules needed to be written down to be permanent. You needed to read to understand them which enhanced literacy which we all obviously know is a great skill for book keeping, (= more money). Also measurable. There's a clear link between litteracy and BNP.

Islam is a development of Christianity. It's not a new religion. The religious text might not be all that different than the Bible, but it had one strength over it. There's no question that the Koran is the words of Mohammed. Every part of the new testament can be questioned. When Mohammed lived the versio vulgata, (ie the modern Bible) was only one of many variants of the new testament. Here's the info.

It's aparent that Mohammed wanted a more cohesive religion without really changing anything. I've read both the Bible and the Koran. They're pretty interchangable, (yes, I have a thing for religious history). Also when Islam first spread it wasn't meant to be the religion of the people. At first Mohammed had planned it to only be the religion of the ruling elite. Islam isn't anti-christian. It has never been. They embrace it as an integral part of Islam. Mohammed was first and foremost a great polititian and general. There are plenty of letters written in his own hand that have survived that we can read. We know his personal opinions. This is a major difference to christianity. We know absolutely nothing about Jesus other than what says in the Bible, and there was so many different versions of the Bible back then that it's easy to imagine that it could get very confusing.

I think it's more correct to say that the rise of Mohammedism is what made the Arab culture superior to the west European in so many ways. They embraced other religions more than Christians, which off-course meant that they had a greater inflow of ideas, (=more money according to Richard Florida).

I'd say the high-point of Arab culture was more likely something like 800-1200 during the rule of the Caliphate. In no other time in history did they crank out so many inventions western Europe could steal. Modern mathematics and our alphabet being the most significant. After that the area started to get invaded from every direction which ended it's period of inner stability. Under the rule of the Ottomans the Arabs lived under the yoke of a standard imperialistic police state which always sonner or later ends up being corrupt and hampering development. So development was painfully slow up until about 1920, at which time they'd lost any head start they had.

I don't think any ideas spread and become totaly dominant in a region if there's nothing to gain from it. But that doesn't mean that they can't linger a lot longer than what's useful. It's hard to see how being christian of muslim today will lead to any fiscal gains over the non-believers. We have laws that regulate trade so morality doesn't really count in that sector any longer. And people tend to like learning to read for other reasons than reading religious texts.

My very long rant here was just me trying to explain how religion has been great for the world.