In a nutshell: why Islam is doomed

Interesting bait on this one !
You might catch a few who need to chat.
Lets see!

Ah-hahahahahahahahaha . . .

Thanks, that was an amusing fantasy.

It doesn't look doomed.



http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/23/why-muslims-are-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religious-group/

That's interesting, but the Pew research assumes that 2050 will be fairly similar to 2010, doesn't it? The half-assed theory I proposed, which just flashed through my mind after watching a Frontline documentary and an interview with Colonel Jack Jacobs, does not make that assumption.

After all, consider the difference in the world from 1910 to 1950.

Anyway, the Jacobs interview is food for thought:

I live to make you laugh, Setanta.

Well, Tuna, ya know....that phony laugh is heard from him 24/7 round these here parts. You aint that special.

So I'm neither special nor funny? You haven't heard me tell my story about how I tried to cook a spaghetti squash in the microwave.

Your sarcasm is noted, as is its puerile character.

First and foremost ISIS and Islam is not one and the same thing and the fate of the one is not tied up with the fate of the other.

No Islam is in no more danger of being doomed then the other world religions.

As an atheist I do hope that the tends in Western nations of their populations becoming less religion will continue and expand to non-western nations but that is hundreds of years hope and no one alive today or their grandchildren for that matter will likely see the end of any of the major religions including Islam.

Izzy you deleted your last post and here I was going to have some more fun pointing out some more of your false statements in that post beginning with the German Republic being fairly stable in the 1920s.

A period of the worst hyperinflation in the history of any nation for one thing.

Oh well I am sure you will post other nonsense in the very near future.

I deleted my post somewhere else because I thought you were talking about something else. I've saved it should the need arise on an appropriate thread.

There was stability before hyper inflation. And said hyper inflation was ultimately caused by the Depression, another example of Republican financial mismanagement.

You do know that the German hyperinflation happen in the mid 1920's better known as the roaring 20's for the US and the rest of the world?

An no economic expert that I am aware of blame any other factor but the billions your nation and France was taking out of Germany in war reparations and surely not the great depression that was still in the future.

Further footnote Depressions result in deflation not inflation and surely not hyperinflation. Suggest you refer to any 101 economic text book for more information.

It is absolutely false that hyperinflation in Germany was caused by "the Great Depression." That event was triggered by the collapse of grain prices in the late 1920s. The United States and Canada had been able to sell as much grain as they could grow to feed a devastated European market. Throughout the 1920s, however, European nations began to recover their agricultural production, and the huge amounts of foreign exchange available to the United States and Canada dried up. In those countries, the foreign exchange lead a great deal of speculative investment in what were, essentially, unregulated securities markets. Securities were wildly over-valued, and this affected European securities markets in a similar manner, although not to the same extremes. Securities markets traditionally engage in profit-taking in late September or in October, and when this took place in 1929 in New York, a great many securities collapsed because there was no "there" there--they were valuable only on paper, and often hadn't the capital to back their paper. This had a ripple effect on other markets, including in Europe.

German economists in the 1980s pored over the records and sifted the data and showed that the German economy became chronically inflationary in 1914, before the war started. Initially, only in Germany, production orders from the government kept the inflationary trend under control. But the lack of foreign exchange due to wartime conditions sapped the confidence of securities traders, and inflation began to rise again. Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff in the first two years of the war, had roundly condemned the tactical doctrine of both sides, who would stack up huge numbers of troops behind a narrow segment of front, initiate a heavy, continuous bombardment (which effectively tipped their hand with regard to their new offensive) and then throw their troops into a meat grinder, unable to effect a break-through because the area of front was too narrow, and a relatively small force could hold off the attack. That was his assessment of the failure of Allied offensives, and then quixotically, he did exactly that with the Verdun offensive of 1916. (S.L.A. Marshall in his one volume history of the First World War for American Heritage speculated that Falkenhayn hoped to cause so many casualties on both sides that the Allies and the Central Powers would then sit down an negotiate and to the war--of course that is pure speculation, and rather an odd idea.)

Comments on German military doctrine in 1916 may seem to be a pointless digression, but it's not. Inflation in Germany began to rise dramatically as the Verdun campaign dragged on without any resolution, and with no prospect of resolution. As Germany was no longer in a foreign exchange market, it is unavoidable to note that German investors had lost faith in the economy. By mid-1916, Germany was in a phase of what is now called "runaway inflation," and no government measures could stop it or even slow it down. After the war, with reparations imposed by the Paris conference of 1919, the Weimar government not only had no motive to reduce inflation, but very good reason to let it rage on. Reparations payments were worthless because of hyper-inflation, and as the reparations were calculated in gold marks, and the paper marks of the Weimar Republic were worthless, the reparations payments were worthless. Eventually the Weimar government collapsed (1930) and with the prospect of Germany defaulting on all debts, and not just reparations, the reparations were cancelled. (That deal was worked out by Herbert Hoover, the evil Republican president that Izzy was hilariously blaming for German hyper-inflation.)

It is absurd to claim that Britain and France took billions out of Germany. Germany didn't have billions to be taken--see my explanation of hyper-inflation in Germany above.

German hyper-inflation and the Great Depression? Apples to oranges.

I agree that no one alive today will see the end of any of the major religions. But if it happened, history testifies that it wouldn't be because of the spread of naturalism. It would be because of the rise of a new global religion.

Islam has challenges that no other religion has, particularly related to its dependence on political and military power. I had already begun to speculate that Muslims will never overcome those challenges when I considered the threat to it posed by ISIS.

In the long run, I think your optimism for Islam is unjustified.

Well hooked !
I just knew someone had a history lecture just bursting to get out if there was a glimmer of a chance !

I think if we check an economics textbook, we'll find that "depression" is not defined strictly as a period of deflation. Deflation accompanied most of the depressions we have identified.

But it is possible to have low growth and high inflation simultaneously. Such a period may be called a recession, and since a depression is a severe recession, there's no reason to rule out an inflationary depression.

Honestly, I wasn't fishing. It was just some crap that crossed my mind. But as the history of Germany is now threatening to swallow my boat, I think I'll head back to shore.

How does Islam depend on political power? This last post, in combination with the OP, suggest that you really do not have clear ideas about the place that organized religion has in political societies, that you have have some fantasy vision of ISIS and its relations to the nations of the middle east and to the United States, and i also suspect that the extent of the Muslim world is not clear to you. For example, are you aware that the largest Muslim nation on earth is Indonesia? Are you aware that the largest Arabic-speaking nation is Egypt, which recently put a Muslim Brotherhood-supported, conservative Muslim government out of business? Are you aware that army in Algeria stepped in and took control of that nation in 1991, after the Islamic Salvation Front had won municipal and national legislative elections, and has run the country for almost 25 years? Are you aware that during the so-called Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia lead a GCC force into Bahrain to put down a popular movement which would have put a religiously conservative government in place, also during the so-called Arab Spring? Far from being dependent on political power, Islam has very often been divided or suppressed by political parties. Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government in Iraq was secular, but was largely a front of the Sunni minority to rule the country and keep down the Shi'ite majority. The Assads in Syria have lead a typical middle eastern minority tribal government since about a decade after the collapse of UAR (do you know what the UAR was?) which has protected Shi'ites, Druze and various flavors of Christians from a Sunni majority. The Assads have been, at least nominally, members of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party, too. Know anything about that party? Do you know anything about Pan-Arabism, or the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood? Do you know anything about Islam outside the middle east?

I suspect that you don't know much about Islam at all, nor about the Muslim nations of the world and their respective and distinct histories and identities. That's OK, though, because ignorance is a pre-eminently curable condition.