03.14.06
A clash of world views
Here’s an interesting video.
I saw it this past weekend. I tried to find a way to download it but they’ve got it well masked - guess I’ll let them use their bandwidth for folks who want to view it rather than hosting it on my site. 
Anyway, I finally got a connection good enough to follow what was going on. It is of a woman psychologist who is of Arab descent and who is talking about the different ways folks think - specifically the Middle Eastern Muslim and the Western “Infidel”. She says “I don’t believe in the supernatural” and immediately a cleric starts calling her a heretic and saying she had blasphemed against Allah and The Prophet. This is typical of “true believers” of many fundamentalist groups. If you can’t handle the debate use a good attack instead. But her basic premise is interesting, to say the least. And it’s something that many folks don’t understand.
What I’ve seen over the years is that everyone tends to view things according to how things are in their own small corner of the world. It is impossible for a Colombian who is born and raised on some small coffee growing farm to understand a KS wheat operation. Just like the KS farmer can’t understand hand planting, tilling and harvesting on near vertical Andes slopes. Oh, you might have heard a bit about it, but “understand”? Not really.
So when it comes to a clash of mindsets, things get dicey very quickly. Folks in modern US of A (not to mention the east side of the pond) have a hard time realizing that there are over a billion people “over there” who have not kept up with the industrial revolution - not to mention “modern” and “post modern” thought. While they may be comfortable accepting behaviors which were abominable to our forefathers (not to mention He Who created all) they don’t understand why such activities are worthy of death, destruction and mayhem to a large portion of the world’s population.
And then there’s the other side of the coin. Folks who want change by force. Me? I’d love to see a much more conservative nation in the US of A. But it’s not going to happen through violence. And it’s not going to happen as long as folks are unwilling to face the situation head on and learn to reason with others. Don’t worry about the died in the wool folks, learn to reason with the “fence sitters”. They, after all, are the “swing votes” and we’d better learn to give them solid reason to slide off on the side of conservative thought and action. And this whole “you have blasphemed” attack pattern? It does nothing towards changing minds - unless causing someone to back away from you and write your opinions off as “worthless” is the type of change you’re looking for.