Don’t give American creationists ideas — this would be their ideal world. ISIS has set their rules for education.
In swaths of Syria now controlled by ISIS, children can no longer study math or social studies. Sports are out of the question. And students will be banned from learning about elections and democracy.
…
Books cannot include any reference to evolution. And teachers must say that the laws of physics and chemistry “are due to Allah’s rules and laws.”
No math means no physics — at least we know they’ll never be able to aim their artillery. And no evolution means no biology, so their soldiers will die of treatable diseases. Are there any recipes for gunpowder in the Koran?
And at least they’re honest about their goals of spreading ignorance and misery everywhere they go.
Given how American conservatives are so opposed to ISIS and would likely not want to be compared to them…shouldn’t they support math, social sciences, and dare I say-evolution?
That’s the first thing that springs to my mind too when I hear about *other* people pushing the just more honest and clearly stated versions of the exact same agendas that conservatives do.
Also, every time a politician speaks against equal treatment of humans who happen to be gay or black or bilingual or without penises, all they’re doing is saying they want to be a little bit like Boko Haram or Al Qaeda. There’s just no escaping it. Equality is an all or nothing deal. You can’t say “I don’t hate gay people, I just don’t want them to be treated EXACTLY the same as me. Just a little bit different. But really guys, I’m nothing like those ISIS maniacs!”
The beauty of the religion is that it will find a way to ban stuff and un-ban stuff when it requires it that way. Conservatism defines as bare minimalism… no shoes, but flip flops.
Aron Ra two days ago: Rewriting Texas history books to instill American (Judeo-Christian) Exceptionalism
Ow, my irony!
Q: What kind of schmuck thinks that people who ban the teaching of math are an existential threat to the U.S.?
A: Every Republican elected to Congress. And Sam Harris too.
Cross-posted from the Lounge thread:
Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, recently voiced a theory that I find is becoming more popular with the rabid right-wingers. The theory is that the USA wouldn’t have groups like ISIS as enemies if the U.S. government would just promote christianity.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/religious-right-leader-ties-us-secularism-islamic-state
They’ll learn the mathy bits that let them count money, then hire some contractors.
Like all of the deepest profundities in scripture, you’re supposed to take “no math” figuratively. They’re not lying to themselves, you see. It’s a metaphor for … uh, err…. *head explodes*
Tony @ 1
Usually around his point American Bible-humpers start getting really smug and passive-aggressive: “Aren’t you atheists glad you’re living in a Christian nation. Aren’t you glad you’re not living in a Muslim country were you’d be beheaded for your godlessness? Maybe you ought to show us some gratitude and stop spitting on us and our Lord because it could be worse!”
When you ask them that, they’ll flip-flop to admiring them.
Tony! @ 1
See, they agree on 90%, but it’s that other 10% that makes them deadly enemies.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The ability of American fundamentalist Christians and other Christian conservatives to not see how similar they are ideologically to groups like ISI* is simply astounding. If you take out every reference to Muhammad and replace it with Jesus and Allah with God, you literally could not tell them apart by their words.
At least in totalitarian North Korea kids can learn math and physics.
But seriously, I watched a documentary by atheist Jim Al-Khalili on Science and Islam and he descrbed how science flourished in the Caliphate between the 8th and 14th century. Astronomer and mathematician Alhazen was the first to devise the scientific method. This begs the question-what on earth went wrong?!?
Today’s quiz: “ISIS or ICR?”
What went wrong? The crusades, colonialism, and a lack of resources to support an industrial revolution.
Back in the 16th century, a group which banned ALL knowledge….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abecedarian
Math? MATH? I can’t get my head around that. Is it really true?
The original Islamic Caliphate gave us base-ten numerals and algebra. Math is not anti-Islamic.
BAN SHARIA MATH!
It really is interesting to see how closely the ideology of islamic state and that of many US xian fundamentalist groups mirror one another – swap over references to islam with christian equivalents, and as Saad says @ 2 it really would be hard to tell them apart. I think, deep down, there is no small amount of ‘fatwah envy’ going on with US fundamentalist christian groups. I think quite a lot of them would love to possess a military power base like that of ISIS and with it the ability to bring back christianity’s one persuasive argument – the threat of torture and death if you don’t go along with it.
I also think we will see no small measure of hypocrisy from IS on this. In the same way that many pro-life Repiblicans clearly think that the only moral abortion is their own, I am sure that ISIS will condemn mathematics, physics, biology and most other forms of education only until that knowledge becomes useful to them, whereupon they will maintain their luddite, anti-intellectual public stance while happily making use of the fruits of scientific endeavour away from prying eyes or after having simply declared a particular form of technology to be godly and thus acceptable because (sophistimicated theology) reasons.
Afterall, many terrorist and otherwise militant groups claim to despise ‘western science’ and yet still use chemistry in the creation of bombs, still use mobile phones as detonators, still communicate from remote areas with satellite phones, still aspire to the creation of biological terror weapons like anthrax or ricin, and still engage in cyber-terrorism activities.
And if a prominent ISIS leader somehow contracted, say, ebola from the recent outbreak, I wonder if he would refuse these new drug treatments that have been developed and seem effective, should they be offered? Would he really be prepared to remain true to his backward convictions while slowly dying, bleeding from every orifice while his organs turned to mush? I doubt it.
Fanatics are almost always hypocrits. If they weren’t they would probably have a hard time surviving at all, let alone representing any kind of threat to the world at large.
gussnarp @ 12
Remember how quickly the right rallied around Holly Lobby Holly/a? “THERE IS NO COMPARISON! HOLLY HAS NEVER KILLED ANYONE!!!!”
Not yet…
Lynna #6 wrote:
The basic “theory” has been popular for a very long time. Consider the popular CK Chesterton misquote:
“When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
The general idea — that abandoning truth (either by embracing error or renouncing the honest search/possibility) will eventually lead to bad outcomes — is reasonable. Once you go off the rails, it’s hard to keep on track.
But the critical part of this isn’t being right — it’s the method you use to get there. Both Christianity and Islam seek Truth-with-the-capital-T and rest on faith apologetics, not reason and science. When you stop believing in those last two, then yeah, pretty much any idiocy will rush in to fill the void.
In other words secularism isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.
It’s perfectly ok, no one uses math in war, nothing to worry about.
What a Maroon@10: “See, they agree on 90%, but it’s that other 10% that makes them deadly enemies.”
And because you can never have too much Emo Philips:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump.
I said, “Don’t do it!”
He said, “Nobody loves me.”
I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?”
He said, “A Christian.”
I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?”
He said, “Protestant.”
I said, “Me, too! What franchise?”
He said, “Baptist.”
I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Baptist.”
I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.”
I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.”
I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”
I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
-Voted 44th funniest joke of all time in “The 75 Funniest Jokes of All Time” in GQ magazine (June 1999)
To be distracted a little by the quote Lynna posted at #6
“And we should know from experience that a vacuum will be filled by something” and that without x-tianity “the nation will perish”
then they should be promoting domestic atheism as a nice peaceful vacuum-filler…
@a ray in dilbert space
XD
Currently at the end of the linked CCN article: “Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story contained reporting about ISIS and education. CNN has concerns about the interpretation of the information provided and we will update the story when we can verify what is happening.”
And just how do the isis thugs differ from the usalienstani thugs (in congress and elsewhere)? I’d suggest answers on the back of a pinhead, back that would leave an enormous amount of empty space. Answers on the back of a photon would be about the right scale, I suspect… but carving or otherwise writing such answers would require maths or a magic great sky fairies, only one of which exists and works.
Freaky. The verbatim text of the original article can now be found on a FOX news site:
http://q13fox.com/2014/09/17/isil-bans-math-social-studies-for-children/
When one compares that to “Version 2.0” of the CNN story —
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/17/world/meast/syria-crisis/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
— one has to wonder whether “version” doesn’t really mean what they think it means.
my, my. Our American wannabee theocrats must be in throes of ecstasy in reading such things. Oh the jealousy must be intense!
Sounds like European Christians from 400AD to 1800AD
edrowland @28:
Fuck you CNN. The story’s all over now, all sourced back to CNN, at least where FOX affiliates aren’t plagiarizing, and you pull the story because you fucked up. Great. Just what we need. Excuses for people in the future to discredit negative coverage of ISIL are about as welcome as syphilis. Isn’t there enough negative to say about ISIL without just making shit up?
Fuck you CNN.
The CNN article is now edited to exclude the information about education inside the Islamic State. It is possible that the story originally came from here: http://www.raqqa-sl.com/?p=1678
I pasted that link before around here, it does look genuine but of course you can never trust anything. The site appears to give updates on life inside the capital of IS, Raqqa, from the perspective of ordinary citizens.
When did ISIS conquered Alabama and Kentucky?
To add to my #32: If the IS education policy as shown on http://www.raqqa-sl.com/?p=1678 is genuine, and the translation on that page correct, than IS are not banning mathematics but they are calling for “Abolition of any example in maths that points to interest, interest on money, democracy, or election.”
I can see how a different translation could give rise to misunderstandings.
Rightwingers in Texas have created anti-education text books.
Mother Jones link.
Just thinking, but if I wanted to steal a lot of money from my rebel organization I would (hypothetically) kill or demonize all the accountants and then stop teaching people to count accurately…
Olav @32, 34:
Oy vey. You’d think CNN might hire someone fluent in both Arabic and English, but you’d be wrong. A particularly bad auto-translation might have gotten them their story, but if that’s the source–and it sure looks like it is–then no fluent human translation could have caused that screw up. Hell, even if they don’t have fluent people on staff you’d think they might run it through a few different translation programs before running their story, but no. Either they ran it once through a particularly crappy program, or they hired a translator lacking in fluency.
CNN is really trying hard not to be a news organization.
In all fairness, Republicans had been warning that our open border with Mexico would allow fundmentalist-fueled terrorists to infiltrate the country.
Now, if only those education restrictions applied to *everybody* in their society (i.e. including people being groomed for leadership) the problem would solve itself after one generation. Fifty years from now their society would be nothing but blithering idiots.
But alas, as long as their future leadership continues to be educated in Western schools before returning to run the show, they will continue to be a threat. Keeping their huddles masses ignorant just makes it easier to convince them to strap on an explosive vest, drive an explosives-laden vehicle into a cafe, or fly an airliner into a building “for the cause”.
It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I fear 9/11 was small potatoes compared to what’s coming. And I fear that some fundagelicals in the US see no need to avoid it, as it merely hastens Armageddon and the return of Jeebus.
win.
from Fatwa envy in the last war, to Caliphate envy in this one.
@ Naked Bunny with A Whip # 14
Neither. The group should be refered to by the Romanised form of their Arabic acronym (داعش), al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham: DAESH (“Daesh”)
For those of you fortunate to be living in countries that do not block wordpress blogs: Pieter van Ostaeyen
In fact the decline in Arabic science (science done in Arabic, not necessarily by Arabs or Muslims) began as early as the mid-9th century, when the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil turned against the rationalistic Mu’tazilite school in favour of Quranic literalism. It was exacerbated in the 11th century when important centres of learning were captured by recently-converted nomadic groups such as the Seljuks and Almoravids. Brutal as the Crusades were, they were marginal events in the Islamic world, which stretched from west Africa to central Asia and what is now Indonesia. They (and particularly the Reconquista in Iberia) had a much larger cultural effect on western Christendom than on Islam.
As I suspected, the IS statement seems to have been garbled in translation. While they are certainly not an existential threat, IS are quite capable of recruiting technical experts in those areas of science and maths most useful if you want to kill people.
Don’t kid yourself: if they manage to consolidate their rule, they’ll soon establish “elite” schools reserved for the scions of their ruling class where their future officers and nobility of the robe will receive decent education. Would-be despots don’t want to spread ignorance and misery for ignorance and misery sake: their real goal is to weaken the plebs as much as possible to insure that their bloodline will remain at the top of the food-chain.
Well, but admittedly, algebra is this godless “fuzzy math”, after all…
Arizona State Senator Says He Opposes Common Core Because… It Promotes Algebra
After subjecting millions of kids to algebra, now they ban math? Thanks for nothing.
Presumably they’ll be counting in base 5, once they’ve been caught shoplifting.
Don’t be too optimistic. The Khmer Rouge killed off anyone suspected of being an intellectual, including (and especially) anyone with glasses. It didn’t stop the KR from using any of the weapons they got from Moscow or the US. (Yes, the US armed the Khmer Rouge, against the Vietnamese.)
Anyone willing to rationalize an extremist ideology is more than capable of rationalizing hypocrisy.
The Mongol invasions caused more damage than the crusades and was likely a significant factor. The siege of Baghdad was particularly bloody and led to the Mongol destruction of the Grand Library of Baghdad. It’s alleged that the Tigris ran black from the ink the Mongols threw into the river. Iran also suffered quite severely.
@ firstapproximation
There’s a variation on this meme: It’s alleged that the Nile ran black from the ink …
It may need to be taken with a pinch of salt.