There has been an inversion of values. The old “my body is a temple” coercian shares a common pulse with Liberal DooGooders-or-else” bunch hangin a the juice bar. We have prolonged life but have not prolonged the quality of  longer lives. We have killed God but not our fear of death. Some gobble hormones and powerwalk, diet tours, hi colonics, and copper bracelets we appear as desperate “also rans”  in the race for immortality. We have increased the misery that is in the world exponentially as the aged lose what defines life. Eyesight fades, taste goes flat, touch becomes numb, music reduced to a dull thud as hearing fades. And the length of life is increased. We now are growing gardens of retarded decay. We have delayed death but not decrepitude. But now we have Gardens of decay in our midst.  We have replaced heaven with oblivion and it just feels “uncomfortable”. So now the health industry,  a multi-billion dollar quality/quantity industry takes the place of a life dedicted to following religious principles.

The death cult of Islam, on the other hand, will kill on a whim. And it isn’t the killing that troubles Islam. Pleasure and the regulation of pleasure is the very core of Islam. In a culture with the ethos of the “Id” the fine tuning required for a mutually equitable partnership is a source of consternation. Conflict with self is deadly to a warrior. So control must be absolute. A crack is as good as abyss to a Bedouin, caravan raider like Mo. Like all,despots, when, he died there was a fight for control of the gang (Ref. Christining scene from Godfather 1) .

Christ lived and died a pauper, unlike Mo, he didn’t insist on dying with the biggest pile of toys, the most poontang and high score on kills and thrills in a the beheading dept. When this quaint little cult remained roaming the sands of the Sahara or some centuries later a backwater in Malaysia, no harm done. They could treat their own population like they wanted. to, after all they were “different” than us. It just didn’t seem as bad.

Now the little Bedouin religion that could is in conflict with the civilized world. They are set upon from every quarter by information. Information, is poisonous to bad religion. Information is often unwelcome in the inflexible systems of beliefs. Christianty has shown flexibility. As the foundations of society evolve so has Christianity evolved, at varying rates of course and in different ways. Now the gadfly question lies in finding out where the boundaries should be held firm or adjusted. How accommodating can a religion be before it loses it’s original identity?

For Islam, there are quite a few who believe they should uphold 7th century standards at all costs. There is the rub. As a psychologist, and most painfully, as a father of five daughters, I have experience with the politics of power in relatiomships. A system threatened by influence from without becomes rigid and sensitive to every indication of  individual thinking. Behaviours that in times of less threat would offer no aggravation now are smitten down with an iron hand. Control on all fronts is the issue. Such micromanaging of behavior is a sure sign of a threatened reqime.  An Islam threatened chops heads off for firing up. They see smoking a cigarette as far worse than beheading the smoker? Sumthin’ is wrong here.