western-civilization

The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...

It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law.

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.

The propensity to say and do dumb things, and even wicked things, is simply part of human nature. One can blame the Church or Christianity for such things only on the thoroughly unwarranted assumption that Christianity claims to have abolished human nature. The truth is that Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, is the mother of Western civilization, with all it strengths and weaknesses, including its frequently exaggerated penchant for self-criticism. Like others who know what it is to be a mother, she is not surprised, although sometimes disappointed, when she is blamed for everything and thanked for nothing.

This was an infidel country, whose way of life we Muslims were supposed to oppose and reject. Why was it, then, so much better run, better led, and made for such better lives than the places we came from? Shouldn't the places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, and the unbelievers' countries ignorant, poor, and at war?

Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Some Westerners [_] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Girls should be taught at school that giving birth to an unnaturally over-sized western baby that no longer fits down the birth canal may lead to a multitude of long term health problems.

All of Western civilization is highly influenced by the Bible, so much so that today people take for granted that our morals and our values are not common sense, but biblically based.

Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it__ pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let__ say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.___es, yes, yes, I know,_ Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. __s far as I__ concerned that__ just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I__ trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it__ his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it__ at the end of its rope. He can__ expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it__ his only hope, the only way out__f there is one for him personally, which I doubt.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.