Education or Electrolysis

Recently, I've been following the story about an Afghan man who is under arrest for converting to Christianity. As I understand it, he may be put on trial and may face a death sentence for his crimes since the Islamic beliefs that form the basis of Afghan civil law prescribe death for apostasy (abandoning your religion). Of course the US government has weighed in on the side of religious freedom, and thankfully (but slightly surprisingly) the European and Canadian governments have also condemned the trial with varying degrees of severity. I think that Canada is officially "very concerned", while Italy is considering withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. The Afghan government, which is relatively moderate, seems to understand that their country is 100% dependant on Western economic and military aid, and wants the case to go away. The Afghan judiciary, which is largely filled with conservative Muslim clerics (they do make for terrific judges), is pushing for prosecution and execution by beheading.

These events raise a whole host of issues that we should be openly debating...should we provide miliary and economic aid to a country that flagrantly violates the most basic of human rights? What does it mean when Western Muslim gropus angrily condemn and protest a cartoon, but, through their comparative silence, implicitly condone the practice of executing Christian converts? Would it be a neat experiment to write someone a $13.74 ticket for being Muslim in North America, and then use a millisecond timer to determine how long it takes for the car bombs to start going off? I think what this all comes down to is the huge chasm between Western and conservative Muslim values, a chasm that has probably existed for a long time but which is only coming into focus now due to the increased contact and friction between the two cultures. I also don't think that we'll ever have peace between the cultures unless we reduce the chasm somehow.

So how do we do this? Well, one option that used to be pretty popular south of the 49th parallel went something like "pretend the have the bomb, invade them, take their oil, instantly transform them into freedom-hugging democracies, high-five ourselves, then go back to Texas for some BBQ." Turns out that doesn't work so well (who knew???). A better approach, in my mind, is education...there are certain inescapable conclusions that you come to when you learn about the world in a secular, non-jihad-centric manner. Some of these undeniable realities are that the world is a very complicated and interconnected place, that because of this there are many points of view to every issue, that to truly understand something you need to consider as many points of view as possible, that one of the most valuable human gifts is our ability for free and independant thought, and that authoritarian dogma which supresses that gift usually does so for purely self-serving reasons. I don't know if it's been proven, but I'm pretty sure that the number of hijacked airplane-bombs taking out office towers is inversely proportional to the number of people capable of reasoned thought in the world. I think education might also have a bit of an impact on economic growth, national development, quality of life, and all of those other neat things that Muslim countries might be able to use.

The problem is that the common people living in many Muslim countries don't want to be educated. Or rather, the people that control the countries don't want them to be educated, and the people don't even know enough to KNOW that they don't know enough. Religion is a terrific way to control people, whether you're Christian or Jewish or Muslim, and increased education almsot inevitably makes people less willing to follow their religious leaders blindly. Not that I think education and religion are mutually exclusive...I think that one balances the other, and that you need to have both to really understand the world. But for authoritarian theocratic rulers to stay in power, they need to command with the fear of God since they don't really have much else going for them (like any interest or ability to improve the lives of their citizens). So, keep the people in the dark ages, control them with a twisted interpretation of a religion, and when somebody tries to "leave the compound" by converting to another religion, it's execution time in the town square.

So I think we have two options...Option 1: stick in it for the long run, slowly try to bring knowledge and balance to the parts of the world that need it most, in the process narrowing the value chasm between our cultures, and maybe maybe maybe eventually bringing about some kind of peaceful coexistance. Option 2: develop cheap, reliable hydrogen-based power generation, electrolyze a couple of lakes, power the West for 200 years, withdraw completely from the Middle East and let the people suffer forever. Both options probably involve the same amount of effort, but the first one seems better to me for some reason.