Christian America Chooses to Self-Destruct by Following 15th century Islam's Anti-Scientism

One of the greatest ironies of our Age is that modern America is arguably a culmination of the ascendancy of the West and it seeks to destroy itself with the very weapon that made it possible. Those who paid attention to history know that as late as 1600, the Arabic world was far ahead of Europe. Arab science dominated European superstition. But the rise of a special brand of Islamic Faith forced the Arab world to turn away from science, lose their advantage, fall further and further behind the West, and ultimately turn over world domination to Western Empires, leading to the ascendancy of the material, technological, practical American version of Western Empire. Our version of the Enlightenment -- one of the practical inventor who drove standards of competition in industry ever upward, reined in by the practical policy maker who insisted that the blessings of the earth be shared democratically -- was arguably our sine qua non.

And now it is being destroyed.

Today, we face the rise of a new brand of Christian Faith that rejects or diminishes science, much as did the Arab world of the 13th to 15th centuries. The Arab world's scientific community today is a tiny fraction of what it rightfully should have been. Religion poisoned their destiny, relegating them in large part to many of the disasters they have endured during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. We are following in their path.

Today, nearly half of Americans repudiate science, expend enormous energy setting our understanding of the world and universe backward, fight to deprive children of an honest education, and suppress the use, much less the advance, of science. Today, while the CDC cries out that we do not have the funding to fight Zika's invasion of the continental US, many Americans apparently believe that Zika is a "government conspiracy." When the next virus comes along -- and it will assuredly come along -- we may be doomed to prevaricate and sermonize instead of blasting it with the might of modern science.

The enemies of modernity say the vast majority of climatologists and other scientists clamoring about changes in the earth's ecosystem are lying for research funding. Thus the Anthropocene Epoch, so named because we have caused an astonishing implosion of the biosphere, is apparently a political ploy.

Ironically, the very Americans who are, for a host of odd reasons, so anti-Muslim have decided to follow in the footsteps of the Arab World in the 15th century and hand over our leadership of the world, trading it in for superstition and nonsense. We are taking the lead offered by Islam in how to destroy the most advanced society on Earth in short order.

The passing of the American Empire is not the whole price, unfortunately. For with our obstinate passing we may take the biosphere with us. But until then, we get to prove that those who failed to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it.