Islamic Hybridism

This was originally meant to be a Community Post for my YouTube channel, but it ran long. It’s a good deal shorter than the usual essay-length post reserved for Extensive Arguments, and though I have two unfinished Sequence Trilogies that have been pending for eons, and embarrassingly so, I’ll publish this too-long-for-the-community piece over here anyway.

The post being moved here started out as a Poll soliciting answers to a deceivingly simple question. As with my other polls, I added a few short lines to explain the broader context of the query, only to then catch myself snowballing the explanations in order to make doubly sure that no one downplays the gravity of what's being queried. So much for that.

Motivation for the Poll: The string of murders in France and elsewhere in Europe over the last two months, particularly the aftermath-spurred debates over how to solve or mitigate the problem of Islam-inspired violence legally or socially, while avoiding overkill (i.e. human rights violations). To those who have decided that there’s no overkill, or that there’s no point in worrying about overkill, you're probably not the target audience, and I imagine you’re in for a disappointing read.

The intended poll:

 

Non-muslims familiar with the Qur’an are correct to rank-order Muslims in the following way, morally speaking:

 

Cultural Muslims > Moderate Muslims > Devout Muslims > Islamists > Jihadists

 

A: Agree

B: Disagree

C: Agree in theory, but this specific ranking is wrong

D: Ambivalent (on non-empirical grounds / i.e. the value of non-judgmentalism)

E: Indecisive (because we lack some pertinent facts / still pro-judgmentalism)

To answer contextually, you will need to keep reading. (Sorry)

Eternity And Mediocrity

Nick Bostrom's Infinite Ethics is a worthwhile read, but if you don't have the time, I'll just point you to this bit from the abstract:

• Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world.

Maybe you gawk at the quoted passage and conclude that contemporary cosmologists are out to lunch. Or maybe you figure Bostrom misrepresents or misconstrues what the majority of them actually believe. I don't know, and it doesn't really matter anyway, because you don't have to believe that sentient life sticking around forever is a foregone conclusion. You just have to acknowledge that the finitude of sentience isn't exactly a foregone conclusion either. The best available evidence for infinitude isn't conclusive, but it's not dismissible either.

And even if you are unfazed by the expertise of cosmologists, to the point of remaining 100% confident that sentient life is destined to go extinct for good sometime in the future, I would say the Arithmetic Paralysis quandary outlined in the paper is fascinating enough in its own right to warrant theoretical pivots. Not everything needs to implicate Applied Ethics to be worthy of our mentation.

If you have a bona fide appetite for philosophy, toying with ideas that educe incredulous stares elsewhere should be a picnic.    

"Nothing stifles intellectual curiosity like the craving for familiarity."

Me. Just now.