Reddit reviews The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

1. ...Rose of the World, a controversial Moscow-based organisation which describes itself as "training for personality development". While researching for a documentary into Korshunova's death, Pomerantsev learned that the model spent three months attending training session at Rose of the World. These sessions—which encourage participants to share their worst experiences and recall repressed memories—are modelled after Lifespring...
   
   
2. Ruslana Korshunova was born in Almaty, Kazakh SSR.
   
   Kazakhstan has been a hotbed of bizarre, hyper-authoritarian, pseudo-mystical religiosity for at least three millennia; maybe four. (See Frankpan's The Silk Roads, and one of Karen Armstrong's books, though I cannot remember which one.) Start connecting those dots, boys & girls.
   
   

I'd like to reference a damn-good Mike Rowe post to preface my comment. The political climate in the United States is reactionary, but I'm simply a man with my own biases and pre-conceived notions. So don't take my word for it. Study history. Empires come and go, calamities happen, and people adjust to keep the collective learnings of our ancestors alive. The United States is in grave danger due to our arrogance, narcissism and greed. Hard-working, honest people naturally go with the flow of nature; the dark-side manipulates, intimidates, makes you question if there's goodness left in humanity. When this happens we have to be our own light in the world and insist we can be better, to give us strength and courage in the face of calamity and despair.

He is a Christian Greek-Orthodox from what is now being categorized as Lebanon formerly known as the Levant. The majority of the people native to Lebanon have Greco-Phoenician genes, not Arab.

After the Lebanese civil war in the 70's, all the news outlets and the Arabist kept echoing that Lebanon is in the Middle East, and Lebanese are Arabs, while the island of Cyprus, located 250 km away from Lebanon, is part of Europe.

Read a book. Don't be sheep. This one, perhaps.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XST7IX2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

> Ah yes, a copy-pasted single sentence definition from a online dictionary is totally not another oversimplification. Wow. Thanks for proving my point twice in a row.

That's it's a religion, as I originally stated, and not some boogy man, as you insinuated? Your welcome lol.

> Hence my use of the term, "religion". Glad we agree on one thing.

Hence your assertion that it's worse than Christianity, hardly the same.

> But there is some pretty intense indoctrination going on in some mosques and in some countries.

Ah yes the specter of the Islamic boogeyman again.

> I apologize all my examples are from Palestine and I do understand the situation there

Lol, speaking of understatements. That's like making a statement about Catholicism based on the IRA during the troubles.

> . There are many similar examples from other Islamic countries and mosques (Red Mosque in Pakistan, Finsbury Mosque in London, etc.) but it's getting late and you honestly have to do some research yourself, buddy.

West Borough Baptists Church, the KKK, LRA, etc. We can both play that game.

The fact of the matter is that extremists of any religion are in the minority. The proof is in the pudding, there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, just over a million in Canada, and the extremists are in the extreme minority. For every Red Mosque, Finsbury Mosque, Paris Attack, etc, there are hundreds of millions of peaceful Muslims.

> The Crusades were arguably a response to the Muslim Conquests. The Islamic invasion of Europe was only stopped by a few decisive battles like the Battle of Tours in France. So please, if you're going to bring up the Crusades then understand the whole history a little better.

lol, read this book.

TL;DR: The Battle of Tours was 300 years before the Crusades. During the crusades the Muslims had little interest in invading Europe, because there wasn't anything of value compared to Egypt, China, etc. This was before Portuguese opened trade routes with India and China, and the Spanish ransacked the gold of South America, which were the two events that catapulted Europe into a place of prominence.

Also funny that you should frame the Umayyad Caliphate as being the antitheses of a Christian Europe, considering:

"The Umayyad Caliphate was secular by nature.[4] At the time, the Umayyad taxation and administrative practice were perceived as unjust by some Muslims. The Christian and Jewish population still had autonomy; their judicial matters were dealt with in accordance with their own laws and by their own religious heads or their appointees, although they did pay a poll tax for policing to the central state.[5] Muhammad had stated explicitly during his lifetime that Abrahamic religious groups (still a majority in times of the Umayyad Caliphate) should be allowed to practice their own religion, provided that they paid the jizya taxation. The welfare state of both the Muslim and the non-Muslim poor started by Umar ibn al Khattab had also continued, financed by the Zakat tax levied only on Muslims.[5]"

> Not justifying persecution of Muslims at all. This isn't a binary issue where either people like Muslims or hate all Muslims. Once again, I'm merely countering your pseudo-intellectual facts.

Perhaps you've forgotten where this exchange started. I stated simply stated that Islam was a religion, which is a fact.

You went off on a rant about how "Islam is a political, financial, judicial, and militant system. It provides a beautifully organized framework to incite hate and violence. More so than Christianity."

So tell me again what the point of all this is? Because it really seems like your trying to turn it into a binary issue.