To put it another way, you are not attempting to disprove your assertion that Islamic faith is to blame. Until you do you are just hand waiving other potentially significant factors.

Then why are the statistics the way they are? Bad luck?

It is interesting to me that rize is willing to condemn 20% of the world without knowing if his claim is even true. You know, not just look at the bare stat but instead control for the many variables that we already do know play roles in this. Right now, it's just hate based on speculation, which I guess is somehow not below his standards?

Wealth can definitely explain a good deal, if not all of it. Have you considered this? Have you attempted to figure out how much a role this plays? Or do you not care, you'd rather just attack religions from ignorance?

Have you even attempted to account for why Muslim countries are not generally wealthy to begin with?

It's all America's fault, right?

Probably, yes.

If the wealth of the world was distributed evenly then the Nobel prize winners would be more equally distributed. As it stands people who could have gone on to cure cancer were born to a life scratching a living in the Gaza strip or in Afghanistan and likely ended up using their natural intellect in other ways - perhaps becoming doctors in hospitals with no medicine or generals to armies of resistance fighters holding off the Russians. Or they died as a child of malnutrition, disease or as a civilian casualty of war.

You are just embarrassingly dumb.

Geography, climate, western conquest, different political systems (even in secular states before theocratic rule), sitting on much of world's oil (these last 3 factors are all very connected), etc. Religion is a part, but much of the fundamentalism is more a result of external conditions rather than the cause, thus negating your argument. If Europe was faced with exact same circumstances in history but replace Islam with Christianity, the situations might be very well reversed (as in fact, they were many hundreds of years ago when Christian nations were well behind many Muslim nations in science and math).

Well almost 1 in 5 Americans now believe that Obama is a Muslim according to one poll: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...d=opinionsbox1

and he got the peace prize

Because we all know how Obama is doing an excellent job of increasing troops in Afghanistan and allowing more military deaths there in his first term than during all of Bush's administration: http://www.infowars.com/military-dea...se-under-bush/

Not to mention we are still helping them grow the opium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gOaPeSCME

Not to mention that he promised to withdraw troops from Iraq but he simply replaced the troops already there and gave them the name "non-combat troops": http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_1...67-503544.html

But seriously Gandhi did not get the peace prize and Obama did, so makes you wonder how credible these prizes are anyways. It just shows there are some flaws in the the whole Nobel Prize process. Perhaps some of these flaws make it less likely for a Muslim to get one??

Or perhaps it has something to do with America or other developed nations as to why there are so few muslim Nobel Prize recipients? What about our and other nations military strategy in this world to go to middle eastern countries(where most muslims live) and cause disruption, and create governments and tyrannical leaders such as we did with Saddam Hussein?? We put him into power first, and supported him when he attacked Iran. Then we went in and caused war in Iraq to take him out. Perhaps all of the wars and tyrannical governments in these countries helped created by the US has an influence on their economic and scientific evolution?? Most muslim countries can't even pursue nuclear technology without threats of war from the US. So if we are hindering their scientific development and economic development, perhaps that has something to do with it? Just my 2 cents.

Here's one big giant clue imo:

Source.

Shouldn't being born ontop of a large quantity of a valuable substance like oil have given them a head start? How is that used as a reason why they should be poor and not a reason why they should be rich??

Also, how does "geography" and climate deeply effect a nations ability to prosper?? It's pretty hot over there in those countries, therefore they are poorer then everyone else??

Read a history book.

Hmmm, perhaps you should start with Dr. Suess first. Does your mommy know you're on her computer?

(This will be my last post to you ever, because you refuse to think, so why bother. My 1st ever ignore add, congrats.)

Someone on the interwebz doesn't like what I'm typing...I feel bad now

Yeah, that oil certainly helped during the industrial revolution. I hear Africa is extremely rich because they have lots of diamonds too. And the fact that much of the region has been at war pretty much none stop since the Crusades likely helps. Oh and not to mention when they started making money their leaders invested in golden palaces instead of schools and hospitals - they may have low literacy and health but when the Nobel prize for constructing gold palaces is made they are a lock to dominate.

So you're saying Muslim/African leaders are more corrupt on average than the rest of the world's leaders?

Why is that?

Bad luck again?

If you're implying, they have dumb leaders because the people there are dumb, we had Bush Sr., Jr.Bush, a movie actor as the president etc. Dumb leaders don't explain disproportionate nobel winners either..

It was kind of bad luck they had our oil and our diamonds in their land so we needed to set up favorable puppet governments to get our **** cheap.

Is there a reason you don't bother using evidence for your claims? It isn't as if people haven't studied developmental economics, or the historical causes of the scientific revolution, or the causes of corruption in government or any of the issues you've brought up. Why are you not interested in using reason and evidence to answer your questions?

Cliffnotes: British empire + US empire terrorizing these nations is why that oil didn't give them a head start. Up until the end of WW2 the British pretty much controlled the region, and thus controlled the oil. After the war the US became the world's first truly global power, and effectively took over Britain's role in the Middle East:

Source.

Today Iran is a notable exception in that we don't control them. They escaped our control in 1979 and that's been driving our leaders nuts ever since. It's a good bet that our next war will be with them. The United States does not tolerate countries that refuse to let us rob and exploit them. No decent empire would.

In general, the OP has a valid point. Religious opression and a negative attitudes towards the sciences in Arab society almost definately has a relationship between technological advances (or lack therof) made in that region.

Doing a search of "Islamic decline" or "Islamic golden age" or "islamic science and technology" will return a wealth of different opinions on the subject. Debatable is how much of an impact it has made, but to say it hasn't made an impact is probably laughable.

Lets face it, most of technological advances recently have been made disproportianately in certain couties. Are those countries more simliar in their attitudes towards science and technology or not?

The argument about there being less women who won nobel prizes is probably due to gender inequity. Women typically enter science at much lower rates than men, studies have been done over and over about why, and there are multiples arguments about exactly why this occurs.

I agree with OP. Most others are just arguing just to argue. Religion is detrimental to the advancement of Human beings as a species. Islam probably more so than more "tolerant" religions. That being said, there probably aren't many fundamentalist type religious nobel prize winners, but that's just a guess, I have no idea, but I'd be willing to bet money that it's generally true.




""There are around 8,000 researchers in the Arab world, compared with more than 400,000 in the United States. The Arab world spends nearly four dollars a head on scientific research, about 300 times less than in the US," he said.

"The Arab world's 200 universities spend around one percent of their annual budget on research, while in the US the figure is often above 40%," said Marwan Kamal, the secretary general of the Association of Arab Universities (AAU).

"Defense spending in certain oil-producing countries is higher than some developed countries, while money set aside for scientific research is around the same level as some of the world's poorest countries," said Henri Jacqueman, Dean of the Science Faculty of the University of Bethlehem.

"For all that, Arab experts have hit the heights of learning, like Egypt's naturalized American Ahmed Zewail," who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1999," said Abd al-Ilah Abidin from the Jordan Polytechnic. "But that Nobel Prize for intellectual and scientific creativity came on the back of American laboratories," said Temini.

"In the Arab world, scientific research is negligible, researchers are not encouraged. Responsibility lies with political decision-makers, preoccupied with holding onto power," adds Temini, for whom the "future of scientific research is in private institutions."

It's much easier to argue for hate from ignorance. Rize is not here to learn or to teach. He's here to preach hatred, and knowledge tends to get in the way of that.

OP says it's because the Muslims are too busy raping their women to be doing the research. I don't think you are agreeing with this point, right? So what is it about Islam in particular that you are claiming holds them back from science?

Most random correlations signify nothing. This thread premise is a good example.

Ice cream does not cause murder.

Pirates don't prevent global warming.

Sorry, you are right, I didn't address the rape issue because everytime I saw the back and forth involving it I just ignored and skimmed over it. I thought the point the OP was making was that because of the harshness of things like the green light to rape wives in a fundamentalist Islamic view things like the advancement of science are probably at the bottom of the list. The penalty for leaving converting from Islam is death. Definately not "tolerant" in any sense.

To answer your question about what in particular holds them back, the answer is "I'm not sure". There are many arguments and we can poke holes in all of these.

There are more women than we think in advanced education in Muslim countries. There are more restrictions on them than in the west, though, and in the west we have a much lower distribution of women in the sciences.

Democracy is debatable, as it's not necessarily a cause. It's definately not a help, but science could have thrived under Hitler or Stalin, so that argument can be debated quite heatedly.

Do Muslims reject technology? I dunno, seems like they use it (cell phones, nuclear power, etc) but using it and embracing it and contributing to the advancement of it are different things.

There is a staggering gap between scientific research in the western countries and the Arab/Muslim countries. That part is obvious. It's probably a combination of a myriad of factors, but the religious attitude is probably near the top of that.

And here's a line I REALLY agree with. :"The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered."

Like I said, I would bet if we did some research on how many fundamentally religious nobel prize winners there were, it'd be few.

Personally, as time goes on I despise religion and it's negative effects it has on us as people. But to keep me from getting harassed, verbally attacked much less physically attacked and very likely hurt in my professional career - I just keep quiet.

Except on the internet bitches!

Absolutely absurd post.

I've met easily hundreds and hundreds of Jewish peopel in my life. I used to work in a place that had a disproportianite amount of Jewish people visit. I can honestly say in over 6 years being there I've only ever met 3 Jewish people who would strictly follow the "No work on the Sabbath" rule. They wouldnt' even sign their credit card receipt, asking me to sign it for them. Please, don't use an example that is seldom followed. Christians aren't supposed to have premarital sex, too.

At one point Muslim societies had relatively advanced philosophy science and maffs. Then later, they didn't. During this time religious attitudes changed in Islam. One was tolerant and open to science. The Muslim world was the center of all learning and culture on the planet. Then a series of events occurred that would be the equivalent of getting all the smartest people in the united states in New York City and dropping a nuclear weapon on it.

Islam changed and the scientific output plummeted. Why?

Just because the OP isn't doing a good job of arguing his point of view doesn't mean he's wrong.