Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Rookie in the NBA. So, jeez, I realized that my power of observation could maybe enable me to get some knowledge that other people might miss out on, and I paid attention. The classic tale I tell about my powers of observation had to do — we had to play Detroit. They had Bob Lanier, a very fine center. And the ball boys, I overheard them talking about — they didn’t like going in the locker room after halftime because Bob and the coach were nicotine fiends, and they’d go in the shower and smoke cigarettes at halftime. I heard that, and I said, jeez, if he’s doing that — I realized that if I could get Bob to run a lot in the second half, he’d be in pain. And so I did. [laughter] But just getting those little tidbits of information, they can open up doors for you that you might not appreciate. Let me try a few questions about religion, and Islam in particular. If I think of Islam, this is what I see. I see a world where probably more people are deeply attached to Islam than to any other religion, so it has a great attraction. It seems to me economically it’s helped a great number of them. In this country, if you look at statistics, Arab-Americans earn more than the national average. Admittedly, they’re not all Muslims, but still. Theologically, a lot of it makes a great deal of sense to me — more than Christianity. There’s intensity of yearning in the aesthetic and the notion of the great distance between God and man makes sense to me. It’s in some ways pretty individualistic. It’s highly cosmopolitan, and it doesn’t, in most cases, rely too much on a centralized clergy. That said, it’s striking how few Americans have converted to Islam, and you have. Given these favorable features of Islam, what do you think first is the cultural disconnect between the United States and Islam — and this is even pre-9/11, right, that won’t really explain it — and how have you personally managed to bridge that? I know that’s sort of a mouthful, but do you see what I’m getting at? I do see what you’re getting at. What I see is the fact that in Western Europe they had the Enlightenment where people realized that the Inquisition was not the way to go. Burning people at the stake and torturing them and taking their property because they did not share the same religious beliefs as you did was unjust and not what Jesus of Nazareth taught his followers. The Muslim world has not had any opportunity to have an enlightenment. They went from the time of the Prophet, which was seen as the ideal time, to despots. Kings and military rulers are the norm in the countries that are majority Muslim. Fair governance, not being able to arrest somebody without charges, that’s a given in the Western world. In the Islamic world, that wasn’t the case. If Nasser didn’t like you, you were going to jail despite the fact that you hadn’t broken any laws or committed any crimes. And that goes again and again for most of the states that are majority Muslim. They really haven’t had the opportunity to have an enlightenment. At a certain point, the people in Europe decided they weren’t going to burn people who they considered to be heretics. They would have a just way to deal with it. In America, we figured it out by separating church and state — the ideal situation — to have people, to let them have their own moral center and let them believe whatever they wanted to believe about their moral and spiritual center. We have a set of laws that everybody has to respect and obey that enable everyone to have equal opportunity. That should be it.…

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