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Geert Wilders

Geert Wilders, dutch Islam critic, declared himself to be an agnostic recently. Niek Stolker from the newspaper "De Tijd" asked me, what I think about it and if I welcome someone like him as an agnostic. Here is my full reply:

Dear Mr. Stolker,

I don't think that Geert Wilders understood agnosticism. The idea behind agnosticism is that it is not known, or even impossible to know, which religion is the right one. Maybe one of the currently practiced religions is right, maybe not. It doesn't matter here what the personal preferences or customs are, some religion that seems very strange to us actually might still be right.
So if Geert Wilders says that the Islam is wrong because it's bad it's not agnosticism, it's religious fanatism, which is quite the opposite. Intellectually he is then on the same level as Mohammed Bouyeri.

This holds as long as we talk about Islam and Moslems. It is a different thing when we talk about Islamism. Islamism involves killing people who have a different opinion. A society can't exist with things like that going on so islamism must be banned. As an agnostic I even accept the idea that islamism might be right but as a social human being I must ban it until we can be positively sure that it is right, for example, if God has announced it publicly in person or some other proof.
So if Geert Wilders says that the Islamism is wrong because it's bad it's probably not agnosticism too, but it adheres to a more important principle than philosophy, namely the ability to live like social human beings.

The big problem with Geert Wilders is that he claims Islam to be the same as islamism, which is, in my opinion, only a cheap excuse to bash people who have a different culture. It's a fact that the vast majority of moslems are nice people who just want to mind their own business, like most people everywhere in the world. We just don't read about them in the newspapers.

Of course there is the possibility that Geert Wilders understood agnosticism very well and that his outcome to be an agnostic is a blatant lie to put himself into a neutral position and into the light of objectivism."See here", he says" I don't believe in any religion, I'm a reasonable thinker, a philosopher even, so my opposition against the Islam can't be irrational hatred, can't it?". If that's the case he's just abusing agnosticism.

Anyway, he's not welcome in my world at all. This is of course only my personal view and does not represent the official view of agnosticism, but most of the agnostics I hope.

Regards,
Sebastian Mecklenburg

2010 07 23

Addendum to the above

Embarrassingly I made the mistake to put islamism on a level with islamic fundamentalism. While the two are commonly used synonymously they are not identical. Islamism is the idea that the Islam and the Quran should be the basis also for the polical system of a state, not only the religious system. Islamism is not necessary fundamentalistic.

2011 11 09