Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself, but some elaboration will be helpful. We will say up front that this article’s purpose is not to demean the followers of “Islam Release 2.0,” which focuses on the idea of a peaceful community (umma) that calls on its members to help one another. Arabs and Afhgans who believe that one must aid a traveler who comes to one’s home or tent are followers of Islam 2.0. The problem is that too much of the so-called Islamic world still follows “Islam Release 1.0,” which commands its followers to hate and subjugate all outsiders (the so-called Dar-el-Harb, “house of war”), and kill them if they won’t submit. Islamic fundamentalists who are trying to institute Sharia law in those countries, and indeed in Europe and North America, are prime examples of the problem we are going to discuss.

The foundation of every civilized society, and indeed every civilized religion, is the concept that the leader exists to serve his or her followers. Jesus said that the leader or ruler must be the servant of all, and Frederick II of Prussia elaborated that the king is the first servant of his people. The Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven says that the king exists solely to serve his people. When he serves himself at the expense of his people, he loses the Mandate of Heaven, and therefore his right to rule.

Societies make their gods in their own images, so it is natural that the God or gods of a civilized society also exist to serve their people, or to act as role models for how people should act toward each other. Religions that demand human sacrifice (such as the Aztec religion) tend to be bloody and violent, because their premise is that people exist to serve their gods. The same is true of religions that promise heavenly rewards for murder and violence, as Islam 1.0 does.

Let us begin, however, with Christianity 1.0 (i.e. as Jesus and his disciples taught it). One does not have to believe that Jesus was the son of God, or that he actually rose from the dead, to subscribe to the underlying values of Christianity 1.0. The value system would still work even if archaeological evidence were to prove that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Christians believe that their religion’s founder died for them. Since Christians believe that Jesus should be the role model for their own lives, their religion’s foundation teaches that the leader or ruler exists to serve his or her followers.

Catholicism has always been very important to Poland, which managed to avoid its perversion by self-serving theocrats and Inquisitions. The legend of Queen Wanda (pronounced “Vanda”) illustrates how a monarch emulates Jesus by dying for her people. After Wanda inherited the throne, a German prince demanded that she marry him. His motivation was not love, but rather a desire to take Polish lands for himself. He demanded the land of Polani as a dowry, and he had a large army to back up his demand. Florence Waszkelewicz Clowes’ Polish Folk Legends reports,

In the cool of the evening she again retired to her room, where she prayed to God to grant her people freedom from the German prince in return for her life.
She had decided to sacrifice herself, rather than marry Rytygier and surrender her lands to the German! And in the darkness, she threw herself into the Vistula and drowned.
…The people honored her by heaping mounds of dirt on her grave until it became as large as her father’s. Her mound is called Mogila and is there to this day.

Next we come to Hinduism. Life is a real bear (or whatever), and then you die, as illustrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
…For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

Hamlet is of course having trouble at the time, since he suspects that his uncle has murdered his father, and this is why he is thinking of making his quietus with a bare bodkin. No normal person wants to end his life, but what if one had a choice “not to be” in the first place? No soul in Heaven, or the Hindu Nirvana, would really want to be born into a mortal body subject to “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to.” The objective of Hinduism is, in fact, eventual freedom from the cycles of rebirth. Good deeds result in good karma that result in rebirth into higher forms, and eventually permanent residency in Nirvana. Bad deeds result in bad karma, and rebirth into lower forms; sort of like a cosmic Chutes and Ladders. It is therefore clear that, to Hindus, the ultimate act of self-sacrifice is to be born as a human.

In the Ramayana, the demon king Ravana cannot be slain by any god. Vishnu the Preserver therefore takes the form of the mortal hero Rama (and his brothers) to stop him. Rama suffers exile in a forest, the kidnapping of his wife Sita, and eventual death as the price of stopping Ravana. Another character in the story is the benevolent vulture king Jatayu, whom Ravana kills when he tries to rescue Sita. It turns out that Jatayu had long ago earned freedom from rebirth, but he chooses to keep returning to fight for justice in this world–an ideal shared by George S. Patton Jr.

Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

…I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear,
Yet I see the twisted faces
And I feel the rending spear.

Perhaps I stabbed our Savior
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet I’ve called His name in blessing
When after times I died.

…So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.

And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o’er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.

In the Mahabharata, Vishnu takes the form of Krishna. Like Rama, Krishna also dies, from an accidental shot from a hunter’s bow. In this story, a Hindu king finds himself wandering in a desert with a dog as his only follower. A door to Heaven opens, but its warden tells the king that he cannot bring the dog with him. The king replies that he will stay in the desert, because a Hindu king cannot abandon even the lowliest follower. It turns out that the dog is Dharma, the god who embodies the Right Way, and the whole thing has been a test of the king. This story parallels Jesus’ injunction that, whatever one does to the least of his followers, one does to Jesus. Greek myths and Hindu stories, in which gods disguise themselves as beggars or distressed travelers to see how people will treat them, underscore this concept even further.

Islam 1.0 (as Mohammed taught it) stands all these concepts on their heads. The follower exists to serve Allah and, since Allah is not there in person, the Prophet or Caliph will just have to stand in for him. This individual promises his followers incredible rewards, such as might come from Aladdin’s lamp, for waging wars of conquest. The followers exist to serve the Sultan, the Caliph, or whomever, and not the other way around. The story about mullahs promising suicide bombers 72 virgins is nothing new. The Old Man of the Mountains, the leader of the original Assassins (from hashisheen, users of hashish), got his men high on drugs. Then he put them in a beautiful garden full of beautiful women, and told them that they were actually in Paradise. He added that, “if you die for me, I mean, Allah, you will find yourselves here permanently.”

It is telling that none of the gray-bearded old mullahs who are feeding the same line to teenage Palestinians today got to be gray-bearded old mullahs by following their own advice. This should be emphasized in anti-terrorist propaganda, and it should be devastating in effect. As soon as the followers realize that their leaders do not believe in the religion they are teaching, they will rip their own leaders apart. Or, to summarize the entire problem with a belief system whose premise that its followers exist to kill and die for leaders who invoke “Allah” to justify the worst imaginable atrocities,

The producer depends for his prosperity upon serving the people. He may get by for a while serving himself, but, if he does, it will be purely accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not being served, the end of that producer is in sight. –Henry Ford, My Life and Work