In the article linked here, a Pakistani Judge is fleeing his country because he upheld Pakistani law. Specifically, he sentenced to death, someone who murdered an elected state official because that murderer did not agree with that officials view on a matter which contradicted the killers Islamic religion.

One could say the loss of a cooperative system where people suffer the mild outrages that democracy brings us all daily in order to create what is frankly, the most astonishingly safe, just, (in the real sense of just, not the rhetorical Islamic one) progressive in both ways, technologically (Bell Canada tech support not withstanding) and in terms of giving the physically weak an allotment of power before the state in nearly all ways, is due to any number of causes.

One can of course, distill the cause of things to whatever discipline we like to credit. From civilization to the behavior of dogs, one can supply evidence that the basic reason for these things can be anything from a certain gene, game theory, evolution of political systems or whatever disciple one likes as a causal factor.

This much I feel is safe to assume.

Islam, like pretty much any faith based system if it was allowed to determine the limits of behavior and public thought, will reverse the tolerant, cooperative nature of a community be it town city or nation state. Technology will reverse thankfully, making them in some ways less of a threat to their neighbors. Disease will flourish and the consequences of natural disasters will be exponentially greater than they are already. Witness the lack of issues with Japan’s recent triple horror Vs. a basic flood in Pakistan today for example.

The fact that a judge has to flee Pakistan for a most obvious and correct application of Pakistan’s law is just the most recent sign that a specific yet hard to define fabric of civilized society, one the rest of us take as given to the extent that we do not see it at all generally speaking, is coming unraveled. Meanwhile of course, we have the leftovers from the degree to which Pakistan was able to sustain a modern state. A.Q. Khan managed to steal enough methodology to build a fairly decent nuclear arsenal for Pakistan, while he was working as a technician in countries with an actual tradition of science and open inquiry. Perhaps this proves that people who do not understand the thought process that leads to great innovation should not be allowed to benefit from it. But then no creationist should ever be allowed to take an antibiotic and none of us nearly would be allowed to own a cell phone.

At the end of the day, what makes a civilization is a kind of thought. One which Islam is destroying world wide as quickly and aggressively as it can and which will leave areas of the world in the long term, facing biblical quality plagues and decimations and in the short term, with nuclear arsenals which are a profound threat to their more secular neighbors. One which we ourselves are failing to teach to our own young as if it was inherent and not necessary to reenforce.

It is always much easier to notice what you do not have than what you do.