banjar, the statements and comparisons you made in your last post are certainly interesting, kind of stupid, but interesting.
There are so many indivdual bits of nonsense, that they almost exhaust my desire to respond.
I can only wonder at what type of grandparents you had and where your upbringing was.
I had dismissed some of the rudeness from debono as him just being needlessly confrontational, but I can see it might be that he was just more familiar with more of your posting.
You do seem to have a talent for skirting around the issue and injecting a few clangers that are not really relevent except in a very peripheral way, that really just take up space and divert the central issue of the discussion at hand.
Anyway...
While you may consider a hat or a veil as comparable to the islamic dress code in iran and other islamic societies today, I think if you think about it a little more you might come to a slightly different conclusion, as you might with regards to the enforement regime associated with this dress-code.
We primarily derive our entertainment and some joy from our pocessions although there might be some curcimstances where people occasionally go overboard with the importance they attach to their pocessions.
Religion is fundamentally a system of population and social control. The implimentation we see in most islamic countries is to that end except that it is one that is subject to considerable abuse by the ruling islamic classes as we also see.
As societies become wealthier, it is generally true that the organizational level in that society increases and the value of belonging to that society generally also rises.
A draconian population-control system becomes less necessary as the organization level increases and the value of being deprived of free membership of the society due to disruptive behavious increases.
This might explain part of the less visible observance of organised religion that you associate with increasing wealth.
It also gives a partial explanation for the desire of the islamic elites to keep their countires and scieties locked in a 7th century time warp by wa of a 7th century warrior/looter death cult. Without an economic progression of the community, the necessity and justification for a draconian religious-police and low remains in place as does the ability of the islamic elites to abuse the system to their advantage.
