(April 24, 2011 at 4:51 am)Rwandrall Wrote: If your society was so much better than ours, why are so many people immigrating from your countries to ours ? I'm gonna guess its not because of the weather.
this is a complicated issue....
You see unlike US in the 1700-early 1900s, the rest of the world (M.E. in particular) were living in tyranny and struggling to pay taxes to the elite class, while US was a free republic with a constitution that closely resembles some of the principles in this religion. This help create and environment where so many valuable inventions to be mass produced and put into society
Inventions such as the automobile, telephone, light-bulb, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, microwave ...etc
help US to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. It got to a point where US gathered 90% of the gold on the planet because everyone wanted to buy American goods/technology.
Many nations and in particular those is M.E. used gold as money (which is kind of mandatory under Islamic teachings) and the nation's standard of living started to decrease drastically.
At the same time, the industrial revolution was going on and many nations in Europe like US were having an increase in standard of living. One thing that helped was that technological information was easier to translate from English to French, Spanish, ...etc. and didn't slow down the speed of technological advances.
What did the people in M.E. do? Nothing, they missed out because A. the monarchy ruling them didn't give the people enough freedom to innovate and B. the journal papers in Europe were difficult to translate and slow down the technological process...
So eventually you have limited Gold reserves in the M.E. nations while US would have most of the gold. So US implemented a new monetary system that will use fiat (paper) money instead of being backed by gold. With USD in paper money backed by nothing, as the world standard currency... US had the luxury of having a high standard of living without working as hard as they did in the 1800-early 1900s.
Europe on the other hand, had its currency almost on par with US before the conversion was made from Gold to a fiat based system. So all that Europe had to do is keep their currencies in line with US and they'll have a good standard of living.
But for the M.E. and in particular the arab nations, they didn't have any piece of technology to offer to the world. All they had was Oil and it was all owned by the monarchy. When the conversion was taken place of, only the monarchies had an increase in the standard of living. The rest of the population really didn't have anything they could offer to the world... thus their standard of living dropped significantly!
Today, among some of these people they are tired of working for $2 a day (like in Egypt), they study hard to learn English and move to a nation where they can help their struggling family. They immigrate to wealthier nations so they can learn what their nation missed out on in the past 2-3 centuries.
This stuff happens when one empire rises and another empire falls...... just like the roman empire, everyone around the world wanted to live in Rome even though they couldn't speak the language. They all wanted a better standard of living.
In general, don't let technology and money cause bias in your judgment towards this religion. This religion says no to Monarchy.....and unfortunately it is only now that the people are realizing it. And much of it has to do with the internet, it can really educate people.
