DanMargarita.com

The ironic part is that thanks to television networks like TV Land, I’m spending WAY too much time watching the same shows I watched WAY too much as a kid.

While I still enjoy the timelessness of these great shows, there’s certainly a guilt factor as I sit there thinking “Yeah, I know this is the one where Beaver gets his head caught in an iron fence” or “Oh, this is ‘Chuckles the Clown dies’ episode” and that maybe I should be doing something more productive with my time.

Every now and then TV Land will feature various “top ten” lists, including a recent one about the “10 Sexiest Women on TV” which includes the likes of Suzanne Somers, Farrah Fawcett and a well-deserved nod to the well-preserved Barbara Eden of “I Dream of Jeannie” fame.

As a kid I enjoyed the comic timing of Larry Hagman, Bill Daly and Eden as well as the escapades that the trio would constantly be immersed in on the show. While I was too young to recognize the male fantasy that this show represented, it didn’t escape my notice that “Jeannie” was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who was supposed to be of Middle-Eastern origin. This never made any more sense to me than the fact that David Carradine played the part of Kwai Chang Caine in the show “Kung Fu” and looked about as Chinese as Larry Hagman.

I find that watching reruns of “I Dream of Jeannie” is now, on occasion, a horrifying experience. Relatives of Jeannie who are angered will threaten people with torture, beheading and will send them away with a blink of an eye. In other words, Jeannie’s relatives sound like operatives for Al Qaeda… except for the eye-blinking part.

Forty years ago the west was unfamiliar with militant Islam and the biggest cause for concern for TV network censors was the possibility that Eden’s navel might be seen by the American viewing public.

Fifteen years ago, with the advent of political correctness, the show would’ve been deemed an out-of-date Arabic stereotype with no relation to reality.

Yet, in March of 2002 the BBC reported that Saudi religious police refused to let 15 girls out of a burning school because they were not dressed in the appropriate Islamic attire, including head scarves and abayas (black robes) which are required by Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam. The girls died as a result and according to the BBC, one witness saw three policeman "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya."

I hate to think what the religious police would’ve done to Jeannie if they found out that she was sporting a bare midriff while living with a man she was not married to.

Lest anyone think that this is an anti-Muslim diatribe, westerners shouldn’t get too smug. I seem to recall hearing about a little incident about a thousand years ago in which some Christians went on a little rampage, a crusade to the east if you will, in what is referred to not-so-ironically as “The Crusades.”

No doubt, the Christians had their reasoning for their brutal activities just as the Muslim Fundamentalists do now. Fortunately, the Crusaders didn’t have access to jumbo jets that could be used as missiles or even the cunning to invent fictional weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to invade other lands.

So, for a couple of hundred years Christians tried to force their religion down everybody else’s throat. Maybe now it’s Islam’s turn.

It’s hardly a coincidence that with the birth of Christianity, the Roman Empire fell and scientific achievement slowed considerably. Some of the lowlights as a result of this period were: The Crusades, The Inquisition and The Dark Ages, in which advances in technology, education and reason achieved in the Greek and Roman civilizations went the way of the Greek and Roman civilizations.

Illiteracy and ignorance reigned while obedience to religious doctrine was required, but in time such learned people as Copernicus and Galileo began questioning the world around them through observation and scientific research. Eventually, this helped usher in The Enlightenment and The Renaissance and the notion that because somebody wrote something down in a book a long time ago, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true.

Of course, Galileo wound up paying a price for his “heresy” by spending the last several years of his life under house arrest by order of Pope Urban VIII, making Galileo the Martha Stewart of the 17th century. There was a happy ending of sorts, however, when Pope John Paul II apologized for the church’s behavior…some 350 years after Galileo’s death. This would be in direct contrast to Pope Urban VIII’s philosophy that “Inquisition means never having to say you’re sorry.”

In 1999 the Kansas Board of Education adopted new science standards (since overturned) that removed mandatory teaching of evolution, leaving local school boards to determine whether or not to teach the theory that is usually associated with Charles Darwin. Kansas soon became the laughingstock of the nation, the scientific community and the punch-line for late-night comics.

Despite the rule being overturned, Fundamentalist Christians have gained increasing ground by attempting to pose the idea of Creationism in a scientific light by calling it “Creation Science.” They argue that it should be taught along side evolution, noting that evolution is merely a theory and impossible to prove. A valid point, perhaps, but using that reasoning it should also be noted that gravity is also a theory and cannot be proven, but until something falls “up” it should be accepted as the best theory available based on the evidence presented.

As the Christian Right increases their hold on high political office in the U.S. and Muslim Fundamentalists continue to attempt to impose their views on various countries by force, the two sides have grown increasingly belligerent and may one day be headed again toward religious warfare.

Some Christian Fundamentalist groups are anxiously awaiting The Rapture, the day when believers will be called up to Heaven, which true believers seem to think is imminent and see the clash of Arabs and Jews in the Middle-East as being the opening salvo. Elsewhere, some Muslim Fundamentalists are trying to drag their communities back several centuries to the morals, mores, laws (not to mention the attire) of an unenlightened age.

If the former happens, it may be because Christian zealots helped use the nuclear technology that evolved as a result of the advances in science made after throwing off the shackles of The Dark Ages, to speed up the Rapture process. If the latter happens, much of the Muslim world will suffer through the ignorance and horror of another Dark Age.

Either way, the combination of middle-age religious fervor and 21st century technology create a dangerous possibility of catastrophic warfare that will make The Crusades look like a spitball fight.

The old saying that “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” never seemed more applicable than at the present time. The only difference now being that with the tools of modern warfare available, society as we know it could be gone in the blink of an eye.