Thanks for thinking me qualified to write an article of the kind you describe. I don’t know if I am up to that task, but a few years ago I did write an article for Ali Sina’s website Faithfreedom.org. The article deals somewhat with the subject you raised. It involved some thoughts I had when recalling an incident at my grandmother’s flat in Tehran many, many years ago.

I published it under a different pseudonym sometime in 2006, as I recall.

Final post on this thread. I consider that you would be suited to write an article wherein you reduced christianity and islam to their basic dogmas regarding the mandated or permitted behaviour of an adherent of each faith towards others of similar faith and towards others of differing faiths.

The theological aspects of worship are not relevant, only the behaviour of an adherent towards others on this earth.

Christianity requires acceptance of Jesus Christ, but does not diminish the rights of unbelievers. A christian must behave towards others in precisely the same way, regardless of their religion.

However, I do not believe that this is the case with islam. A muslim, I believe, is permitted or mandated to deny secular rights and freedom of religion to non-muslims, and the overt practice of this is determined solely by expediency.

To me, there is no moral equivalency and it is dangerous and dishonest to pretend that there is.

An annecdote: thirty years ago, whilst at university in Glasgow, I met an Israeli, who introduced me to his Palestinian friend. I was sceptical and thought that they were having a joke. However, the Palestinian insisted that he was a Palestinian and that the Israeli and he had been friends for a long time. They both insisted it was quite normal for jews and muslims to socialise together, when abroad. I suggested that socialising together whilst abroad and then trying to kill each other upon returning home was very strange. They told me that, as a foreigner, I would never understand, but that I should liken it to a family feud. Those are the most bitter feuds which can ever arise.

I believe that adherents of islam are perpetually in struggle with all non-believers, but that there can be no military victory.

Only by demonstrating the superiority of Christianity in promoting the type of society which, I think, most people would prefer to live in, can any lasting victory be achieved.

Predator strikes will not defeat an ideology.

Assistant Village Idiot:

It is my belief that most people are not fanatics, but will give tacit support towards the fanatics of their particular religion/ideology. Nothing succeeds like success; victory has a thousand fathers, etc.

When there is no penalty attached to indulgence of fanatics, then the penalties for opposing them are substantially greater than the rewards, thereof. That, alone promotes tacit compliance, in my opinion.

Yes indeed, most of my relatives are not only liberal in the classical – that is, good – sense, they sadly liberal in the post-modern, bad sense: they support and admire fools like Obama. To their credit, they don’t make excuses for Islamic barbarism, but like most P.C. liberals they are too attracted to lame-brained moral equivalency arguments vis-a-vis the Israelis and Palestinians. Their view of the world is often based on the logical fallacy that because all peoples are flawed, we must respond to them as if they were all flawed to the same degree. This is the sort of humbug a seventh-grader should be able to see through. The Israelis may be flawed, but they are basically a civilized, modern people.

The Palestinians, by contrast, are essentially barbarians, the moral equivalent of unruly children incapable of acting in a mature way. Their culture is so steeped in hatred of Jews and God knows who all else that the sheer stinking vileness of it is enough to knock a vulture off a sh*t wagon half a mile away. I have not a drop of sympathy for them, except PERHAPS a modicum of sympathy for those Palestinians who are Christians and have to find a way to co-exist with a Muslim majority.

But the test of a group is not so much how many of its people are generally decent humans, but what they do in response to the others in their midst who are not decent. That is where we all reveal how important our virtues are to us, compared to mere tribal loyalty. That is a rule of thumb that applies to motorcyclists, scout leaders, Belgians, aromatherapists – everyone.

Thank you for your reply. Most of the self described muslims where I live are very liberal and very hospitable. They are tolerant of the beliefs of others. I think that a muslem fundamentalist may consider them almost appostates. It is interesting that one can be a muslim, without understanding what the tenets of the faith are. How many of these would still be muslims if they did know the tenets of their faith? People of all religions tend to cherry-pick and adhere to the doctrines of their faith with which they are comfortable and ignore or diminish in importance, those which they are not comfortable with. Many catholics use birth control, for instance. I believe that in America, many blacks adopt islam, because they are rejecting the christianity of the society which brought their ancestors as slaves and which continued racist oppression for many decades after slavery was abolished. The fact that slavery was prevalent throughout the islamic world and was central to the trafficking of their ancestors is something which has been de-emphasised in the modern teaching of history. Jumping from the frying pan into the fire is not the best of ideas. I belief that regardless of one’s religion, or lack of, the type of society which results from the judeo-christian religious doctrines will be a society more capable of producing freedom and all of its benefits than a society based upon islam, or adherence to its tenets.

Rote Zora started in 1974, when they bombed the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in Karlsruhe to protest against the abortion law

In addition they bombed the Federal Doctor’s Guild (in 1977) numerous sex shops, the cars of landlords, the Siemens company, and the company Nixdorf Computer AG

Rote Zora was a militant feminist group active in Germany from 1974-95.

if you follow history… terrorism has its majority life sourcing from socialism… and its worst inventors, helpers, suppliers, and promoters (of the worst), was the top communist state and the satellites.

the whole idea was to create better and better proxies for fighting.

Support of international terrorism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive#Support_of_international_terrorism

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/05/AR2010050505288.html?wprss=rss_nation/nationalsecurity

Obama is still asking what causes people to become terrorists. Didn’t he have all the answers even before he was elected?

To Abdul: Wow. Just wow. Great. As Paul Johnson said about Edmund Wilson: a brand from the burning. I disagree with you on one point and I’m sure you’ll agree with my disagree: We are not a miserable race.

Thanks for your question. Boy, I could say a great deal about this, but the short answer is “No, Islam is not at heart a religion of peace, nor has it ever been. It is BY ITS OWN ADMISSION a religion of Jihad, that is, a creed centrally dedicated to the idea that if you are not a believer, it is morally acceptable to lie to you, to cheat you, to steal from you, to discriminate against you, to treat you as less than completely human, and ultimately to kill you. If many individuals in the Muslim world do not act like this, it is usually either because they are not that religious or they have been taught to recite the Koran without understanding what the Arabic text is actually saying.

Islamic history bears this out consistently, not only in its treatment of Jews, but Christians, animist Black-Africans, Hindus and Sikhs, and Buddhists. Those on the secular progressive Left who make arguments of moral equivalency between, say, Christian Evangelicals and Muslims, are either ignorant or deliberately kidding themselves in order to rationalize their infantile resentment of Christianity and conservative Christians like Bush, in particular.

Bill Maher is a case in point. This is a Hollywood nincompoop who like most of his fellows in the entertainment industry has his head so far up his rear end that if he were living in Canada he could skip the 10-month waiting list and given HIMSELF a colonoscopy. Whenever I hear one of these jerks calling Bush – or conservatives generally – “morons” I feel as if I am listening to a manure-eater accusing somebody else of bad breath.