[quote]vroom wrote:
So, should we have some more witch burnings?[/quote]
No. These are quite clearly wrong.
In actual fact the last witch trial was in the 1940’s in England when a woman was hanged for claiming to be able to contact dead servicemen for their widows and in the practice of this she revealed some official secrets. This attracted the wrath of the authorities.
Without writing out ten thousand pages, I will merely make a few inelegant comments on them. Firstly, the lands that the Muslims at the time occupied were previously Christian lands, largely because Islam wasn’t even invented until around 600AD.
The Crusades were in response to the fall of Jerusalem. Christians pilgrims were denied the right to visit their holy sites, and the Christian world responded by aiming to provide unmolested passage for these pilgrims to the holy land.
Whether the waging of a war is ever justified, is an issue that will never be resolved? Can Christians fight in self defence? Sure, but what constitutes self defence? Can I fight in defence of my neigbour? What if my neighbour is half way around the world and I must fight many people along the way?
Let’s agree that these practices of witch burning and waging wars are not Christian.
My point is that a Christian man killing someone merely because of his religion is not behaving as a Christian is taught in his holy book. Whereas a Muslim man doing the same thing is behaving as a Muslim is taught in his holy book. He is acting as Mohammed did, and he is fully in the belief that he will go to heaven for it.
Although the world is trying to encourage “moderate” Islam, it is difficult to do so, when their Prophet was not a moderate man.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not hate people for being Muslims, I do however feel the religion is misogynistic, anti-semitic and violent.
Now you could argue that the established Christian Church, (let me use Catholicism as an example) is misogynistic, as men and women have different roles and women are not entitled to enter the priesthood. Perhaps women should be Priests, because perhaps Jesus only had male disciples in order to be accepted at the time? But women are not treated as property of their husbands, and they are not made to cover their faces through fear of making other men lose control.
The Catholic Church especially could be considered anti-semitic, with the long history of persecution of the Jews, yet Jesus never taught people to treat the Jews badly, so this behaviour was un-Christian. As so many verses from the Koran state, much like the one that initiated this thread, the Jews are a hated enemy of the Muslims; and as such they are persecuted and always will be.
The recurring theme in all this is that although Christians and Muslims may both commit acts purportedly in the name of their religion, the Christians are not following the “word of God” whereas in many cases the Muslims are.
You may find my view outrageous and racist/Islamophobic/right-wing, but I am not condeming a race or an individual, I am condemning an idea, and a belief system, a bunch of spiritual rules by which people live their lives.