What Muslims are taught in their mosques - unbiased

[bobzills]

Considering how you just dismissed reports of whole towns being burned, raped, and murdered, including old women and young children…

Where is your outrage? What I find outrageous is that you can look at a report of acts just as vile and criminal, and also larger in scope, but then turn around and say “eh…it wasn’t that bad compared to one attack on a school.”

I supplied a reference to Beslan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan
What is your reference to Russian soldiers targeting school children? You really don;t have one, because they never went into a school building and targeted 1200 innocent children they way that the brave Islamic fighters do. Bombing is an act of war, and innocent people will sometimes be casualties. But it is always wrong to directly target innocent civilians. In a war, provided it is fought for a just cause, it is sometimes justified to bomb certain military areas, but it is never right to target hospitals or civilian areas.
When all is said and done, it is never under any circumstances justified, according to Christian principles, it is never allowed for soldiers to target innocent school children.
Do you think that after all, it was justified for these brave Islamic soldiers to target 1200 innocent school children because they were Christian?

 

[pro_universal]

I supplied a reference to Beslan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan
What is your reference to Russian soldiers targeting school children? You really don;t have one, because they never went into a school building and targeted 1200 innocent children they way that the brave Islamic fighters do.

Again, please read the Human Rights Watch article I just linked to you. Yes, there is a reference. And the documentation is there.

Bombing is an act of war, and innocent people will sometimes be casualties. But it is always wrong to directly target innocent civilians. In a war, provided it is fought for a just cause, it is sometimes justified to bomb certain military areas, but it is never right to target hospitals or civilian areas.

Again, read the article. The Russians bombed entire cities, and occupied and shot entire cities as well.

When all is said and done, it is never under any circumstances justified, according to Christian principles, it is never allowed for soldiers to target innocent school children.
Do you think that after all, it was justified for these brave Islamic soldiers to target 1200 innocent school children because they were Christian?

No, I don’t. But you just spent your time making excuses for documented murders that reached much further in scope than the Beslan attack.

Why are you apologizing for widespread slaughter? Just because the victims are Muslims and the perpetrators are Christians?

My point was that you ignore violence committed by Christians, and obsess on violence committed by Muslims. I think your posts so far have proven this point quite nicely.

Despite your focus on this one terrorist crime at Beslan, it remains a fact that Christian members of armies around the world have left Islamic terrorists in the dust as far as civilian body counts are concerned. There really is no comparison-murders committed by Al Qaeda style terrorists are in the thousands, and murders committed by mostly Christian armies are up in the millions for the same time period.

 

[Contarini]

What is your view of the distinction between Islamic traditions concerning violence, and Christian ones?

Historically, it appears that the two faiths have developed quite similar norms concerning warfare and violence. So what would you say are the relevant differences in this regard between Islam and Christianity?

The biggest difference is that many Christians have been able to reject violence, largely by appealing to the example of Jesus. There has always been a strain of pacifism in Christianity–I’m unaware of anything similar in Islam.

Muslims traditionally have rules that restrain and govern violence, but the only possibility for overcoming it seems to be spiritualizing it away, and even that avoids it rather than really opposing it. As Montalban or Rodrigo or someone pointed out, even the Sufis historically supported (on the whole) violent Jihad. There were Sufi orders that were actually part of the Ottoman army.

Edwin

 

[pro_universal]

The biggest difference is that many Christians have been able to reject violence, largely by appealing to the example of Jesus. There has always been a strain of pacifism in Christianity–I’m unaware of anything similar in Islam.

I think the primary dispute we have is your opening contention that Christians have in fact been able to reject violence.

My question is as follows: why have societies that are predominantly Christian been involved in so many wars recently? Is it that Christians personally renounce violence, but are willing to support it as long as it is the state’s business? How do you reconcile the claim that Christians reject violence with the alarmingly regular occurence of wars between Christian populations, and led by Christian populations against others?

There is certainly the rhetoric of pacifism, but the reality is that the Christian world has up to recent times been far, far more bloody than the Islamic world.

Muslims traditionally have rules that restrain and govern violence, but the only possibility for overcoming it seems to be spiritualizing it away, and even that avoids it rather than really opposing it. As Montalban or Rodrigo or someone pointed out, even the Sufis historically supported (on the whole) violent Jihad. There were Sufi orders that were actually part of the Ottoman army.

Edwin

But Christian rules for restraining violence do not seem to have reduced the body count in the Christian world any more than Islamic rules have done so in the Muslim world.

It seems strange to read the violence in the Muslim world today as a failure to overcome violent tendencies in Islam, yet to have no comment on why Christian pacifism appears to have been a complete failure in terms of reducing the readiness of the Christian world to engage in violence.

 

[Contarini]

I think the primary dispute we have is your opening contention that Christians have in fact been able to reject violence.

My question is as follows: why have societies that are predominantly Christian been involved in so many wars recently? Is it that Christians personally renounce violence, but are willing to support it as long as it is the state’s business? How do you reconcile the claim that Christians reject violence with the alarmingly regular occurence of wars between Christian populations, and led by Christian populations against others?

I didn’t claim that all Christians rejected violence. But outside Northern Ireland and perhaps Yugoslavia (though in both cases one can question whether religious motives per se were dominant), I can’t think of a single major war in the past 100 years that was primarily inspired by Christianity. Rather, Christians have (deplorably) often supported wars launched for secular reasons. (I’d say 300 rather than 100 years, but it gets more dubious–arguably one cause of the Crimean War, for instance, was the Russian desire to recapture Constantinople.)

Pacifists are still a minority among Christians. But they do exist, and yes, they are influential. For instance, Christian pacifists sent “witnesses for peace” to Iraq, some of whom were kidnapped by Muslims, and when rescued by U.S. soldiers refused to speak ill of their kidnappers and continued to criticize the U.S. occupation. Korean Anabaptists have a mission in Afghanistan, or did until the murder of another Korean missionary caused the Korean government to pull all its nationals out (the son of one of my colleagues, being American, is trying to keep the group’s work alive).

It does not seem to me that Christians are, by and large, behind most of the violence in the world today. On the other hand, we hear regularly of extremely violent acts explicitly inspired by Islam and celebrated by many (even if a minority) Muslims as acts of martyrdom.

But Christian rules for restraining violence do not seem to have reduced the body count in the Christian world any more than Islamic rules have done so in the Muslim world.

I disagree with both premises–or rather they are unproven.

It seems strange to read the violence in the Muslim world today as a failure to overcome violent tendencies in Islam, yet to have no comment on why Christian pacifism appears to have been a complete failure in terms of reducing the readiness of the Christian world to engage in violence.

Well, I think this premise is clearly false. Even after 9/11, most Christian churches called explicitly for tolerance toward Muslims and spoke out against retaliation. On the whole, the larger Christian bodies in the U.S. have stood solidly against the Iraq war (the Southern Baptists are the only exception I can think of among the largest denominations, but I may be ignorant). And while I oppose the war itself and do not deny that U.S. soldiers have committed atrocities, the degree of restraint shown by U.S. soldiers is, in terms of military actions historically (particularly against a stubborn insurgency) truly remarkable. I know this is politically incorrect, and I say it as someone who thinks that the initial invasion was wicked folly. But the Western nations, for all their faults, do value human life and show this by their actions even under severe provocation. Islamic nations and militant organizations do not, by and large, show this kind of respect for human life in the way they respond to insults, much less to violent attacks.

Of course it’s hard to be fair on this level of generalization. But your claim that the Christian world has historically been “far, far bloodier” than the Islamic world is, frankly, nonsense, even leaving aside the contemporary situation. If you count everyone killed in any war or other political action waged by a predominantly or officially Christian nation, then you have to apply this across the board. You have to count all the people killed in early intra-Muslim civil wars as well as the wars of expansion; all the people killed by the Abbasids in their bloody rise to power; all the people killed in the endless wars among the Turkish sultans and other warlords after the collapse of Abbasid power; all the Crusaders killed by Muslims as well as the other way round; all the Christians and other minorities slaughtered by Al-Hakim in Egypt; all the victims of the Muslim Tamerlane; all the people killed by the Muslim gunpowder empires in their wars of expansion and succession, their conflicts with each other, their massacres of rebels, their rulers’ murders of potential rivals; and, of course, the victims of modern Islamist terrorism as well as those of the “moderate” or secular despots.

Edwin

 

[Rodrigo_Bivar]

To Fatma,
It is undeniably truth that violence is a human trait, but you would think that a prophet of God like Muhammad would behave and teach better, wouldn’t you?

It’s like saying to sin is human. What is the point of prophet to teach and enshrine sin? Surely we can expect better than that.

I would rather think that a robber, murder, enslaver and pedophile has nothing to say that we would ever be interested in. But then again, I’m not Muslim.

Muslims have very low standards indeed when it comes to their prophet.

 

[fatma]

you are obviously just being provocative and not worth replying to in a serious fashion.

 

[Montalban]

I know many decent and good Muslims. I am sure that there are many millions of decent Muslim men and women. And I certainly admire the Muslim women as they dress modestly and appear to cherish family life and many children.
What bothers me terribly is why we see Muslim fighters targeting 1200 innocent school children as they did in Beslan. Where is the outrage?

In Australia we call this kind of question a Dorothy Dixer

 

[Montalban]

you are obviously just being provocative and not worth replying to in a serious fashion.

Such is the realm of Islamic debate - criticise Islam and you’re ‘provocative’.

That’s the same reason Muhammed needed a poetess to be murdered - because her humour could not be tolerated. Her satire of him ended in her death. 1,400 years later nothing has changed

 

[Montalban]

Two words: Tamil Tigers.

They invented the suicide vest, and used terror against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

They identify with race, not religion. If your Sinhalese you’re a target, whether you’re Christian, Moslem, or a Scientologist.

Ideologically bound to the revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism and Leninism, our movement firmly believes that its commitment to armed struggle is not an alternative to mass movement.
tamilnation.org/ltte/

Marxism, Nazism, Islam, any movement that denies our values* is likely to allow such methods of warfare.

And there are Christian examples of using suicide as a weapon of war. Most notably, from the time of the Crusades, when the Knights Templar destroyed one of their own ships, killing 140 Christians in order to kill ten times as many Muslims.

That’s not ‘suicide’ but martyrdom.

The person who throws himself off a cliff because he’s depressed is a suicide. The person who throws himself on a grenade to protect his buddies is ‘giving his life for his brothers’.

*-other ideologies value life; Buddhism, for instance.

 

[fatma]

The label of Catholic terror was never used about the IRA

Fundamentalism is often a form of nationalism in religious disguise

Karen Armstrong
Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

…
We need a phrase that is more exact than “Islamic terror”. These acts may be committed by people who call themselves Muslims, but they violate essential Islamic principles. The Qur’an prohibits aggressive warfare, permits war only in self-defence and insists that the true Islamic values are peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. It also states firmly that there must be no coercion in religious matters, and for centuries Islam had a much better record of religious tolerance than Christianity.

Like the Bible, the Qur’an has its share of aggressive texts, but like all the great religions, its main thrust is towards kindliness and compassion. Islamic law outlaws war against any country in which Muslims are allowed to practice their religion freely, and forbids the use of fire, the destruction of buildings and the killing of innocent civilians in a military campaign. So although Muslims, like Christians or Jews, have all too often failed to live up to their ideals, it is not because of the religion per se.

**We rarely, if ever, called the IRA bombings “Catholic” terrorism because we knew enough to realise that this was not essentially a religious campaign. Indeed, like the Irish republican movement, many fundamentalist movements worldwide are simply new forms of nationalism in a highly unorthodox religious guise. This is obviously the case with Zionist fundamentalism in Israel and the fervently patriotic Christian right in the US.

**…Because it is increasingly recognised that the terrorists in no way represent mainstream Islam, some prefer to call them jihadists, but this is not very satisfactory. Extremists and unscrupulous politicians have purloined the word for their own purposes, but the real meaning of jihad is not “holy war” but “struggle” or “effort.” Muslims are commanded to make a massive attempt on all fronts - social, economic, intellectual, ethical and spiritual - to put the will of God into practice.

Sometimes a military effort may be a regrettable necessity in order to defend decent values, but an oft-quoted tradition has the Prophet Muhammad saying after a military victory: “We are coming back from the Lesser Jihad [ie the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad” - the far more important, difficult and momentous struggle to reform our own society and our own hearts.

Jihad is thus a cherished spiritual value that, for most Muslims, has no connection with violence. … The term jihadi terrorism is likely to be offensive, therefore, and will win no hearts or minds.

…Western people should learn more about such thinkers as Qutb, and become aware of the many dramatically different shades of opinion in the Muslim world. There are too many lazy, unexamined assumptions about Islam, which tends to be regarded as an amorphous, monolithic entity. Remarks such as “They hate our freedom” may give some a righteous glow, but they are not useful, because they are rarely accompanied by a rigorous analysis of who exactly “they” are.

…
Precise intelligence is essential in any conflict. It is important to know who our enemies are, but equally crucial to know who they are not. It is even more vital to avoid turning potential friends into foes. By making the disciplined effort to name our enemies correctly, we will learn more about them, and come one step nearer, perhaps, to solving the seemingly intractable and increasingly perilous problems of our divided world.

· Karen Armstrong is author of Islam: a Short History

karmstronginfo@btopenworld.com

 

[fatma]

abc.net.au/rn/ark/stories/2003/1007784.htm

…
Malachi O’Doherty:: That’s right, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, all the top leadership of the provisional Sinn Fein, the organisation which politically represents the IRA who were themselves the leaders of the IRA through the '70s and '80s, were all Christian Brothers boys.

Now I don’t think it was a strict cause and effect relationship that Brothers walked into the classroom and thumped this Republican ideology into our heads, although they were assertive of it the Brothers tried to instil Republicanism in us, in much the same way that they tried to instil Shakespeare in us, you know. And those boys didn’t grow up reciting Shakespeare sonnets over the breakfast table in the morning. So it wasn’t the straight cause and effect relationship, but something quite extraordinary happened in 1970.

A lot of the boys who were the first generation of the IRA left school, they were boys who were at school with me, but they left school at about 15. They were rough lads who in any walk of life would have done rough things, they were the guys that you fought on the schoolyard at school, or you stayed out of the way of. But they came out of school having resisted the Christian Brothers, not having absorbed the core religious or cultural lessons that the brothers were trying to teach them. And yet five years later these boys were in the IRA, and when they were in the IRA they found a culture which was very familiar to them, and it was familiar to them because they’d been through the Brothers.

Now the boys of 19 and 20, Belfast was consumed with rioting, and the leadership of the organisation that was taking them in, if you like, and training them to use weapons and to shoot at the police and soldiers, was people very like the Brothers themselves, people who thought that it is a violation that the Irish have been stripped of their language, people who thought that Catholicism and Irish Republicanism were interwoven with each other.

So suddenly these boys recognised the template that they were in, and the Christian Brothers found themselves visiting these boys in prison and remembered that you had used the strap on these boys, and the cane on them, to try and get them to speak Irish, and they wouldn’t do it, and then when they go and visit them in the prison, the old boys of the classroom, there they are sitting around saying the rosary in Irish, singing the little Gaelic language songs and being devout Catholics. But they were being devout Catholics within an IRA structure.

Rachael Kohn: Well you were a pretty devout child, though I gather that the contradictions of living in a society that was both very religious and very violent, wouldn’t make sense to you any more. And I think you make a strong link actually between that Irish Republicanism and that absolute sense of the one true faith. There’s a certain degree of shared fundamentalism, is it?

Malachi O’Doherty:: That’s right. The thing to remember of course about Catholicism is that Catholicism changed when I was in my teens through the Second Vatican Council, but the Catholicism that I was taught as a child was a fundamentalist religion, which in many ways has gone. The Irish Republican culture that started in 1916 essentially, was built on a Catholic model, and through its history through the '30s, '40s and '50s, held very, very close to that Catholic model.

I mean for instance in the 1930s Republicans some of them, wanted to develop Communist ideas, and this created a flurry of worry within the Catholic church, and as a concession to the Catholic church, the IRA, that’s people who were going off to London and planting bombs to overthrow the British Empire, they decided that they would accept as their social policy the encyclicals of the Pope. But the Catholic culture changed before the Republican one did. And I think in a sense the Republican culture was left without its spiritual foundations in a Catholic Ireland, which was more moderate, which was more open, which did acknowledge that Protestants were Christians too, that there’s salvation outside the Catholic church.

 

[bobzills]

Again, please read the Human Rights Watch article I just linked to you.

What does the Human Rights Watch think about Shiite Muslims bombing people praying in a Sunni mosque
news.netscape.com/story/2007/03/25/shiite-militants-retailiate-bomb-sunni-mosque/
abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200607/s1687319.htm
or about Sunni Muslims bombing people praying in a Shiite mosque?
nytimes.com/2007/06/19/world/middleeast/19cnd-iraq.html?ex=1188532800&en=a507c736bdf64ca0&ei=5070
chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-06/20/content_897833.htm
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDQ/is_2005_Nov_7/ai_n15801805

Does Human Rights Watch blame this killing of innocent people on the Russians?

 

[pro_universal]

Contarini;2647484I:

can’t think of a single major war in the past 100 years that was primarily inspired by Christianity.

I misunderstood your first sentence in the previous post-by “many Christians have been able to reject violence”, I thought you were making a generalization about Christians and tying it to the example of Jesus.

While I agree that wars in the past 100 years have not been inspired by Christianity, it’s equally true to say that the numerous bloody wars in that period have not been prevented by Christianity.

And similarly, wars in the time period involving Muslims have not been inspired by Islam.

Rather, Christians have (deplorably) often supported wars launched for secular reasons.

This is true also of the Muslim world-I think you would be hard pressed to find a theological war from the same period.

It does not seem to me that Christians are, by and large, behind most of the violence in the world today. On the other hand, we hear regularly of extremely violent acts explicitly inspired by Islam and celebrated by many (even if a minority) Muslims as acts of martyrdom.

The problem is that the voters and administrators in the countries that initiated the very wars you cited, were in fact mostly Christian. Yes, there are Christian pacifists, but they are a small minority (as you acknowledge.)

And on the other hand, I really do not see violent acts inspired by Islam. The distinction is that most of the violence involving Muslims involves a perceived injustice that virtually all members of the ethnic group involved agree to, and that Muslims step in offering Islamic spirituality as a solution to the problem. That is not to say that wars are inspired by Islam, but rather that Muslims have offered their system as a solution to the battles fought by Arabs in particular.

And while I oppose the war itself and do not deny that U.S. soldiers have committed atrocities, the degree of restraint shown by U.S. soldiers is, in terms of military actions historically (particularly against a stubborn insurgency) truly remarkable.

The problem is threefold here:

1. Most Americans are Christian, and most supported the war, regardless of what Christian leadership thought.
2. The restraint exercised by US soldiers has not resulted in a remarkably low number of civilian victims of the US war machine.
3. The insurgency is stubborn, but at the same time, predictable and also fueled by a widespread demand that US troops not be present in Iraq. It is difficult for me to credit an occupying army with restraint against “stubborn insurgents” who represent the vast majority of the citizens of their country.

But the Western nations, for all their faults, do value human life and show this by their actions even under severe provocation. Islamic nations and militant organizations do not, by and large, show this kind of respect for human life in the way they respond to insults, much less to violent attacks.

I disagree with this assessment of Western nations. If you compare, for example, the experience of Western client states in central America with Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, there is really a shocking difference in terms of the death and destruction wrought by the occupying power. With no provocation other than religious and national defiance, the United States in particular was willing to fund a widespread terrorist campaign against Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala that resulted in deaths exceeding the hundred thousand mark.

So based on deeds, rather than rhetoric, the historical record seems to be to pretty clearly indicate that the Western nations are not friendlier to human life than Islamic ones. At least by body count, this is a certainty.

If you count everyone killed in any war or other political action waged by a predominantly or officially Christian nation, then you have to apply this across the board. You have to count all the people killed in early intra-Muslim civil wars as well as the wars of expansionEdwin

Compared time period for time period, the numbers of deaths are quite similar. I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. For every Abbasid and Fatimid and proto-druze massacre, there was an equally large (or larger) Christian massacre of unorthodox Christians or Jews.

However, comparing only the past 200 years, there is really no contest. Even including intra-Muslim violence, there really is no serious way to dispute that Christians have killed millions more people than Muslims, including religious and non-religious motives for violence.

In rhetoric, it’s true that Christians have spoken the message of nonviolence more frequently than Muslims, but when you turn to deeds, I think your thesis about Islam versus Christianity collapses.

 

[pro_universal]

What does the Human Rights Watch think about Shiite Muslims bombing people praying in a Sunni mosque
news.netscape.com/story/2007/03/25/shiite-militants-retailiate-bomb-sunni-mosque/
abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200607/s1687319.htm
or about Sunni Muslims bombing people praying in a Shiite mosque?
nytimes.com/2007/06/19/world/middleeast/19cnd-iraq.html?ex=1188532800&en=a507c736bdf64ca0&ei=5070
chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-06/20/content_897833.htm
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDQ/is_2005_Nov_7/ai_n15801805

Does Human Rights Watch blame this killing of innocent people on the Russians?

No, but what does that have to do with Beslan?

Do you see the context now? Or is that Russian violence excused because the Russians are mostly not Muslim?

 

[Palladio]

The label of Catholic terror was never used about the IRA

Fundamentalism is often a form of nationalism in religious disguise

Karen Armstrong
Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

…
We need a phrase that is more exact than “Islamic terror”. These acts may be committed by people who call themselves Muslims, but they violate essential Islamic principles. The Qur’an prohibits aggressive warfare, permits war only in self-defence and insists that the true Islamic values are peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. It also states firmly that there must be no coercion in religious matters, and for centuries Islam had a much better record of religious tolerance than Christianity.

Like the Bible, the Qur’an has its share of aggressive texts, but like all the great religions, its main thrust is towards kindliness and compassion. Islamic law outlaws war against any country in which Muslims are allowed to practice their religion freely, and forbids the use of fire, the destruction of buildings and the killing of innocent civilians in a military campaign. So although Muslims, like Christians or Jews, have all too often failed to live up to their ideals, it is not because of the religion per se.

**We rarely, if ever, called the IRA bombings “Catholic” terrorism because we knew enough to realise that this was not essentially a religious campaign. Indeed, like the Irish republican movement, many fundamentalist movements worldwide are simply new forms of nationalism in a highly unorthodox religious guise. This is obviously the case with Zionist fundamentalism in Israel and the fervently patriotic Christian right in the US.

**…Because it is increasingly recognised that the terrorists in no way represent mainstream Islam, some prefer to call them jihadists, but this is not very satisfactory. Extremists and unscrupulous politicians have purloined the word for their own purposes, but the real meaning of jihad is not “holy war” but “struggle” or “effort.” Muslims are commanded to make a massive attempt on all fronts - social, economic, intellectual, ethical and spiritual - to put the will of God into practice.

Sometimes a military effort may be a regrettable necessity in order to defend decent values, but an oft-quoted tradition has the Prophet Muhammad saying after a military victory: “We are coming back from the Lesser Jihad [ie the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad” - the far more important, difficult and momentous struggle to reform our own society and our own hearts.

Jihad is thus a cherished spiritual value that, for most Muslims, has no connection with violence. … The term jihadi terrorism is likely to be offensive, therefore, and will win no hearts or minds.

…Western people should learn more about such thinkers as Qutb, and become aware of the many dramatically different shades of opinion in the Muslim world. There are too many lazy, unexamined assumptions about Islam, which tends to be regarded as an amorphous, monolithic entity. Remarks such as “They hate our freedom” may give some a righteous glow, but they are not useful, because they are rarely accompanied by a rigorous analysis of who exactly “they” are.

…
Precise intelligence is essential in any conflict. It is important to know who our enemies are, but equally crucial to know who they are not. It is even more vital to avoid turning potential friends into foes. By making the disciplined effort to name our enemies correctly, we will learn more about them, and come one step nearer, perhaps, to solving the seemingly intractable and increasingly perilous problems of our divided world.

· Karen Armstrong is author of Islam: a Short History
This is merely ignorant. The IRA was communist, not Catholic.
karmstronginfo@btopenworld.com

This is merely ignorant when it is not out of date. The IRA was communist, not Catholic. We call Islamo-facism such, now, for a reason. The terrorists at the Glasgow airport on a murdering rampage was screaming Allah Allah.The Guardian is of course a left wing newspaper, hence unreliable.

 

[Palladio]

I misunderstood your first sentence in the previous post-by “many Christians have been able to reject violence”, I thought you were making a generalization about Christians and tying it to the example of Jesus.

While I agree that wars in the past 100 years have not been inspired by Christianity, it’s equally true to say that the numerous bloody wars in that period have not been prevented by Christianity.

And similarly, wars in the time period involving Muslims have not been inspired by Islam.

This is true also of the Muslim world-I think you would be hard pressed to find a theological war from the same period.

The problem is that the voters and administrators in the countries that initiated the very wars you cited, were in fact mostly Christian. Yes, there are Christian pacifists, but they are a small minority (as you acknowledge.)

And on the other hand, I really do not see violent acts inspired by Islam. The distinction is that most of the violence involving Muslims involves a perceived injustice that virtually all members of the ethnic group involved agree to, and that Muslims step in offering Islamic spirituality as a solution to the problem. That is not to say that wars are inspired by Islam, but rather that Muslims have offered their system as a solution to the battles fought by Arabs in particular.

The problem is threefold here:

1. Most Americans are Christian, and most supported the war, regardless of what Christian leadership thought.
2. The restraint exercised by US soldiers has not resulted in a remarkably low number of civilian victims of the US war machine.
3. The insurgency is stubborn, but at the same time, predictable and also fueled by a widespread demand that US troops not be present in Iraq. It is difficult for me to credit an occupying army with restraint against “stubborn insurgents” who represent the vast majority of the citizens of their country.

I disagree with this assessment of Western nations. If you compare, for example, the experience of Western client states in central America with Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, there is really a shocking difference in terms of the death and destruction wrought by the occupying power. With no provocation other than religious and national defiance, the United States in particular was willing to fund a widespread terrorist campaign against Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala that resulted in deaths exceeding the hundred thousand mark.

So based on deeds, rather than rhetoric, the historical record seems to be to pretty clearly indicate that the Western nations are not friendlier to human life than Islamic ones. At least by body count, this is a certainty.

Compared time period for time period, the numbers of deaths are quite similar. I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. For every Abbasid and Fatimid and proto-druze massacre, there was an equally large (or larger) Christian massacre of unorthodox Christians or Jews.

However, comparing only the past 200 years, there is really no contest. Even including intra-Muslim violence, there really is no serious way to dispute that Christians have killed millions more people than Muslims, including religious and non-religious motives for violence.

In rhetoric, it’s true that Christians have spoken the message of nonviolence more frequently than Muslims, but when you turn to deeds, I think your thesis about Islam versus Christianity collapses.

You lay at the feet of Christians, so far as I can follow, all war undertaken in the West by nation states it appears since the Renaissance, perhaps before: this is very poor history indeed–no, it is not history at all–because it fails to take up actors and causes even just a little bit, and I note that not a single fact is adduced in evidence to argue for the specifically Christian character of any war.

 

[pro_universal]

You lay at the feet of Christians, so far as I can follow, all war undertaken in the West by nation states it appears since the Renaissance, perhaps before: this is very poor history indeed–no, it is not history at all–because it fails to take up actors and causes even just a little bit, and I note that not a single fact is adduced in evidence to argue for the specifically Christian character of any war.

Uh, no. I am laying at the feet of Christians specifically most war undertaken since the dawn of the 20th century.

The fact is, since then, Christian populations have out-killed Muslim populations by a margin that is literally millions of souls wide.

 

[Palladio]

Uh, no. I am laying at the feet of Christians specifically most war undertaken since the dawn of the 20th century.

The fact is, since then, Christian populations have out-killed Muslim populations by a margin that is literally millions of souls wide.

But you fail to demonstrate the specifically Christian character of any such wars, undertaken by secular nation states. You don’t even appear to try. So the body count–without question, the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history–really proves nothing.

 

[pro_universal]

But you fail to demonstrate the specifically Christian character of any such wars, undertaken by secular nation states. You don’t even appear to try. So the body count–without question, the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history–really proves nothing.

I never alleged that they were Christian inspired wars. Please reread what I said.

Just as the wars today involving Muslims are not theolgoical wars, most wars involving Christians were not theological in nature. But Christianity certainly has not prevented Christian societies from racking up a death toll of millions in a 100 year period, that is for sure.