For goodness sake, will some of you critics of actions done using the name of christianity actually read the new testament and find out what a christian is? People, groups, nations who commit atrocities in the name of christ, ARE NOT FOLLOWING the teachings of Christ or his disciples. A Christian who murders is not being true to their professed belief. Islamists however, as taught in the Quran are being true to Mohommeds teaching when they kill infidels who refuse to convert to Islam. Christians who openly contradict what is taught in the New Testament are either ignorant, apostate or false. Muslims who openly contradict the Quran (by claiming there is no room in Islam for violence) are either ignorant apostate or false.

It seems to me that many still cannot tell the difference between religion and culture.

Many of those practices that the west finds disturbing come from specific cultures and are not universally practiced by the religion as a matter of course.

It's easy to identify extreme examples of anything and simply generalise to include all adherents.

Religious extremism can also be found in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and even (although not strictly a religion) - Buddhism.

The biggest problem in the world is not religious belief, but intolerance and that's a universal practice.

Many of the anti-Muslim zealots are as rabid as the extremists.

KarlX

"Islam has been using terror since it started it did not start fifty years ago?"

The modern car bomb was invented by the Jews during their terror and assassination campaign to found the state of Israel.

Early Christians in Alexandria used to publicly disembowel adultresses and have their entrails eaten alive by pigs. They burned and crucified thousands of pagans in their killing fields in what is now Syria and thousands more during the Inquisition.

Only a few generations ago they were burning witches and keeping slaves.

Is the modern use of drone warfare not potentially an act of terror?

Islam does not have a monopoly on terror.

bobS

u are right of course but secularist are often so full of self righteousness that the only way they can justify murdering the unborn is to slag off and misrepresent Christianity. The national broadcasters have mastered it. I think it is a pre requisite for any senior position.

The hatred and bigotry on this thread is quite astounding. Islam is a branch of Christianity, which is a branch of Judaism, which is a branch of earlier forms of religion from the Mesopotamian region.

In other words, the commonalities are huge, yet the bigots want to focus only on the differences! It's sheer madness!

Wake up to yourselves. You and your fellow travellers in each of the religions mentioned are interested in stupid petty point-scoring over meaninglessness, while you try to pretend that it really matters what you call yourselves and which team you barrack for. You're all a bunch of stupid fan-bois, no different in your motivations than football hooligans who claim to love the game but spend all their time trying to beat up supporters of the other side.

Not a brain cell to rub together between the lot of you.

davidf, why do you bother trying to hold an intelligent discussion with dimwits whose entire repertoire of argument consists of slogans?

On the subject of secularity, it bothers me that "freedom of and from religion" without something to replace the moral structure that religion provides will be much worse. I'm surprised at your support for such a model. Religions are all about trying to make people responsible to others. The Abrahamic religions (in all of their politico-cultural permutations) do this by positing a supernal authority that is called God which sits over the petty squabbles of people and judges their behaviour, in the way a parent might oversee children, rewarding the good and punishing the bad after the play has ended. As a result, just as with kids in a playground, less direct policing of behaviour is required, because people self-regulate.

The alternative is that rigid rules must be imposed and enforced. One of our modern inventions is the "helicopter parent", who must hover vigilantly over all activities ready to step in immediately and put a stop to anything she doesn't like. The adult equivalent is the "nanny state" and the ultimate nanny state was your old nemesis, the soviet state.

Is that what you're advocating?

Siller, the Abbassid Caliphate collapsed under the weight of both external threats and its own success. It outsourced its military to the less settled groups around its borders and it spent all of its efforts on cultural pursuits. As a result, it became an easy target and was duly picked off. However, the "summer" was much longer than you say. The Umayyad caliphate was expansionary, but it was also strongly focussed on trade and cultural exchange rather than on conquest per se, or even on religious proselytising. It came into being 150 years before the Abbassid revolution that supplanted the leadership after several civil wars.

It was the Rape of Baghdad that destroyed the Islamic Enlightenment and that was driven by largely illiterate, power and wealth-hungry barbarians after years of assaults by equally barbaric religious crusaders had destroyed some of the greatest flowerings of that enlightenment. Their empire was not religiously-based at all and was perhaps the most violent ever until the 20th Century. What they did do well though, was to adopt the Confucian principles, which were overtly about obligation rather than rights.

The problem with religions (Abrahamic and Eastern mystic) was that the rulers didn't like having to be bound by the same restrictions as their followers, so compliant clerics made sure they didn't have to be. Confucianism changed that by making a virtuous life an end in itself, with reward based on virtuous performance of one's role and in proportion to social status. A peasant couldn't expect to exceed a king's reward, as Christ had suggested he could, for example.

That Confucian model is still in use today and underpins the Chinese version of Marxism.