Islam a branch of Christianity?? Really? Rather a branch of Judaism ...

All beside the point really ....

History is a very interesting subject and by it's very nature seen in a very different lights according to what side you are on.

It's the here and now that counts - and looking to the future.

We live in a Nation founded on Christian principles. That's our culture. It accounts for the fact that nationally we are a peaceful tolerant society. Far too tolerant in some respects.

Nations built on Islamic principles do not enjoy the same levels of peace, harmony and tolerance as Australia or most other 'Western' countries whose cultural traditions are predominately Christian based. I'm talking NOW, not hundreds of years ago.

Christian faith - the New Testament, espouses these principles. The history of the Christian Church is indeed lamentable at times but that is PAST. Can anyone name a country today where wholesale civil war, slaughter and atrocities is happening between opposing groups of Christians? I can't, but it's easy to rattle off the Islamic States.

So while Muslims are enthusiastically killing each other, contemplate the fact that Islam is the one religion that considers anyone who is not Muslim as an infidel whose life is of no consequence. As much as some 'believers' and the 'apologists' protest, this is a Koran teaching. As it is that any convert from Islam to another religion should be executed.

This might have something to do with many of us, right here right now, having a healthy aversion towards a "Muslim Invasion" - real or imagined. While numbers are relatively small, there is peace based on limited power of a minority to create great change or trouble. If the balance changes markedly - who knows! If it happens I don't wish to be here.

Now - who wants to contribute to the 'Marilyn's Egyptian & Middle East Adventure Holiday' fund? C'mon - it's a good cause. Returning (well hopefully - if she keeps quiet and covered up) with a new appreciation of home. :-D

Dear david f,

>>Maimonides was Jewish, but he was free to teach and learn in the Muslim world.<<

True. However, the article is about the present. Where do you think would a contemporary Jewish “Maimonides” be more “free to teach and learn” (except, of course, in Israel) in a country belonging to the Muslim world or in a country like the US or one of Western Europe that until recently unequivocally belonged to the Christian world?

Todays’ Jewish culture, Jewish thinkers are more safely and “organically” embedded in what became out of the “Christian” world than they ever were in the Muslim world. They became the co-shapers of the West. This was true even before the Holocaust, and is even more true after the Holocaust. This is a fact, although one can convincingly argue that the Holocaust was a too high price to pay for this.

>>With the Enlightenment and the rise of the secular state the intolerance and anti-scientific attitudes endemic in Christianity have been curbed.<<

Again, true. However, the Enlightenment self-correction and the following thereof scientific and industrial revolutions came from WITHIN the Christian world, not from the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu - or what you had at those times - outside worlds or cilvilisations. Whether one sees this as happening BECAUSE of the Christian background or IN SPITE of it, it is a fact that Western thinking became the avant-garde of human development on the global scene, even though this role will become gradually less visible. Perhaps not unlike the often underestimated Jewish and Muslim impacts into intellectual wealth of what used to be a predominantly Christian world.

SILLER,
>>Islam … is locked into an Islamic version of medieval Europe.<<

Well, Mohamed was born about 620 years after Jesus, and 2013-620=1393, which is a year belonging to Christianity’s late Middle Ages. I know this is a silly observation, but still.

The funniest response so far, has been Antiseptic's criticism of DavidF for "holding an intelligent discussion" with his opponents. Nobody could ever accuse Antiseptic of ever holding an intelligent discussion.

Congratulations, DavidF. You are doing a good job of using a perverted view of history to support your premise that Christianity is worse than Islam. However confused your reasoning, it is a much better way of promoting your worldview than the woeful efforts of Poirot, Marilyn Sheppard, and Antiseptic.

That Christianity was once as bad as (if not worse) than Islam, is not in dispute. But what we are concentrating on is the fact that the two religions are totally dissimilar, and that they have produced entirely different outcomes for the people who live under each belief system.

Christianity was begun by a Jewish hippie who preached, pacifism, love and tolerance. Islam was begun by a genocide advocating warlord who created a warriors religion, similar to the old pagan Norse religions, where men who fell in battle were rewarded through all Eternity. It stands to reason that the two religions have fundamentally opposed values.

Christianity is a religion based upon pacifism. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, Christian Europe for 1000 years was a continent under siege. Norseman from the north, Muslims form the south, and Goths, Visigoths, Huns, and Hordes from the East. No pacifist religion could survive such a time, and the Christians decided to forget pacifism and to muscle up. The concept of a Christian warrior fighting for God was probably adopted from the Muslims.

That Christian religious leaders then became extremely intolerant and violent is not in dispute. But by being that way, the Christian clerics were contradicting the teachings of their own prophet. The Reformation was brought about by Christian clerics like Martin Luther who demanded that the church return to the original teachings of Jesus Christ. Protestant Christians could still be violent, but their behaviour was moderated by the fact that violence and intolerance was proscribed by their God. Very violent Christians could be labelled by other Christians as being "unchristian."

(continued)

This is fundamentally the opposite from Islam. Violence, genocide and the spread of Islam by the sword, was openly advocated by the Muslim prophet. Islam may have become more tolerant through prosperity, but such tolerance was proscribed by their God. With Islam now in trouble, the Muslims today are having their own Reformation. Like the Christians before them, they are returning to the original scriptures advocated by Mohammad. And that means violence, intolerance, terrorism and the obligation to spread Islam by violence.

There are a lot of bad Muslims today who do not want to do what God and Mohammad has instructed. But while they may not wish to commit violence themselves to spread Islam, they can not criticise the True Muslims who are simply doing what Allah has commanded.

The validity of my this statement can be ascertained by the differebnt ways that Christians and Muslims behave. When France banned the burqua in French schools, thousands of Muslims in Sydney rioted. When some silly YouTube video attacking Mohammad surfaced, Muslims all over the world went beserk, burning churches and killing Christians. But when Amina Lawal was sentenced to being stoned to death in Nigeria for "adultery", or when the Taliban shoots schoolgirls in the name of Allah, there is a deafening silence from Muslims everywhere.

When Salmon RUshdie published a book mildly critical of Islam, he was condemned to "fatwa" death by the Ayatollah Khomeini. If "moderate" Muslims are the norm in western societies, one would have expected these moderate Muslims to have laughed the whole thing off. They didn't. Moderate" Muslim leaders, including the convert Cat Stevens, publically boasted how they hoped to be the ones who had the honour of killing Rushdie themselves.

Unlike Christians, Muslims will never condemn violence committed in their name against those who break Allah's rules, or criticise their religion. Such violence is officially sanctioned by their religion by their own scriptures.

divine msn, Islam accepts Christ as a divine prophet, Judaism doesn't. Don't confuse Western Christianity, that has been subject to centuries of modification, largely to justify special pleading from some power elite or other with the Orthodox, Coptic or Gnostic forms that preceded it and pervaded the area where Mohammed lived. They are still the forms practised in that region today.

I understand your views on history, I used to hold them myself. However, I think they're a little wrong-headed. The current situation doesn't exist in isolation from the historical one, they're part of a continuum.

In this discussion, when we talk about "Muslims", what we're talking about is people from the Middle East and the sub-Himalayan region principally. Those people have been at the centre of world events and have informed a huge amount of what we regard as "our" culture.

Why are we so scared of them? I think you provided the answer when you said "Far too tolerant in some respects". We are scared because they represent the wild outside. They are dynamic, strong-willed, not afraid to take risks, strongly linked to their own communities, group-motivated, devout, aggressive in pursuing the things they regard as important, ruthless perhaps. these are not virtues in our soft, bureaucratic, somewhat effete culture. Historically, sedentary, inward-looking cultures such as ours have always been eventually subsumed by the wild outside. Abbassid Islam is just one example, so are the early Chinese Tang and Song dynasties and so on.

History is important. It tells us about how people just like us dealt with events and shows us how that worked out.

Islam is a unifying force within that region. The reason so much is made of uniformity of religion is that Mohammed and his successors understood all too well that there were already lots of local differences that lead to strife, so they sought to reduce that strife by creating a unifying, overarching religious imperative. Later leaders have done as Christian leaders have and misused that to give themselves a justification for their own special claim to power.

[cont]

The Shia/Sunni split is a case in point, imposing a divine right to rule not dissimilar to the Catholic idea of the Pope as an appointee of God on the original Mohammedan idea of the Caliphate as a constitutional theocracy with secular obligations as important as spiritual ones.

We've seen the same sorts of schisms in Christianity, as I mentioned above.

In my view, while your concern is understandable and reflects a large part of the population, it's narrow and somewhat reactionary, with the main fear being that your religious/cultural sense of self is under threat. What's interesting is that the response suggested is to become less tolerant, which is also held up as a reason to dislike Islam!

I say that the sensible approach is try to understand what made the Islamic Caliphates so successful in promoting cultural diversity and intellectual endeavour and try to incorporate them into our dynamic Judaeo/christian/humanist model along with the best of the Eastern mystic and secular ideologies like confucianism.

We can hardly say our present socio-cultural arrangements are perfect and the progressive/conservative political polarisation doesn't seem to offer much of a way out.

Let's strive for something better.

Our human species now spans the globe. We are essentially one large community, with sub-populations that vary considerably. We need to move rapidly away from the idea of localism to that of true globalism. Corporate globalisation was a start, but it is essentially flawed because it is a managerialist model that seeks to suppress sociocultural drives by imposing processes and regulations that are rigidly enforced, while the corporations themselves, because they are not human entities are not affected. It's essentially a development of the notion of the divinity of kings, where the "divinity" is made concrete by the inherently inhuman nature of a Corporation.

I would like to see a much more human model based on our innate drive to be social. This is vital, in my view.