Loudmouth: ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Saudi_Arabia#/media/File:Flag_of_Saudi_Arabia_(in_order_of_writing,_later_over).svg

Hey, I just love the little stickman with the Afro in the lower right hand corner of the Royal Sovereign.

Mox,
Arabs can't create and maintain stable societies without European or Asian support, they just can't.
Did you realise that even ISIS pays it's Western born and educated fighters more than the locals?
Without their European troops, engineers, arms manufacturers and bureaucrats the Arabic sheikhs and caliphs of old were useless and Europeans have had a more than 1000 to one kill ratio against Muslim armies since the days of Napoleon.
If the Anglo Saxon powers wanted to take the middle East by force of arms, drive all the Arabs back to the Arabian peninsula and return it to it's rightful owners, the European Christians and Jews they could do so in a few short years but they clearly don't want that.

Yuyutsu writes: "......religion leads one toward God while violence leads one away from God - so if, or to the extent that, Islam has a violent political agenda, then it is not a religion."

By the same token then, roman catholicism during the Dark and Middle Ages could not have been a religion either given the wars and social conflicts it fomented. Religions are power-bases built upon human superstition and fueled by self-interest. That is why it has been a political tool used extensively by those who seek power over others since time immemorial. Even in the 21st century this scenario holds true. In preferring to believe in fairies and goblins humans reach the heights of intellectual cowardice, they are incapable of relying on their own intellect and grotesquely contrive via ecstatic declamation to turn such cowardice into highest virtue. Cont.....

....cont.
Religion: [1] The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
[2] A particular system of faith and worship.
[3] A pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.

Nowhere will you find a definition of the word that supports your contention. In fact it surprises me that you ascribed any logical sense at all to your idea. Christian scripture drips with exhortations to violence and bloody conflict. Such exhortations were Holy Writ and were observed with meticulous attention to detail particularly during the Dark and Middle Ages when heresy, witchcraft and misogyny were rife and human superstition at its zenith.

A famous and harrowing example of christian extremism is to be found in the massacre of heretical cathars and devout roman catholics at the town of Bezieres in the Languedoc region of southern France in 1209. Papal Legate and Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, commander of the army sent to enforce conversions or exterminate the heretical sect, was asked how to discriminate between cathar and catholic. He replied “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius - Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. ii. 19) and so a reported 20,000 men women and children in that town were massacred.

George Santayana's famously observed; "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It is intellectual cowardice that has sustained the great truth in this statement.

Yuyutsu,

For Christ's sake, religion IS ideology. And sometimes ideologies are treated as religions - many Marxists and Trots seem to follow that principle, even after a comb9ined hundreds of years of experience of how practice does not follow theory.

Pogi,

Isn't it fun to go back eight hundred years and sink the boot in ? I've always had a soft spot for the Albigensians, they seemed like my kind of Christian.

But why stop there ? I'm fuming at the way the Roman destroyed the civilization of the Etruscans, 2500 years ago. Utter bastards ! Etruscans seemed like such nice people. And how the Hurrians and Mitanni were crushed a thousand years before by the Hittites. And how the Upper Egyptians were conquered -- so brutally - by the lower Egyptians, or the other way around, a thousand years before that. And so on, back as far as you like. It all makes you weep, doesn't it ?

We have to oppose evil and brutality when and where we find it: today, it is at the hands of Islamists, followers - to the letter - of the Koran, a book which can never be questioned, changed, modified or in any way denied. Now. In 2016. If the Hittites, or the medieval Catholic Church, or the Romans, were to somehow rise up and do what they did all those years ago, we would have to oppose them appropriately.

But they aren't the ones carrying out atrocities today, in 2016. The Islamists are. So leave the old decrepit Catholic church alone and focus on the Islamists. We have to understand whether or not Islamo-fascism, an ideology, flows directly from Islam, a religion. I think it does, and that it is, and will remain, a very dire threat to the rest of the world long after I'm gone. We can argue about the dastardly crimes against the Cathars over a few beers on a Friday night if you like.

Joe

Dear Pogi,

<<By the same token then, roman catholicism during the Dark and Middle Ages could not have been a religion either>>

I am inclined to agree.

<<In preferring to believe in fairies and goblins humans reach the heights of intellectual cowardice>>

Only if one's allegiance is given to the intellect.

(it is common for example to call an enemy "coward" even when they fight well)

<<Religion: [1] The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
[2] A particular system of faith and worship.
[3] A pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.>>

According to the story of the Blind Men and an Elephant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant),

Elephant: [1] a pillar
[2] a rope
[3] a tree branch
[4] a hand fan
[5] a wall
[6] a solid pipe

Those without understanding of religion and its purpose, instead hang onto particular religious techniques as if they were in essence religion itself.

Religion is the process of coming closer to God. If particular beliefs, faith, worship, ideology, pursuits or interests help us to come closer to God, then they are religious - otherwise they are not.

<<Nowhere will you find a definition of the word that supports your contention.>>

Ahimsa (non-violence) is referred to as the first and foremost religious practice (Yama) in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Yoga, without which no real spiritual progress is possible.

<<Christian scripture drips with exhortations to violence>>

What makes such scripture "Christian"? Just because the authors claim to follow Christ? I don't think that Jesus would approve!