Do you hate Islam ?

[JimC]

They would have spent most of their time threatening their own followers.
There was a reason printing the bible in english was considered heresy.

In most European countries before the reformation, "their own followers" for the entrenched Catholic church meant the entire population...

[Trolldor]

And Islam has no territorial boundaries. It has taken the worse of Christianity and then 'improved' on it.

[Hermit]

They would have spent most of their time threatening their own followers.

Like during the crusades? Also, read up on how christians treated nonchristians generally. You'll find their methods for converting them to christianity particularly interesting. The spanish inquisition was particularly lethal for anyone suspected of judaism.

[JimC]

And Islam has no territorial boundaries. It has taken the worse of Christianity and then 'improved' on it.

Basically, it hasn't had it's teeth filed blunt by an enlightenment and (to be honest here) the desire of secular rulers not to bow to papal or other religious authority...

[Trolldor]

It also has no fall back, and its members are fanatisised.


Also, the crusades began because the Muslims decided it would be a good time to go and conquer some magic dirt that was sacred to them.

[Coito ergo sum]

Christianity didn't have the destructive capability that Islam has today.

Just as well too. Can you imagine what the crusaders would have done if they had access to modern weaponry and transport? What about if today's surveillance technology was available to christian theocracies? :shudder:

They might have retaken the land that the Muslims forcibly conquered.

The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression.

Here is a map from 600 AD:


At this time, there is no such thing as a Muslim (oh, to live in such a time! Ah, nostalgia.....). The pink bit is Byzantium - Christianity was the official religion, and prior to that it was pagan Rome. Note, there are no Muslims in the Holy Land at this time. There are Jews and there are Christians, and there are some pagans from Persia and outside the empire that show up for trade, etc.

Here is a map from 750AD:

Nice job of conquering from Mighty Mo and his successors.....

Note, however, that France was almost subsumed by the invading Muslim hordes in 732AD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours
If it wasn't for Charles "The Hammer" Martel, and his forces at that time, France would have fallen, like Spain, under the Muslim yolk. Note - Tours is up closer to the English Channel than to Spain. The Muslims had advanced all through France, and were pillaging and burning as they went.

Here is a map from 800AD:


The pink part is Byzantium (Eastern Roman Empire). That had been around as officially Christian for something on the order of 500 years (note the green bit to the south and east - there's the Muslim Empire, which had spread out of Arabia, and into present day Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. - by force of arms). So, in the 600s, the Mighty Mo was jettisoned form his mother's wretched womb, and he created Islam, and then the Arabian Muslims began conquering. See what they did in just a century? Not content with staying in Arabia, they moved out and took most of the middle east and north Africa - and look - look at Spain! Last time I checked, that was part of Europe, and it's an Emirate! You know - like the United Arab Emirates? Only, it's an Emirate of Cordoba, in Spain.


Here we have 900AD:

Nice right - look how it changed -- Sicily turned green - Crete turned green - ....they're on the move...during this time, 800s there were constant attempts by the Muslims to push into France and the hammering away at Byzantium occurred. Beginning in the 800s and into the 900s, Byzantium enlisted the help of the northmen (Varangians and Vikings) to help fight off the Muslim hordes.


Fast forward another century - to 1099AD:



Look at all that green moving into Turkey! -- the Seljuks - Arab Muslims - conquering Christian lands. The Byzantines - the light of the world - slowly dying under the crushing weight of the Musselmen.

Now - the First Crusade was in 1096 to 1099. Is it any wonder that the Europeans put together forces to try to beat back the Muslims? I mean, in recent decades it has been fashionable to cast blame solely on the "Crusaders" - how awful they were, right? What were they even doing marching on the Holy Land to begin with, right? That's Muslim lands! Crusaders - get out of Muslim lands! Right?

Well - look at the changing maps. Those weren't Muslim lands in the first place! And, Europe was legitimately under siege by an invading force that was already slowly dispatching the greatest nation on the planet, Byzantium. To a person in the 11th century, Byzantium was "it" - it was "The Empire." It was a shining light, and an emblem of power, might and civilization. It was Rome.

For Constantinople to fall would have meant, to the Franks, to the Germans, to the Italians, a grave threat. If it could fall, then all of Europe was at risk.

I think the Muslims get too little blame for the wars between the Arab-Muslim world and the Christian world in the middle ages. Too much focus and scorn is foisted upon "Crusaders" as if the Crusades just occurred in a vacuum. Clearly, they did not, and I think that most of us, if we were living in Italy in 1096 and saw the encroachment of an ever increasing Arab Muslim empire, that had already solidified its hold on Spain and had narrowly been defeated by the Franks, we might well have thought it absolutely justified to send aid to the beleaguered Byzantines.

[Coito ergo sum]

They would have spent most of their time threatening their own followers.

Like during the crusades? Also, read up on how christians treated nonchristians generally. You'll find their methods for converting them to christianity particularly interesting. The spanish inquisition was particularly lethal for anyone suspected of judaism.

Yeah - they sucked. So?

[Hermit]

Christianity didn't have the destructive capability that Islam has today.

Just as well too. Can you imagine what the crusaders would have done if they had access to modern weaponry and transport? What about if today's surveillance technology was available to christian theocracies? :shudder:

The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression.

They would have spent most of their time threatening their own followers.

Like during the crusades? Also, read up on how christians treated nonchristians generally. You'll find their methods for converting them to christianity particularly interesting. The spanish inquisition was particularly lethal for anyone suspected of judaism.

Yeah - they sucked. So?

Are you suggesting that that tweedledee was preferable to tweedledum? If so, we could have an interesting discussion regarding the merits of christian theocracies in comparison to islamic ones during the period you referred to.

[Coito ergo sum]

Christianity didn't have the destructive capability that Islam has today.

Just as well too. Can you imagine what the crusaders would have done if they had access to modern weaponry and transport? What about if today's surveillance technology was available to christian theocracies? :shudder:

The Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression.

They would have spent most of their time threatening their own followers.

Like during the crusades? Also, read up on how christians treated nonchristians generally. You'll find their methods for converting them to christianity particularly interesting. The spanish inquisition was particularly lethal for anyone suspected of judaism.

Yeah - they sucked. So?

Are you suggesting that that tweedledee was preferable to tweedledum? If so, we could have an interesting discussion regarding the merits of christian theocracies in comparison to islamic ones during the period you referred to.

I was suggesting that the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression, and I think the facts bear me out on that.

But, this thread is about whether a person hates Islam or not. One of the reasons I hate it is that it appears to motivate a lot of conquest, and the evidence for that is in the changing maps of the world over the last 1400 years. We can see a similar progression in Africa where first the Muslims invaded and conquered north Africa and ever since have been pushing south. Islam is now covering 1/2 the continent and it's not stopping.

One thing we can say about the relative merits of the theocracies is that both were middle ages theocracies at the time. Christianity, however, exited the middle ages a few hundred years ago with a Rennaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Islam, quite simply, did not.

Game, set, match.

[camoguard]

I'm back. I took a holiday over the weekend.

About Quakers, yes, the less extreme a religion is the less it is worthy of my opposition and if a Quaker saves a life I am grateful to that Quaker. When regarding crazy beliefs, a belief is irritating. I'm over all of it. I can live and let live, but my opinion is that beliefs are bad for working through real problems.

Muslims are worse but not just muslims. Anything that makes killing especially honor killing seem alright is deserving of extra scorn. I'm tired of religion combos such as the big religions where you opt into a whole book of crazy. I'd much prefer mix and match religions except that it gets psuedo scientific elsewhere. I'm surrounded by homeopathy, reiki, midwives (the american kinds that snub hospital births) and such in a place where I feel like none of that stuff is carefully regulated and there are real people with treatable conditions that could be living higher quality lives simply by having correct information. My problem with religion is the unthinking buy in as with the snake oil I've mentioned. The result is I feel very impatient even with many coexistance features because I'm not accepting other people's belief in fairies. It's still loony.

However, all I ask is that people know enough about society to have an ethical system of beliefs and an awareness that the average person should not be expected to agree with the belief. At that point, I should be satisfied.

[Hermit]

One thing we can say about the relative merits of the theocracies is that both were middle ages theocracies at the time. Christianity, however, exited the middle ages a few hundred years ago with a Rennaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Islam, quite simply, did not.

I certainly grant you that, but I do not conclude from that that therefore islam is therefore inherently more pernicious than christianity. If and when muslim countries develop economically along similar lines of individual acquisitiveness that occidental societies did, their believers will stop cherrypicking the brutal aspects of the quran and focus on its lovey-dovey ones, just like christians changed their focus in the past couple of hundred years in regard to the bible's content. The bourgeois nature of societies makes such changes irresistible and inevitable.

[charlou]

That works while we have the luxury of the bourgeois existence ... It can make us too comfortable, apathetic, easily manipulated to other, more materialistic 'gods' ... It's a precarious house of cards really ...

[JimC]

One thing we can say about the relative merits of the theocracies is that both were middle ages theocracies at the time. Christianity, however, exited the middle ages a few hundred years ago with a Rennaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Islam, quite simply, did not.

I certainly grant you that, but I do not conclude from that that therefore islam is therefore inherently more pernicious than christianity. If and when muslim countries develop economically along similar lines of individual acquisitiveness that occidental societies did, their believers will stop cherrypicking the brutal aspects of the quran and focus on its lovey-dovey ones, just like christians changed their focus in the past couple of hundred years in regard to the bible's content. The bourgeois nature of societies makes such changes irresistible and inevitable.

Without being in any way certain, it is possible that there are aspects of the tenets and operational reality of islam that make it more resistant to an enlightenment than christianity. Also, its current environment is very different to the largely christian Europe in pre-enlightenment times, which had the liberating feeling of a world to explore and colonise. It finds itself a religion of a technologically inept series of cultures, facing a dominant existing culture that it resents for many reasons. The cultural pressure to be anti-western militates against many of the obvious moves towards open, tolerant and democratic systems; autocracy florishes...

[Hermit]

One thing we can say about the relative merits of the theocracies is that both were middle ages theocracies at the time. Christianity, however, exited the middle ages a few hundred years ago with a Rennaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Islam, quite simply, did not.

I certainly grant you that, but I do not conclude from that that therefore islam is therefore inherently more pernicious than christianity. If and when muslim countries develop economically along similar lines of individual acquisitiveness that occidental societies did, their believers will stop cherrypicking the brutal aspects of the quran and focus on its lovey-dovey ones, just like christians changed their focus in the past couple of hundred years in regard to the bible's content. The bourgeois nature of societies makes such changes irresistible and inevitable.

Without being in any way certain, it is possible that there are aspects of the tenets and operational reality of islam that make it more resistant to an enlightenment than christianity. Also, its current environment is very different to the largely christian Europe in pre-enlightenment times, which had the liberating feeling of a world to explore and colonise. It finds itself a religion of a technologically inept series of cultures, facing a dominant existing culture that it resents for many reasons. The cultural pressure to be anti-western militates against many of the obvious moves towards open, tolerant and democratic systems; autocracy florishes...

There will be a lot of conflict during the transition. Feudal christian theocracies did not just simply slide toward increasingly civilised modes of government. It took countless violent and not always successful rebellions, revolutions and civil wars to get to where we are today, and early on (the thirty year war, for example) was not even explicitly about ending cruel theocracy, though it was, at least in part, about individualism. Looking at the history of christianity-based feudalism I don't see how islam's resistance in regard to moving toward bourgeois society (with all the tenets regarding individual rights and freedoms this entails) will be any stronger. And please keep in mind that the bloody path from christian hegemony to liberal democracy took many centuries to traverse. It began very inauspiciously with emperor Henry IV's walk to Canossa in 1077 and included the almost entirely unsuccessful revolutions that took place all over Europe in 1848. Successful or not, progress (and failure) in that long struggle between those dates involved a massive number of killings.

[JimC]

Seraph wrote:

There will be a lot of conflict during the transition. Feudal christian theocracies did not just simply slide toward increasingly civilised modes of government. It took countless violent and not always successful rebellions, revolutions and civil wars to get to where we are today, and early on (the thirty year war, for example) was not even explicitly about ending cruel theocracy, though it was, at least in part, about individualism. Looking at the history of christianity-based feudalism I don't see how islam's resistance in regard to moving toward bourgeois society (with all the tenets regarding individual rights and freedoms this entails) will be any stronger. And please keep in mind that the bloody path from christian hegemony to liberal democracy took many centuries to traverse. It began very inauspiciously with emperor Henry IV's walk to Canossa in 1077 and included the almost entirely unsuccessful revolutions that took place all over Europe in 1848. Successful or not, progress (and failure) in that long struggle between those dates involved a massive number of killings.

I entirely agree with you that the fall of christian theocracy from its arrogance and power was a bloody and long drawn out affair; one that should not just be regarded as some inevitable historical movement (although it was that in part), but also a triumph for brave thinkers who risked the evils of the rack and the hot pincers to remove from the church its monopoly on truth.

My attempted point was two-fold: are the tenets of islam more intrinsically resistant to relegation by secular authority, and does the geopolitical situation now existing for its adherents make a social change like the enlightenment less likely?