Dayseed Dayseed:
Blue_Nose,
You're fighting the impossible fight. You actually believe that a fundamentalist Christian has the capacity to change, rather than just present himself as open-minded.
You can show him passages from the bible no different than the worst ones from the qu'ran; the fundamentalist simply states that any good thinking Christian will ignore those passages but in the same breath state that Muslims are incapable of the same judgements.
You can show him websites of Christian sects hell-bent on nuking and paving this world into a united Christian parking lot; they're irrelevent to him as they don't typify the religion. Show him news articles of Muslims in Canada opposing Sharia law and he ignores and/or dismisses them as fakes.
You can show him a moderate Islamic state, Turkey; it's acceptance into NATO and its impending accession into the EU. The fundamentalist Christian merely scoffs, points to Turkey's involvement in the Gulf War and safely returns to hating Muslims.
The bottom line, Blue_Nose, is that fundamentalists aren't interested in a rational discussion about other religions. They're scared little bigots maintaining hypocritical double-standards because it helps them sleep at night.
Bonne chance...
An excellent post and pretty flawless in its logic.
It got me to thinking about religion and society wirth regards to violence.
THe anti-muslim crowd looks at the (very small scale) violence being committed "in the name of allah" as something they themselves haven't done only in a different manner.
They use religion as a rallying cry for war. So have christians throughout history and doing far worse. Of course if we look at modern times the christians will tell us they haven't killed "in the name of jesus/religion" in a long time.
1) Thats not true. The Nazi's/Hitler did just that.
2) So even if that true so what? Our society, our moreso secular society has
committed countless acts of brutal violence in
other names
Did the muslims fight 2 world wars? No. We did. The first boiled down to all the world superpowers fighting it out because they didn't have anything better to do.
The second was even worse and featured one of the worst holocausts of humanity perpetrated by which religion again? Not muslim thats for sure.
The current war supporters of afganistan/iraq say that are troops aren't deliberately targetting civilians like the enemy is.
First off thats simply wrong. Those same people justify doing just that when our airstrikes kill off entire families because a couple of insurgents may be hiding there.
Second, our superir weapons, training, and numbers mean we don't have to use those tactics as we so often did in the past.
We nuked entire cities of civilians because we felt it was the best way to end a war with the fewest casualities. We firebombed major german cities for the same reason.
We did that and more and justified them as surely as the "enemy" is doing so today.
Terrorists is what the big army calls the little army.
To all of that you can add the massive guilt western society (and I'll include russia/USSR) has when it comes to all meddling in the middle-east we have done for over 100 years now.
There is a great deal of holier then thou people justifying their outrage for "muslim" violence who are simply blind or unbelievably hypocritical to the violence their own society/religion.
The difference between them and us is that religion is almost their entire society/culture so their violence can be conviently lumped into a single category.
Take western society Vs muslim society for the last 100 years or so. Now compare all their "religious" violence against all our violence whether comitted for acts of religion. resources, or political ideology.
Suddenly we don't look so great as an enlightened society especially when you consider that its our troops invading their lands yet again.
That fresh brown trout in your huggies smells just as bad as theirs.