Should Americans really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah’s son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God’s word – but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people’s religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don’t think we Americans should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.
Militant Christianity versus militant Islam
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7 responses to “Militant Christianity versus militant Islam”
I’m strongly against religious fanatism no matter where it comes from. It is always dangerous and leads to dangerous kind of behaviors.
People who think they have the right to justify racism through biblical studies are insane to me.
Tolerance in Christianism and Islam are the best way for mutual understanding between both communities.
amen god the bible tells us that God created man in his image it dont tell us wether God was white or black or asian so when i luk at an asian i see the image of God wen i luk at a black man i also see the image of God and wen i luk at a whiteman i see the image of God so y god sent the muslims to kill the americans or tha british wen we were all created by God its like a parent seeing his children that he loves the same kill one another will he be happy God has the power to take everyone on earth`s life in a split second how does he need the help of a man to do a job that takes a man weeks to plan wen he can just do it in a second.if god didnt want the victims of 9/11 to live he cud have just took their lives within a second. i am sayn how can reward my child to my other child wen i love them both the same
thank u
Hey there folks….if you want to engage in a battle over religious doctrine go to the Eugene Armstrong comment page under terrorism…its up to nearly 1000 comments in a month or so and is the battleground between good and evil in the universe.
honest.
😀
Hi. I am an English Muslim. I became a Muslim about 12 years ago. The Muslim belief is that we are all descendants of Adam, and, therefore, his children (i.e. brothers and sisters in humanity). The Book (by this I mean all the revealed scriptures) states, “Speak to humanity goodness”. The single most important thing that the Book came to do was perfect good character and in Islam, the rights of the neighbour (i.e. anyone other than your family) are as great as those of your family, with the exception that neighbours don’t get inheritance rights).
I attribute the disgusting behaviour – in all its insidious forms – that “so-called” believers wreak on sacred human lives to their complete ignorance of God’s reality – the reality that they idiotically claim privy to.
May God guide all of Adam’s children to the right path, amen.
bleargh
There is an ambiguity in the title of the article above. We should all know what “Militant Islam” means. It refers to that brand of Saracen religion which still clings to the Prophet’s vision of global Islam. The form which it must take, according to the “holy bookâ€?, is the subjection of every society on Earth to Muslim Law, as the Prophet himself warned the rulers of the empires of his time. Within that law, people of Jewish and Christian faith (alone) are allowed to continue to practice their religion, although they are not allowed to profess it publicly, share it with Muslims, live equally with Muslims, or hold public office. They are also required to pay a special tax, as Jewish and Christian communities in the Middle East suffering under the oppression of Islam have done for over a thousand years. These “militants” or “extremists”, as the secularized media like to call them (tacitly suggesting that the real problem is religion or religiosity), also accept the use of acts of extreme violence as a legitimate means in global ‘jihad’. Despite attempts by Muslim and non-Muslim apologists for the religion to interpret this term in a benign way, the best means to interpreting the original sense of it is to examine the actions of the one who coined it. Mohammed not only condoned the use of violence in the name of Islam (which in his time took the form not of random acts of widespread violence but of organized military campaigns), he even led it. Jihad took to the streets as early as the mid 600’s and did not put down the sword for more than a millennium during which time it subjugated two thirds of the Christian Roman Empire and all of the Persian Empire. What started out as an Arabian religion, within a century came to dominate territories from Southern Spain to the whole of North Africa, to Asia Minor, to the Far East, and that by means not of books or evangelists, but armies.
Now, what does “Militant Christianity” mean? There are no Christian armies on the planet. Nor are there Christians calling for their establishment. There is no Christian group that has adopted terrorism as its means of evangelization. Christians do not believe in the establishment of “Bibleâ€? governments who punish unbelief. All attempts at picking out things from the past (such as the Crusades, about which Westerners have adopted a Muslim point of view that is both historically inaccurate and religiously biased), in order to paint the Church as the great aggressor in the conflict between the West and Islam, fail to stand before the bar of history.
Militant Islam, which is rapidly growing all over the world, is the revival, in a particularly modern form of violence, of the original mission of the Mohammedans. There is no serious comparison between this and the beliefs or socio-political activities of conservative Christians. The very attempt at grouping them together is a sign that Militant Islam has succeeded in using the political environment created by secularism and liberalism in the West to disguise the true significance of its movement.
PAX
The article also fails to point out that militant Christianity is the force that ended slavery in America.