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Originally Posted by baggygreen
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Neal Stevens
I'm saying over time, people don't adhere to religon as strongly, and I think eventually it will be the same for Muslims. It already is for a lot of Muslims, they have their faith, the prophet's teachings, but they don't follow it as rigidly as the fundamentalist Muslim, the one we see in the ME on the news.
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When considering this, it is worth remembering that in terms of age, Islam is almost 700 years behind christianity, and thousands of years behind judaism. Now, roughly 700 years ago, christianity was very fundamental and very opposed to anything that didn't toe the party line, so to speak. Whilst you could argue that with the benefit of the modern world, a religion could develop faster, but on strictly age terms it would still be several hundred years behind.
Always remember where you've come from. And even as recent as 300 years ago there were witch hunts, just after the Inquisition, at the same time as people like Copernicus were locked up for daring to differ from the teachings. |
The church did not lose power just by becoming old, it lost power because of the "progressive" trend in European history forming up, as well as a certain man called Luther, and because the christian scripture also included the basis for thinking about alternatives (in the form of the glad tidings) to the churche'S dogmatic view and powerpolitics basing on fear of hell-fire. But in Islam, Neal, you do not have a parallel to a.) european multiculturalism and the resulting climate of national/economic competition that fostered these progressive trends in best capitalistic understanding (instead you have a dogma of monoculturalism), b.) Luther, and c.) an alternative canon in the scripture of Quran and the traditon of Hadith and Sharia that would compare to the glad tidings.
The starting conditions therefore do not compare. Nor do christian religion and islam compare by content. Why this determination to see phantoms that are not real? Just to be considered as "polite" when falling in line with populistic fairy-tales? Islam is not the Christian religion just dressed in other clothes. That would be like saying the Herrenrasse is just another word for legal citizenship. the one teaching sbrings you self-responsibility, tolerance, freedom. The other demands you to submit, to obey and brings you intolerance and attack. Muhammad did not copy parts of the Jewish-Crhistian tradition to become part of it - he took them and then CHANGED them to make his own baby being different to them, and then declare it superior to them.