[Abraham]

Originally Posted by TteFAboB Posted

Watch it Abraham, according to open-arms-warm-welcoming Type XXIII, you are acting as an Islamophobe.

Do it like him and praise something, quick!

Naw, I can't believe anybody is going to say something that stupid about me...
Actually I think Islam is in great danger in this modern world and resorts to reactionary tactics to survive unchanged. It's really like a dinosaur that doesn't adapt to modernity. It can only survive in a backwards, undevelloped, reactionary, protected environment, not (unchanged) in the rest of the world... Look how they reacted to some innocent cartoons, for Mohammed's sake! (Or is that remark politically incorrect and should I say: "for Christ's sake"? I'm really in doubt now, perhaps it should be: "For G-d's sake"?).

Am I Islamophobe? Rather the contrary!

Originally Posted by Bertgang

Not so true, if you think with an historical perspective.
Christian culture, specially catholic culture (the mine), was for century against investigative, exploratory, creative, scientific and critical thinking: this nasty attitude, a strong brake for any scientific and social development, has changed since no so long time.

Now it's so easy and cheap to tell something against Islam, as too many bad apples pretend to be the perfect believers of Allah, but religion has little to do with their actions.

Terrorism is an old European invention, then exported and modified for a new environement.
Some historical types, peculiar to my country:
Patriot terrorism, against foreign rulers (mainly austrians);
German terrorism, by people of South Tyrol under italian rule;
Red terrorism, made by people close to communism;
Black terrorism, made by people close to fascism.

Not speaking of other european countries with different problems.

I don't agree at all with your comment.
Being a Christian myself (Protestant) I have nothing against religion in general. A blessing for Christianity was that the rigid medieval thinking of the Catholic Church - only slightly more modern than Muslim thinking of the 7th and 8th Century - was woken up by the great Roman thinker Thomas Aquinas, who set into movement the modern thinking about church authority and state authority, which led to the Renaissance, consequently the Reformation and finally the Enlightment. The end result of this phantastic devellopment is the separation of the powers of State and Church in the modern world, freedom of religion and (other) Human Rights. I could dwell on on this subject as long as Skybird on Islam...
All this came after often fierce conflicts, but the result has been a burst of progress in the Western world and a superior western culture that can be called dominant in much of the world.

You don't give any examples of the Islam not prohibiting investigative, exploratory, creative, scientific and critical thinking, as my point was.
The examples of terror in Europe that you give were clearly abberations of the normal rule of law, done by relatively small social groups, which violence was never condoned by the population at large (or the Church) and corrected by the respective societies themselves.

To counter any cheap arguments: I'm not saying that our Western society is perfect. I'm saying we've come a long way (with ups and downs) from solving conflicts between religions and between states and their subjects in an orderly way by thre rule of law.
Compare that to the Sharia...