Go take the camel...

[caspofungin]

@abraham

In a sense it is really worrysome that people in 21th century Europe feel the urge and the freedom to perform these 7th century totally outdated religious rituals

i thought the modern judaeo-christian tradition was all about individual freedoms. are those freedoms limited to certain segments of society?

Outdated religious rituals -- like baptism, or using a rosary in prayer, or kneeling to pray, or singing in church? Religious rituals are an integral part of any religion.

they are obviously in Holland because they prefer the better living to their own country, so let them pay for the damages that introducing their own country's habits caused the Dutch society.

maybe that's part of the problem. maybe those 2 guys were born and raised in holland. maybe they served in the dutch military. maybe they see themselves as good dutch citizens. but yourself and the majority of your countrymen will never see them as dutch -- they'll always be "immigrants" even if they've been born there, or at best "dutchmen of arabic origin." a lot of people have brought up isolationism as part of the problem of having a muslim minority i a country, but isolationism can come from both sides of a cultural divide.

i've only visited holland once (nice place) but i was born and raised in the uk. but if i walk into a pub, with my dark skin and my "funny" name, the first assumption that some people -- probably the majority -- leap to is that i'm from somewhere else. No matter what ive done for or feel for my country, there's always going to be that element of being a stranger in your own home.

is it any surprise that some people are going to fill that vacuum of needing to belong to something greater than your individual self by identifying more strongly with a rreligios community than the secular society that seems to "reject" them?