Yes it does. Like I keep saying,m Christians last engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass rape only in the last decade.
And I am not trying to open up the obvious can of Christian worms, either.
But this is the 21st century, and there is literally no comparison in the OP’s premise to compare the varying degrees of outrage and actions thereof between what the OP states and what occurred when some funny European drew a bomb on Holy Muhammed’s head.
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I think the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is the perfect counter example. Do people really have such short memories? That was Christian on Muslim violence beyond what we saw on Sept 11, 2001 in the US. Maybe some people think that those barbaric Serbs weren’t “real Christians”. Nonsense.
Oh, I know…I’m sorry about that. I was just trying to show that I agree with that assessment, but that I thought it was irrelevant to the OP, which as I see, you already knew.
My evidence is that the overwhelming majority of both Muslims and Christians do not become fanatics, yet they have the same respectives theologies, So obviously there has to be some other variable involved.
This seems to me a logical fallacy. No-one is claiming that a particular theology invariably creates fanatics. The issue is what motivates those who do become fanatics, and for that, the fanatics themselves provide the best and indeed only evidence.
No doubt there are lots of different factors that lead to the decision to become a violent fanatic. I have never denied it, and as pointed out above, culture supplies a great deal of the rationale. I simply reject as absurd and baseless the counter-intuitive notion that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the actual content of the theology espoused makes absolutely no difference in the decision to embrace fanaticism, and the form that this fanaticism takes - in particular, violence towards real or perceived religious enemies.
There is absolutely no evdidence that the content of the theology is any factor whatsoever. The evdience is that fanatics will twist any thjeology to suit their purpose and the anger at the root of fanaticism is based on factors other than religion.
You keep repeating this like some sort of mantra. I simply do not understand how you can read a lengthy explaination written by a fanatic describing in detail their motivations and simply dismiss it out of hand as totally irrelevant, and indeed “not evidence” at all.
It’s not evidence because they virtually always distort the theology to serve a preconceived agenda. Amazing that no one ever wants to say that Christian theology is responsible for something like Bosnia but have no problem blaming the Qur’an for ME terrorism, ignoring the 100’s of millions of non-Arab Muslims in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in SE Asia, in the US, even in Iraq (the Kurds), who never become violent or extremist at all. If the theology had anything to do with it, you’d see the extremism across all cultures and (in the case of Christianity), across all historical eras.
My purpose in posting this was as a rebuttal to those who say that there’s something unique to Islam that makes Muslims say and do things like this. Clearly, if we have Christians threatening violence over offensive images, it’s not something unique to Islam that causes it.
I doubt there’s any theology or ideology that couldn’t be twisted into a fanatic-friendly version. I certainly won’t say my own religion of Judaism couldn’t be- just look at Yigal Amir, who assassinated the prime minister of Israel in 1994, for a modern example. Hindu nationalists in India have destroyed mosques that they believed to be on Hindu holy sites.
The genocide, and if you’ll read my posts a little more carefully, you’ll understand that i’m saying Christian theology was NOT responsible for Bosnia. I’m trying to argue that Blaming Islamic theology for ME terrorism is just as off base.
Here here. The religious aspect is simply used to justify a latent anger/hatred/course of action, and the source of those is typically culture, economy, or politics. The difference between the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons and the Western reaction to the painting is better explained by Western political values–such as a respect for free speech–than the specific contents of either predominant religion.
DtC exposes the double standard in claiming Islam is a root cause for terrorism yet not counting the invasion of Iraq or the war in Kosovo as the fruit of Christian theology. In reality both views are incorrect and rather short-sighted.
Irrelevant, since I’m not making either contention.
My point is very simple: that there is plenty of uncontradicted evidence to support the notion that the specific contents of theology matter very much to (a) the choice to embrace fanaticism; and (b) the specific targets of a fanatic’s violence.
You claim that they “virtually always distort the theology”. Presumably, it should be easy to prove it. Demonstrate the “distortion” undertaken by Osama in the screed attributed to him, posted by me above.
To my mind, the answer is this: you do not need some sort of simple-minded dichotomy between culture and circumstances on the one hand and theology on the other, so that if one has an effect the other must have none - quite obviously, there is a mixture of motivations, theology being an important motivator along with other factors. The same theology which inspires some people to violence may not inspire others, while some persons with the same culture and circumstances, absent the theology, will not be inspired to fanaticism.
No doubt there isn’t an ideology that couldn’t be twisted into a fanatic-friendly version. However, there is a very large gap between that, and claiming that they are all the same in this respect.
You keep saying this but you haven’t provided any evdience at all except that fanatics use theology as justification, but you have to show that justification is causal rather than a posteri.
For one thing, his definition of jihad is all fucked up. For another, he’s cherry picking quotes from the Qur’an the same way Christian nutters cherry pick the Bible.
