Shouldn’t you include the Muslims killed by other Muslims who claimed their victims weren’t real Muslims? The 20,000 and counting Shia in Pakistan, for example.
I’ll leave that to you. I’m disgusted with myself for taking the bait. Instead of reading something interesting, or learning something new, or even sleeping, I spent an hour looking up cites for a post that maybe ten people will read, and eight of them will immediately forget it. And the guy I was responding to clearly isn’t going to change his mind, so it was a complete waste of time. And what if he did change his mind? It wouldn’t make a bit of difference to me.
So my New Year’s Resolution, starting right now, is to avoid debates here. Really, avoid posting here at all, unless I’m either helping somebody, or just venting. Probably give me an extra two weeks a year to do something constructive.
Because despite the fact that “civilization” started around 8,000 to 5,000 BCE it is some how relevant that the western world was still putting people in jail for blasphemy within the lifetime of a significant portion of the population. E.G in the UK John William Gott was in-prisoned in 1921.
But because some small percentage other group that we want to vilify failed to change all of their beliefs within such a short time period we can call their entire belief system barbaric to make them seem less human. While we ignore that a small percentage of the group we view as “our team” also has a small segment which has the same belief
Note that a large number of European countries only removed their blasphemy laws from the books in the past few decades.
For the sake of argument: If Islam is the truth, and someone denies Islam, then they are either a malicious liar and a traitor or they are bafflingly ignorant. If someone is Muslim to begin with, they cannot claim ignorance and so they must be acting maliciously.
Christianity went through the same thing for about 1500 years. (“The Inquisition, what a show…” Sing it if you know it.) The only difference is that Christianity eventually got to the point where people valued secular governance and religious tolerance… and even today we have violent extremist Christians.