I would like to know what you guys think about the idea that Christianity is equal to Islam in its capacity to inspire followers to commit acts of violence, violate the separation of church and state or lead to human rights abuses. Do you agree with this? Do you disagree?
Now bear in mind that I don't believe in either religions, I think their stories are childish and transparently false. If you want me to believe that the world was created as Genesis describes it or that there's an "all-loving" sky God who employs the most brutal methods of conflict resolution or that some man in the desert got revelations from an angel or whatever, you have another thing coming.
Now of course both religions have, either directly or indirectly, brought some harm to mankind. Nobody's denying that. (And atheism alone doesn't guarantee that harm will go away as we've seen with Communism, they were anti-religion but not pro-freedom at all.)
But the question is, are they equally dangerous, especially in this day and age?
I don't think they are, while Christianity seems to have largely moved away from an oppressive, supremacist understanding, Islam has not.
There's also quite a bit of a contrast between Jesus and Mohammed, Mohammed was a military and political leader, Jesus was just a preacher. Likewise, by the end of his life Mohammed commanded his followers to wage warfare against all unbelievers and subjugate them as dhimmis in 9:29 (Surah 9 chronologically is among the last ones so it supersedes the less aggressive verses on military conduct). People like to say "well you're taking it out of context", but there are plenty of scholars who agree with this interpretation, plus Al-Azhar University in Cairo sanctioned a book called Reliance of the Traveler who also agrees with this understanding of jihad as offensive warfare to establish the religion of Islam.
Islam is also quite theocratic in its nature providing a comprehensive plan of how to govern a society and how to enforce those laws with
earthly punishments, not just threats of Hell. Plus we have seen that democracy can flourish in Christian majority countries while in Muslim majority countries this is a bit harder, plus we have seen that the Arab Spring was never really a genuine democratic reform, just a Muslim Brotherhood / Islamist take over. People often like to bring up Turkey, but Turkey is more of a forced secularism (and it has been under threat before, still is really due to Erdogan) rather than an example of real Islamic reform. Ataturk was not a scholar and in fact there's good evidence that he was an atheist.
People like to bring up those vile inhumane laws from the Old Testament but there's no mainstream Christian denomination that believes in the necessity to implement those laws. There are some Christians called "dominionists" who believe the OT laws still apply, but they don't dominate the mainstream.
The implementation of Sharia however is necessary, none of the 4 schools of Sunni Islam are in any way "secular". Here is an example of what the Shafi'i school has to offer:
www.shafiifiqh.com/maktabah/relianceoftraveller.pdfSo that's my take on this issue. That's not to say that all individual Muslims worldwide believe these things, there's always a wide spectrum of knowledge and devotion, but also I don't think we can 100% entirely separate the individuals from the ideology.
Also, that's not to say that Christian interest groups don't sometimes try to implement faith-based laws (for example the Orthodox Church opposed the decriminalization and homosexual solicitation and still continues to oppose the legalization of prostitution and still wants money from the state, that's in Romania my country). But they seem to do it in a less extreme way and less frequently. (They don't have a comprehensive plan for societal domination.)
Topic: Christianity equal to Islam?