Is Christianity really as violent as Islam?

Violent conversion? Witch burning, the Inquisition, torture, 'convert or die'. There's your loving, pacifist Christianity for you.
While we're on the subject of persecution, could you explain why the mortal enemy of Israel and the Jews, Iran, has written into its Constitution protection of Jews from persecution, and why there are currently 11 functioning synagogues in Iran, along with Jewish schools? Iranian Jews also have representation in the Iranian parliament, and are conscripted into the Iranian armed forces along with their Muslim brothers.

 

No. I don't at all.
Those of you claiming christianity is better because they killed less people in the effort to convert, rings hollow.
Sure, they've cleaned up their act in the last couple hundred years, but that is because countries went secular and took religion(christianity) out of governing as much as possible.
Many Islamic countries have not done so yet.
But I'd be willing to be, if christianity could get hold of gov't laws, they'd slowly drift back to Sharia type laws.

I am an unafilliated religion person, formerly christian.

 

Thanks to Secularism.

 

Thanks to secularism neutering christian rule.

 

LOL. How you try to justify things is funny. But I don't agree with what happened. But again, you cited one case. I'm sure there may be more, but, just because they have a law, doesn't mean it's enforced.
If christians had there way in the west, they'd kill people for raping as well. They used to kill people who are gay. But secularism rid them of their sin.

 

Religion is not guiding their laws. It was when the founders or their relatives left to come here.
And our founders decided not to let religion rule the land. They new better. Do you deny this?

 

Not only are they christians, they are the foundation of the christian religion.

 

The left points out the christians hypocrisy. You just interpret that as defending. Your problem, not the left.

 

Now, you as a self proclaimed non christian, are making things up what you think would have happened?

 

So are Protestants. There are many sec

Read my posts again. The Old Testament is law and judgement, God's anger toward sinful man. That ends on the cross, which you conveniently fail to recognize. God's wrath was put on Jesus on the cross. The New Covenant is God's grace and forgiveness. You don't understand the New Covenant, and I believe you don't want to.

 

The question here is which is more violent, Christianity or Islam. Witch burnings killed maybe 60,000. The Inquisition was active for maybe 20 years. Native Americans died mainly from disease.

The Turks conducted genocides against the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the twentieth century. Millions were killed. They killed tens of millions if not hundreds of millions Hindus over the course of history. You are familiar with the term Hindu Kush? It means "Hindu Killer" and is so-called because the majority of Hindu slaves transported to central Asia died in the crossing. The British conquered India and no Hindus were killed over religion.

Several of your colleagues have already stated they don't really care if Islam is more brutal than Christianity, so are really not part of the discussion. Perhaps you fell the same way.

My question to you is the same one as to dairyair, who has yet to respond.

Islam ought to be anathema to anyone with a Progressive world view. Why do Progressives defend Islam so much. Bill Maher and Sam Harris are atheists who do accept that Islam is much worse than Christianity from an atheist point of view.

Why are they routinely called Islamophobes? Why don't you endorse their perspective?

-----------------------------------------------
I am not familiar with the claims you make about Jews in Iran and so I will not comment.

 

Nothing Christian about the KKK.

 

Speculation. And I believe there was a man named Jesus 2000 years ago. Did you have a point?

 

They are the selectors of what was included in the bible. Other than that I cant imagine what you mean by foundation. Only Catholics believed the Pope was infallible and therefore all his pronouncements were infallible

 

What I am denying is that established religion would lead the US into a sharia-type social structure, which is your claim, and I cite as evidence that it has not done so in Europe.

I am still curious as to why you defend Islam despite its aversion to Progressivism and secularism. However, I have given up on actually hearing a response from you, other than some vague response about hypocrisy. I suspect your brain can't actually process the question due to cognitive dissonance.

Why don't you follow Mr. Maher and Mr. Harris in recognizing the Islam is by far a greater threat to the Progressive world view than Christianity?

 

The Bible isn't a

Many "progressives" defend islam simply because it's the Democrat party agenda to do so.

 

I think that the problem comes in how people measure it. There is a big problem of ignorance - both 1) that by far the majority of people polled don't know jack about history or world politics, and 2) a general ignorance of the theology of the respective religions, which leads people to judge the faiths simply by looking at what their claimed adherents do.

There is an obvious problem with this: what do you do about supposed adherents who don't know a damn thing about their own religion? For example, go back in history to the medieval ages, and for the most part only Priests and a select few others knew how to read and write. Crusaders, with very very very few exceptions, didn't read the Bible - they didn't know how to. It is certainly odd to say that Christianity is violent because of the actions of adherents who were unable to read their scripture.

This is how I think we should judge faiths - judge them according to how devoted adherents who intimately know their scripture act. This has led me to, quite frankly, be very critical of Islam, more than any other significant religion in the world. When you look at violent Christianity, it is almost invariably violence done by Christians ignorant of their own scripture. And when you look at the most devoted and learned Christians, you find pacifists. But when you turn over to Islam, you largely find the opposite. The most devout parts of the Islamic world, where the Koran is most read, are precisely the areas with those extremist elements. The violent Islamic extremists aren't simply people being duped by religious leaders, or acting ignorantly in violation of their faith, but they are people who are inspired directly by the Koran.

Really, this goes back to the holy books. Christianity's hold book, the Bible, has plenty of deplorable violence in it, but anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christian theology knows that the Old Testament is the background, and the New Testament is the core of the Christian faith, which trumps the Old. In it, what kind of a prophet do they look to? They look to a man who had (so far as I can recall) only one event that could be called an episode of violence, in which he didn't kill anyone but ran people off, besides which they have a prophet who was basically a pacifist, went to his death willingly, died for the sake of his enemies, and forgave his enemies.

The difference between Christ and Mohammed is night and day. Mohammed was a violent warlord, who raped and pillaged, and consumated marriages with pre-teens. Muslims believe that the Koran, in entirety, is scripture spoken verbally by God to Mohammed - and this, their prophet, was clearly a violent man. I do not know how, even just looking at the examples of Christ and Mohammed, people are in any way surprised that Islam is more violent.

 

Nothing in the doctrine of the bible supports Christian governance or rule. That was inventions of men other than the authors of the bible. In contrast to Islam

 

The Old Testament is by Jews who didn't meet Jesus yet.

 

I think most of the facts you point out are correct - such as that the witch burnings and inquisition actually killed very few people, and they have clearly been made into something more than they were. But I disagree with your approach. If a given faith has violent adherents, but those adherents are in clear violation of the rules of their faith, is the faith violent? No, of course not. But if a given faith has peaceful adherents, but those peaceful adherents are violating their faith by their aversion to violence, is that faith peaceful? No, of course not. I think we too easily judge faiths according to the actions of those who don't follow their faith, and that is just silly. Whether or not a faith is violent, imo, has everything to do with the religious scripture and traditions, and technically nothing to do with the acts of adherents, even though to some degree the two coincide.

 

No, many on the Left actively defend Islam, by ignoring its history and its undoubtedly violent texts. They obscure the rape and terrorism committed in Europe by Muslim immigrants.

Why aren't people on the left actively denouncing Islam as a vile religion? You certainly do not hesitate to denounce Christianity as a vile religion. And, yes, that I interpret as defending Islam: remaining silent about its crimes and attacking those who are not silent.

It is not a problem for me. It causes me no psychic distress, just puzzlement.

 

A lot of it is who has the power to commit atrocities, once Christian Europe had more power than Islamic states, they started committing more atrocities.
But, if we look at times when Islamic states had more power they had committed more atrocities.

 

Nothing in Christian doctrine of the bible that even discusses laws to be applied in governance. The only Christian "laws" concern admission to heaven.
Unlike Islam that has an extensive body of law to be applied.

 

There's still Witch killings in Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia even has a anti-witchcraft units, and what ISIS is doing is not far off from the Inquisition, look at how they're butchering Christians, and Yazidis.

 

Or better yet judge them by the content of their scriptures. There are some wacky Christians intimately knowledgeable of the written scriptures that can come up with some pretty tortured and twisted interpretations of the bible.
I don't blame Christianity for example, for the tortured and twisted interpretations of David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. Or the tortured and twisted interpretations of some African tribes in the Lords resistance army. I blame their tortured and twisted interpretation.