Received a picture on my Facebook page today, and it struck a chord that resonated deep down in my soul. On one side it had a short sentence from the Bible:
"Thou Shalt Love thy Neighbor as Thyself."
On the other side was a quote from Mohammad:
"Fight everyone in the way of Allah, and kill those who disbelieve in Allah"
The purpose is obvious. The author wants to do two things. First, paint Christians as rightous people who stand for good and love and all that squishy stuff. As opposed to Muslims who believe in hate and torture and death to all not like them. The ultimate goal is to drum up support for a religious war against Islam. Iran to be specific. I mean we aren't at war in Iraq now, at least no troops on the ground. We have more or less ended the war in Afghanistan, and will be removing most of the troops there in a year or so. And we have declined to get involved, boots on the ground, in North Africa, Lybia, Eqypt, etc. So we are entering a period where we will not have a war to fight and God forbid that happen.
But I digress.
It is things like this, where we cherry pick something from the Bible to justify our actions or make ourselves look innocent and then cherry pick something from, in this case, the teachings of Mohammad to vilify the people we want to go to war against. In the middle of all this, we completely ignore, forget or, worse, don't know about our own history. So let's take a quick look at the History of the Christianity.
So let's take a walk down the history of Christianity, not in any particular order.
We could start with the first of the Holy Wars, the Crusades. The 4th Crusade sailed with help of some Italians to the ancient city Constantinople. Now Constantinople was the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire, and was a Christian City. But it was okay to sack the city for pay that was promised them if the Crusaders could install an exiled Price to the thrown. Which they did. Unfortunately, the Price didn't live up to his end of the bargain and the Crusade though able to defeat the city defenders and sack this Christian City eventually collapsed. Ah yes the integrity of Christians.
Another time in Christian history to consider. How many of us remember a man by the name of Tomás de Torquemada, and his shinning Christian accomplishment the Inquisition? This was an event where people were tortured in rather horrific ways if they did not swear fealty to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, after first renouncing their own religious beliefs.
And let us not for get that for hundreds of years the Jews were persecuted by European Christians because they were blamed for the death of Jesus. I mean they did have a hand in putting Jesus on the Cross. One might be able to link the culmination of this persecution with the Russian Pogroms and eventually the German Death Camps. Christianity at its best.
And of course one must conveniently forget the 130 Years of Religious Wars in Europe. A period from 1524 to 1650 or so when Protestants and Catholics were at war with each other over which Religion was the True way to worship the same God. How many cities sacked, women raped, children put to death all in the name of Christianity.
It was during this period that a man named Oliver Cromwell came to power in England. And largely because of him we have a line in the First Amendment to our Constitution. Something about the prohibition of a state religion. We should all read about this period of British history to get an understanding of who we are and where we came from. It would help us understand what the founding fathers were trying to do in 1787 to 1791.
And just so that we understand Christians didn't just use brutality, war and torture on Europeans, the Spanish and Portuguese used the ruse of bringing Christianity to the heathen populations in the New World as an excuse to commit atrocities on the indigenous populations of those countries. They went so far as to classify natives in Brazil as less than human so that it would not break the 6th Commandment when they slaughtered the tribes in order to take over their lands.
You can go on for ever listing the atrocities that Christians have done in the name of their Religion. The point that one should take from all this History, is that the Muslim Religion is, in fact, not a whole lot different that the Christian Religion. And both Islam and Christianity were offshoots of Judism. In fact, Moses is revered in the Quran. And if you look real hard there are more than a passing similarity between Sharia Law and Leviticus.
Maybe we should be trying to identify areas of congruence between our religions and grant that every living person has a right to worship a God of his or her choosing in the manner in which he or she wants to worship. Instead of recoiling from people who have different ways of doing things we should accept that there are always going to be differences between peoples. And if we would simply take the time to learn about these differences and accept that they exist and everyone has a right to his or her own views then maybe we wouldn't need to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb (fill in the blank). It would be so much more exciting and glorious to colonize the Moon and Mars and build ships that would set off to explore this glorious universe. To go where no man or woman has gone before. To learn what the hell is over that hill or floating around that star. Much better than fighting a war because I don't believe in the same God as that guy does.