Okay? Is it Islam bashing week on SECtalk?

Funny how what you said pretty much applies to any religion, even Christianity.

Yep... this week and every week.

Winston Chruchill rightfully called Islam "the most retrograde force in the world." He compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.

The religous right in this country, who are (at least in their own minds) Christians want to do the same thing. Any faith/religion can be considered a political ideology when its followers attempt to use tenets of that religion as basis for public policy. The only difference is that we live in a more civilized society in which freedom of religion is a major element, thus marginalizing the religous right. Even so, make no mistake about it, if they had their way, they'd be doing the same thing, albeit with their "Christian" ideals.

Don't be so naive... Christian ideals have been dominant in this country since its inception, and our freedoms, independence, free will, and happiness have not been harmed. Here is something that I posted elsewhere that is appropriate here.

Islam is a political ideology whose goal is the Islamization of the world, complete with sharia law enforcement. If you want the U. S. to have, as many cities in Europe now do, entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen, where the women walk around in figureless tents with baby strollers and groups of children, three steps behind their husbands, shop signs you cannot read, with mosques on many street corners, keep being naive. These Muslim enclaves are the building blocks for territorial control, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Muslims demand what they call "respect" and we give it to them under the premise of not wishing to insult their "religion" or to be other than "politically correct." But, in essense, the Muslims don't just want respect; they want control. That is what their ideology demands.

If this forum is going to do nothing but bash Islam, I'm leaving.

It is infuriating me too. No one has any right to bash a defenseless religion on this board. As in defenseless, I mean that no Muslim is here to defend their religion. Please stop, this is going nowhere.

The only naive one is you. You need to realize the history behind Christianity, and what it really entails to "be" a christian. Today's version of Christianity is vanilla at best. The real one is the one that punished Galileo for determining that the earth is not the center of the universe, the one that made Luther into a criminal, the one that began the crusades, a religious war, and the one that uses its ideology to deny gay rights, abortion, and the use of contraceptives.

Christianity has been molded into what it is today. At their core, every religion is a form of political control. Which is why we hold freedom of religion in such high regard here in America.

The problem is you're grouping all muslims together. There are over a billion muslims in the world, so if they all really wanted control all it would take is for each one to kill 5 non-muslims. Of course thats over simplified, but then again that seems to be how your mind operates.

And how can you say that American freedoms, independence, free will, and happiness have never been harmed? Do you remember slavery? Or the times when women had little to no rights and were viewed as little more than servants? Or prohibition? Or the slaughter of countless Indians? Or the Salem witch trials? Or the Civil War?...I could go on and on all day. And thats just what happened in this country. Lets not even go into European history under Christian rule. What if people back then had said there was no place in the world for Christianity?

What you say is true, those principals COULD be applied to virtually any organized religion. The difference is in the means of execution. Many countries where Christianity is prevalent are becomming more and more secular because people don't want to be a part of "religious indoctination". However, in countries where Islam is prevalent, there is no such secular retraint, and no one challenges the extreme murdurous ideas that fester there.

If you think that this is simply a "all religious are susceptible to such atrocities" and we're only picking on Islam, then you're not even scratching the surface of the problem.

Naive? Ha! If that's not like being called ugly by a frog, I don't know what is!

The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.
-- Rev Jerry Falwell

Hmmmm...... where have we heard rhetoric like that before? I can't place it.... wait a minute.........bearded guy, lives in a cave, cammo jacket, makes audio tapes and inserts muslims in place of Christians.......what's his name....oh yeah, Osama Bin Laden.

Again, you are considering Christianity as it is "today." That's not the Christianity of old. You need to take into account the changes that each religion has gone through. Islam has been a very constant religion, whilst Christianity has branched into thousands of different forms and schools of thought. Not only that, but it has been tamed by your aforementioned secular core. The renaissance and enlightenment are to blame for that, both of which were European and had little to no effect on Islam.

400 years ago, they placed you in jail for denying anything the church had to say. 200 years ago they BURNED people alive because they thought they were satanic witches.

All religions are intolerant by nature. We are just lucky that Christianity has been tamed, and that we have a constitution.

I'm not defending Islam, but I hate this "holier than though" attitude that other religions love to claim.

I understand where you are comming from. And I see that you recognize the dangers the extremist Muslims pose to the world, but what concerns me is that people run with the notion that we should not be concerned about Muslim terrorists because Christianity itself had a bloody past. It's like comming up with excuses not to look both ways before crossing the street, it's inherently dangerous.

Exactly. My points were mainly against GeauxTo's rebuttal.

Whilst I don't want to group all Muslims and say that they are all "terrorists," in my opinion, in today's political and socioeconomic climate, it is Islam that poses a threat. Any extremist group that believes that they have a right to dictate how others live, and what they should believe in, has no place in modern culture. I'm sure the Qur'an has some beautiful teaching, like the bible, but it's these small, extremist groups, that read up and follow on all of that intolerance that that book can spew, AND act upon it that need to be taken care of. It's only a small group, out of billions of Muslims. But that's still a group that's making itself known.