You are right that FC’s main point is about Jesus vs. Muhammad, and you are right about the very different messages of each.

The earthly followers of Jesus fall short of the ideal.

(At the same time, however, I resist well-intentioned generalizations such as FC’s that implicitly or directly bash the [so-called] Middle Ages, which is the crucible of our civilization. That’s like insulting your ancestors for no good reason. We have to give those ancestors a lot more credit. The Crusades, for example, as called by Urban, were about responding to unjust conditions and restoring just order. Of course the real Crusades failed to live up to the ideal.

If we take FC’s arguments to their logical extent, pacifism seems to be the only moral position for a follower of Jesus? Plenty of Christians take this point of view. I don’t. I find it interesting that Jesus, as far as I know, never criticized a soldier, nor any of Israel’s military history. At least as far as I remember. He criticized Peter for using the sword unlawfully, for sure. And the default teaching is always in favor of love, peace, and fellowship.]

Thanks for the comment.

Compare that with Muhammad, you’ll find that Muhammad was quite a bit more like any standard raping, murdering, stealing highwayman or brigand from European and American history, if you add in a personality cult. For instance, the Harpe Brothers who plagued Illinois and Kentucky at the end of the 18th century. Or the Scots cannibal Sawney Beane and his vicious clan.

” . . . the violent Christians [crusaders] were very poor Christians going against the chief commandment of the founder . . . . ”

O.k. you dead-ender commenters, I can see that I’m going to have to bore you dudes into giving up this thread! You asked for it:

Pope Urban, at Clermont, according to the chroniclers, told his audience that they should be ashamed of the violence that Christians were visiting upon fellow Christians. The usual rapine, theft, oppression that brigands visit upon their fellows.

He urged them to undertake war against the infidels. Not least of all because the war would be just. Admittedly, some chroniclers say that Urban claimed it was God’s will; others that the audience said it was God’s will. But throughout the call to arms, there is an argument for just war. And it sounds not unfamiliar to modern ears, including the Muslim beheading fixation. Here’s a spicy excerpt from Robert the Monk’s version:

“From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempt to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and deprived of territory so vast in extent that it can not be traversed in a march of two months. On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you.”

Maybe the final detail is to the unshaven Taliban types?

I think that I can put the point somewhat differently, if you don’t mind. The essential difference between the Crusaders and the Inquisition, on the one hand, and the jihadis in various wars right up until the present day on the other, is that the violent Christians were very poor Christians going against the chief commandment of the founder; and the violent Muslims were and are exemplars, going along perfectly with the commandments of theirs.

And that is why the problem of Muslim violence is only going to be solved in one of three ways, one of which is completely unacceptable to me and presumably all the people reading this blog. That one is for us to give in and let Islam take over the world. The more acceptable solutions; for Islam to have a reformation that changes their religion utterly and removes the violence from its fundamental tenents. And the last one, one set out by Wretchard quite some time ago and unfortunately (for them, obviously, but also for us) most likely; they all die. Every last stinking, intolerant, neck-chopping SOB one of them.

Right on the money. My experience with them was mixed. I had the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in grammar school and the Salesian Fathers and Brothers for high school. The latter were truly great guys who treated us kindly, respectfully, and like we were human beings. Some of the religious sisters did not. I think some of those women never should have been in a room full of kids, but there were other sisters who were quite good.

Most critics of Christianity and Catholicism have a lot of anger issues. I can understand and empathize – up to a point. When you go as deeply into the Church (and aspire to the priesthood)as people like me have you DO find where the bodies are buried. But, you have to make an evaluation of the big picture and the entire history of the Church and Christianity. Were the horrendous episodes the essence of our Church or were they deviations from the Gospel and the best teachings of the Church? I like to think that Thomas Aquinas would have disapproved of many medieval practices and episodes, but then again he died too young and only left us a prodigious amount of work.

Christianity and the Church ARE NOT at all the same as the Founder. It aint perfect, and I don’t expect perfection from people or institutions.

When comparing Christianity with Islam, I just am amazed and dumbfounded that some people can get it so wrong. If you compare the behavior of Jesus of Nazareth with the behavior of Muhammad, the difference is so stark as to defy the need for a comparison to begin with. So, I can only conclude that those who lump the two together as roughly equivalent know neither of them at any depth at all. And that confirms an observation I have made about our modern world as it is right now: intellectual sloth and moral torpor are rampant among our populations, especially among the educated elites.

“. . . the Qur’an is the eternal, uncreated, perfect, literal words of Allah.”

and

“Islam is a cult and a heresy. Its prophet was a false one. . . .”

Yes, it’s important to keep examining Islam.

As John of Damascus pointed out to the new Muslim guys in town in the 7th century, if you affirm the first statement regarding the koran, above, God is no longer ‘one,’ since there was another one (the koran) with the one (allah)at the beginning. Christians don’t have a similar problem, openly acknowledging the paradox, calling this uncreated word “the Word” and the outpouring of the mutuality of God and the Word “the Spirit.” Muslims deride Christians as “polytheists.”

As a result of the Islamic doctrine regarding the koran, you get the situation noted in Fred’s second statement, i.e., a religion that most resembles a cult, relying on self-referential justification. (“Sock puppet deity” really is a pretty good term.)

And Bob Murphy wrote:

“I wouldn’t go back too far with Christianity,Fred.
what’s the biggest difference between Christianity and Islam?
’bout 500 years.
It was not that far back that people regarded the Bible as the undisputed word of God and burned people at the stake if they had a different take.
When it actually was, as with the Koran, the work of religious bureaucrats with their own spin on things.
And it was in my own youth that I was told I would go to everlasting damnation if I ate meat on Friday.
Perhaps the main moral difference between Christianity and Islam is reason/volition and its nominal importance in Christianity and total irrelevance in Islam.
As in that rather interesting dialogue between the Eastern Roman Emperor and the “Learned Persian” spoken about by the current Pope that cause so many Muslims to riot. Again.”

As Bob notes at the end of his comment, there really is a big difference between the two religions. So why begin the comment by entertaining the notion that there may not be a big difference?

Bottom line: Christians make a fundamental distinction between the “Word of God” and the “word of God” (scripture).

People perhaps need to get over their bad experiences with the nuns and parish priests. That was another time.

More Americans killed in this event than at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese naval air forces left a mess in their wake.

Also, it was just one large event in a long chain of them going back to 1979. Airline hijackings, Marine barracks’ bombing in Beruit, kidnapping and murder of CIA and embassy personnel, Khobar Towers, embassy bombings, Mogadishu, “maybe” even involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, 1993 World Trade Center bombing attack, the U.S.S. Cole, and others…

When the worst one happens on your watch and there’s a pattern to the jihad, either you put your foot down or you continue to do what prior administrations did: appease. It must be said that President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to give the Muslim pirates the cold, hard steel rather than continuing to pay the jizya was politically unpopular, even when the jizya was about 20% of our Gross Domestic Product in those days.

We have a long history of appeasing Muslim terrorists and it was time for another American president to either take it up the **s or dish it back. Otherwise our deterrence posture would continue to deteriorate.

Oh, and dose joooooos had to be behind it all…

Must be one of them Joooish Bolsheviks.