Fundamentalists, who in turn split into two. Radicals (like the Taliban) are ready to resort to violence in an attempt to create a totalitarian order. Scripturalists (like the Saudi monarchy) are more rooted in a religious establishment and less prone to rely on violence.
Excuse me, do you really think this applies to Christianity??!! The Crusades have been over for some time now. Where are the Christian fundamentalists, ready to use violence to create a totalitarian order? What have they blown up lately?
Traditionalists, who also split into two. Conservatives (like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq) seek to preserve orthodox norms and old-fashioned behavior as best they can. Reformists (like the Kuwaiti rulers) have the same traditional goals but are more flexible in details and more innovative in achieving them
It seems to me that Christianity as a whole, has made its accomodation to the modern world a couple of hundred years ago. To be an equivalent Christian traditionalist, I would think that you would have to promulgate a 16th century version of Christianity, the kind that declared Galileo a heretic.
The difference in kind and quality between Christianity and Islam is obvious to me, and I'm stunned that you can't see it. Christianity supports the separation between church and state. Islam denies it can exist, and it has only EVER been achieved by ruthless secularizers like Ataturk. Christianity is commited to peaceful missionizing; a quite large chunk of Islam thinks it's holy to blow people up as part of jihad. Christianity has come to terms with the modern world; in most of Islam an Islmaic education means memorizing the Koran, which holds ALL the wisdom there is, with no education in modern literature, mathematics, or science. Biblical studies as we know it don't exist in the Muslim world, because not only is it blasphemous to apply historical techniques to the study of the Koran, but lots of people stand ready to kill you for it.
And you see no difference between Christianity and Islam? |
