Of course, we have our loonies like the KKK and the far right Evangelicals. But they are a minority. Christianity in general has come a long way since the medieval ages of the Inquisition.
But, as you say, Christianity has it's "loonies." Christianity is not yet fully evolved despite being much, much further evolved than Islam. We have culture wars going on right now right here that seek to reverse that evolution. It's an ongoing struggle.
There is no such thing as a separation of church and state within Islam.
That's not true. As I wrote before, there are Muslims and then there are Muslims. And there are differences among Muslim majority countries. About a quarter of them are essentially religiously free. Theocracy is not inevitable even though it is the norm. It would seem to be in civilization's best interests to foster Islam's evolution.
The Middle Eastern countries are among the least free. Europe and the US have been poking them with a stick for centuries. Doesn't seem to have helped.
I submit that if you and I dump all Muslims in that basket of deplorables and fail to support those Muslims who are trying to foster the evolution from within, then we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The first and most essential step in fostering the evolution is to stop lumping all Muslims in together and/or rejecting the notion that Muslims can outgrow and overcome the ugliness in their holy books just as most Christians have outgrown their own.
Besides, what is the alternative? Yeah, we are not completely safe from them right now nor will we be in the immediate future. But until they catch up with modernity, and as long as their reasonable elements are written off and pushed to the wacko side rather than valued and assisted, their wackos will just keep coming. The only feasible alternative to constructively supporting their evolution is to kill them all, and by all I mean all because otherwise you just piss them of and push them deeper into their medieval hole. Would we be willing or able to do that, just flatten all those countries? Walling them off and keeping them out is not a feasible long-term solution. It's not even an adequate short-term solution. The smart thing is to foster the evolution. We have the Christian model from which to work. It will be a choppy process but I don't see a constructive alternative. |
