Opinion:

I respectfully disagree...

Beth, She Who Will Be Obeyed, has posted:

When I was in elementary school - all girl Catholic school - Mother Earhardt was our religion teacher from 1st to 4th grade. She once said that if you think of a tall tower, with windows all around the top of it, the view outside of each window could represent the different views of each religion - they all see part of the truth, but none of them see all of the truth.

I think that perhaps that Mother Earhardt was wrong - I think that perhaps one religion is in the basement, looking at the dirt around the tower and trying to figure out how to blow up the tower so that all the other religions will perish. So they can force all of us, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Animist, Buddhist, all of us, to face East, kneel and submit to their religion - so they can rule us and enslave us.

I think we need an exterminator to get that rat out of the Tower's basement before the foundation of all of faiths is fouled.

I'm not so sure. I've read histories of both the Catholic Church and Islam, and it seems to me that BOTH churches/religions/faiths have gone through similar evolutions. What we forget is that Islam started AFTER Christianity, and has not evolved for the same period of time. Islam started in roughly 620 AD, so if we look at where Christianity was in 1384 AD you might get a rough idea in terms of philisophical evolution. In that time, the western Catholic Church was undergoing its biggest schism, with multiple Popes, and it was before the era of widespread Inquisition. There had been many murders committed up to then in the name of Christianity, and many more murders, along with the Protestant reformation and its consequent wars, were still in the future.

Am I saying we should accept the murders perpetrated in the name of Islam? No. But it is far, far too easy to say "wipe them all out" than it is to actually try to understand the whole of the issue, to try to see the evolution of religious thinking and philosophy.

Perhaps I am too much aware of where we (the culture of the West) come from.

On the other hand, however, saying "wipe them all out because they are the source of our problems" is far, far too reminiscent of what Hitler said in the comparatively recent past for it to be said lightly.

Perhaps before we condemn an entire faith, we should look to our own past, our own cultural heritage before we pass judgment on that religion. Remember, it was Jesus who said when a prostitute was brought before Him to be stoned to death, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."