Wednesday, November 15, 2006

read it and find out

...from Sam Harris’s book, “The End of Faith”

“We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been hijacked by extremists. We are at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only future devout Muslims can envisage is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed.”

...just like the only future devout Evangelical Christians can imagine is one in which all infidels have been converted to Christianity or killed.

That is a perfectly true statement. And if someone living in a country without any Christians were to read it, it might inspire fear in them. How evil and violent, these Christians are.

Thankfully, not all people who call themselves Christians are ‘devout Evangelical Christians’ who believe that very soon Jesus will come back to earth and start slaughtering all non-Christians. Neither are all Muslims the ‘devout Muslims’ you speak of. For the majority, Islam is taken about as seriously as Christianity is here.

Christians here do not (often) stone adulterers and homosexuals, engage in genocides at the behest of their god (anymore), nor do they act as if ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,’ and, most of all, they don’t give all of their possessions to the poor. Likewise, most muslims live their faith as it pleases them - which is to say, they don’t thirst for the blood of infidels, and “We” are not “at war” with Islam.