Forgive me if I disagree. Your totally fixed opinion is that Islam is fundamentally the problem, not the people who choose to twist it to their perverted and psychopathic views. There's no shades of grey or willingness to even consider other peoples' views and if they don't agree with you, they're dishonest and obfuscating. Well you're entitled to hold that opinion but others are equally entitled to hold others. Mine (& others) is that Islam per se is not itself the problem any more than The Baptist Church is the core problem with the Westboro Baptist Church. Yes I know that WBC hasn't actually killed anyone but the point is that there are words in the Bible that give them an excuse to peddle their perversion of what they see as the truth. And yes, it's clear the Koran gives that excuse but the majority of Muslims ignore it. Whatever radical views they choose to think, only a fraction od a percent are actively involved in the sort of violence we saw this week or we see in Nigeria.
And if we're talking about dishonesty and obfuscation, you said Christians don't follow the Old Testament. You mean they don't believe in God, the Creation, the Ten Commandments? One of the few certain things known about Jesus was that he was a religious Jew, a member of a religious Jewish family, who followed the precepts of the OT as a traditonal Jew of his time, almost in their entirety. There's no evidence, other than the unreliable gospels, that he rejected it wholesale. Someone else did that. If we take the issue the church has had with homosexuality, that's entirely an Old Testament issue. It's not mentioned at all as an aberration in the New Testament.
So you can't simply claim that the Old Testament is a complete irrelevance, which you're desperate to do because otherwise it completely undermines your whole argument. The fact is that the Judaeo-Christian writings offer numerous excuses for violence, oppression and murder. Fortunately the overwhelming majority choose not to take them, certainly not to the degree that groups like ISIS have, because our political and social culture has moved on.
I believe religious doctrine that can be used to justify violence is a problem. And of course, Islam is the most prominent religion to have this problem, and to the greatest degree, in the present day.
But you're right to point out that the Old Testament could in theory be used to condone acts of brutality or homophobia, and I'm not neglecting that, at all. I just don't see it as the foremost issue given that we're not actually seeing that religious pretext translating into a real world problem, of any real measurable scale.
I see it as nothing more than a whataboutism to distract from the core discussion around Islam, in an attempt to highlight a perceived contradiction or to highlight an inconsistency which can only be described as a bigotry against Muslims - thus said person's argument can be dismissed outright as the ramblings of a hateful bigot, rather than a well intentioned neutral seeking reform in a solution to violence via necessary critical discussion on a sensitive topic.
The dishonesty, IMO, is the presentation of the West Boro Baptist Church as an equivalent problem, as equivalent extremists, to the kind of groups that killed more than a hundred French civilians last week.
That is obfuscation. If militant Christian groups posed the threat that militant Islamist groups do, then it'd be a relevant point, but they don't, and it's not.
Parallels can be drawn however in the homophobic beliefs of the likes of the West Boro Baptist Church, and the religious pretext in the Old Testament. In which case, of course the Old Testament must be held responsible for said beliefs, and the advocation of them.
Much in the same way that the Koran is responsible for notion of martyrdom for example, among other things. As well as, of course, its own particularly homophobic passages.
Do you recognise the point re the New Testament? That was Christianity's reformation, that is central to modern Christianity, not the Old Testament - to my knowledge at least. That is what many people believe Islam needs, a modern reformation.
I can't pretend to know precisely how relevant the Old Testament is to modern Christianity, maybe you know more than me in that respect. My only perspective is that fundamentalist/militant(whatever you want to call it) Christianity doesn't pose the threat to the world that Islam's equivalents do.
The fact that West Boro Baptist Church serve as your go to example of Christian extremists is evidence of this in itself.
But nonetheless, all religious bigotry should of course be highlighted and receive significant criticism. The reason that Islam in under particular scrutiny here and elsewhere, is due to the sheer scale of the violence being done in its name at present. I believe in placing issues in orders of priority, and the use of Islamic scripture and doctrine to justify violence is surely the world's biggest priority in respect of religion at present, would you not agree?
