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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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The quote from Sam made me chuckle. This was my "dumb normie" understanding of Islam back when I began trying to understand it a decade ago. The violence, sex slavery, torture, and oppression are a feature, not a bug. They made Islam successful. No amount of historical whataboutism from people who are still mad that they had to attend Sunday service as kids will change this.

The only Muslim that a non-Muslim can coexist peacefully with is an unobservant one, and even then there's the Agent Smith risk that you correctly identified. Fast food and unlimited porn aren't going to fix that. Just look at Europe.

It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology

The culture didn't develop "antibodies," its religion was displaced/cannibalized by the growth of heresy/new religion that is even more destructive. The religion of the elites and then the masses slowly changed to Enlightenment humanism and soft/hard persecuted any decisive action in the name of the Christian religion. There are plenty of Christian men who would be willing to pick up a sword in the name of Christendom today, but they're not allowed to organize. In fact their own leaders discourage it, since many of them are converts to the new religion themselves, consciously or otherwise.

Isn't this a contradiction? On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism. Instead you would seem to want Christians to behave as they did in the Crusades and fight back against the intrusion of those with a foreign religion.

But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.

On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism.

The sneering is pretty lame and unconvincing. Are you arguing that liberalism/protestantism didn't have any effect on Christianity? That it was good, actually? That there's no such thing as Christianity? What's your point?

But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.

It wouldn't, though. It's not as simple as "violence = Islam, nonviolence = Christianity."

Christians believe in the right (some would say duty) to inflict violence in self-defense, both personally and collectively. Muslims believe the same, but they also believe that dar-al-Islam must wage unceasing, righteous, bloody war on the dar-al-Harb until all profess the Shahada. That's a huge difference. So yeah, Islam is exceptionally violent.

Not sneering, just trying to figure out what breed of Christian you're promoting.

I described one religion overtaking another, and I described how one religion differs from another. Not sure what you're talking about.

From my perspective, the main difference with Islam vs. Christianity is that Islam was started by a warlord and the tales of his good deeds include beheading all the men of a Jewish tribe that had surrendered. I think this is going to result in a religion that is much different from one started by (either in reality or simply in story) a former carpenter who preached peace and turning the other cheek.

Did he circumcise an entire tribe and kill them the next day when they were recovering?

This seems likely to me too, but it could be a genetic fallacy. Islam, after all, is known as the religion of peace. Though presumably the peace comes when everyone is Muslim...

...or in heaven