Moral equivalency - Jerry Falwell & Osama bin Laden?

[Starkist]

"Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow musicals, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school."

Mark Steyn, Senior Contributing Editor of The National Post


The words of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell may be arsenic to the ears of you tolerance-philes out there, but they pale in comparison to Bin Laden's airline missiles and Arafat's human bombs.

[AlphaDawg]

Hey, I agree... what the supposed "Religion of Peace" fundamentalists have been doing is much worse than the Christian fundamentalists.

However, that doesn't make anything Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson says any better.

[Menokh]

Just because Christian fundamentalists don't usually do violent things now, doesn't mean they haven't in the past.

Look back into history, go back to the 1600's and before, and look at the actions of the fundamentalists of the time. Now realize that many Muslims in the mid east, now, have attitudes and beliefs very similar to those of the christian fundamentalists of the past.

Not trying to justify anything, just saying that similar attitudes and beliefs bring similar actions.

[Saffith]

"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."
— Rev. Jerry Falwell (source unknown)

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you."
-- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, August 6, 1998, on the occasion of the 1998 Orlando Gay Pride Festival

They may not kill people, but I'd rather see mankind wiped out than a world full of people like these two.


Oh, and there's this...
http://funnystrange.com/quiz/

I got 14...

[Starkist]

Perhaps it is a testament that Christianity has outgrown the desire and will to murder, while Islam is still living in the Middle Ages, getting defensive about the Crusades.

[Lilith]

Fundies are fundies, and I don't care if they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Wiccan fundies; they all suck.

[Menokh]

There are differences between fundamentalists depending on thier religion, actually.

Some religions have as a core belief that all religions are correct in a way, and that any religion will work for getting to divinity. Examples of this would be Wicca, Hinduism and Shintoism. While they can still have fundamentalists, they can't claim to be the only right way like with Christianity.

And it's not that the religion has outgrown a desire to kill. A religion can't have that. Both Islam and Christianity have it as a sin to kill inocent people. It is the beliefs and attitudes of the people that have changed to a large degree in the past 300 some odd years in Christianity, while staying largely stagnant in the Mid East for Muslims. Muslim fanatics act like they are from the middle ages, because for all purposes the middle east is still in the middle ages.

[Lilith]

Hindu fundies don't like pushing their religion on others? I seem to remember several clashes in India awhile back between Hindus and Muslims that beg to differ. Both the Muslims and the Hindus were doing quite a bit of rape and murder fueled by hatred for the other side and their gods. Fundies just suck. When people want to twist scripture and religion into something, they'll do just that. Wiccan fundies can also get quite hostile and annoying even if they don't "push" their religion on others. Believe me, I've seen it happen.

[Menokh]

What those Hindus did then, if they were fighting over purely religious disputes(meaning the Hindus were trying to convince the Muslims of the rightness of thier religion), is violate a treasured Hindu belief.

And I never said Wiccan fundamentalists don;t get hostile and annoying(even though they aren't supposed to do that). I just said there was a difference in the case of some religions. Wiccan, Hndu and Shinto fundamentalists usually get hostile and bitchy over trying to get people to accept their religion as a valid path, and that is sometimes an impossible thing to do which leads to these fundies doing even more things that they really shouldn't do.

I'm not justifying the actions of any fundamentalist, I'm just trying to explain them.

[Starkist]

The difference between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims? The Christians try to convert you while the Muslims try to kill you.

[Lilith]

Well, the Hindus and Muslim's weren't fighting over purely religious reasons (although that can be argued, I always like to look the the material plane for reason first), but you're exactly right, they were violating a Hindu belief, and that's what fundies do. Most logical people can point out their hypocracies. And hypocrites suck. So therefore, fundies suck ;P

[Dart Zaidyer]

As for Christian fundamentals, Falwell is off his rocker and is getting it all wrong, but Robertson is doing things the right way. I'm sorry if that still comes to you as a slap in the face, but if Glenn has the right to tell us he thinks he's god then Robertson has the right to say what the Christian Bible says. If you don't like it, you have the right to quit paying attention. It's that simple.

Many, many Christian fundamentalists are either boring or nutty to other Christians, so don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.

And I think everything relevant has been said about the state of Islam...



Fundamentalism: Easy to learn, hard to get even remotely right.