Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity. So if we are to compare the two, we have to look at what Christianity was like 600 years ago in order to compare it to today’s Islam.
Back in the 1400s, Christianity was only about to gear up for its own version of Sunni / Shia sectarian violence and its emissaries were only getting ready to conquer the world, wiping out the unfaithful at every turn. The debates as to whether the unbelievers are fully human were only about to take place. Very public executions of those who committed some minor infraction against the orthodoxy were gradually getting into vogue.
So even the most backwards forms of Islam are way ahead of schedule in terms of their development as a major monotheistic religion.
Clarissa's Blog 
But you can’t simply compare the two religions as if they were developing in a vacuum, or like growing microorganisms in separate but identical Petri dishes.
Christianity and Islam have been developing on the same planet, surrounded by the same civilizations and cultural events, as those events unfolded during the centuries.
The Christians were acting like barbarians in a time when such behavior was accepted as the norm in much of the known world, whereas today’s Muslim jihadists are behaving in a manner totally at odds with the highly civilized 21st century world around them.
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A two-year-old will not be able to walk as well as I do no matter what surrounds him. Things take time to mature, that’s the law of existence.
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Sure, but a 2 year old is nothing like a 1,400 year old religion.
The USA is basically 250 years old (you can go as old as 500 if you want to talk about people llanding here.. but I don’t think that applies).
China is at least 3-4000 years old as a society. So basically we need 2,750 more years to compare our society to theirs. But wait, we are WAY more advanced, and in fact are the only reason they have become more advanced in teh last 50 years (where they have progressed MUCH further than they did on their own for 3,000+ years).
Just trying to point out why your islam analogy doesn’t really work here.
The argument that actuallly might is along the lines of the nation’s age. US 250 and most middle east at best were sort of formed after ww1 so less than 100 years (or even less if you want to consider current iran regime taking over in 1979 etc.)
The thing I like about my analogy is it is less to do with religion, and more to do with the combination of backward govt., relatively illiterate people, and oil wealth that has allowed despotic leaders to rule. If these conditions existed in christian denominated areas we would be talking about christian terrorists.
At best (worst), islam just provides an accelerant to all those underlying political/ economic / social factors that mainly account for the violence from that region.
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“The USA is basically 250 years old (you can go as old as 500 if you want to talk about people llanding here.. but I don’t think that applies).
China is at least 3-4000 years old as a society. So basically we need 2,750 more years to compare our society to theirs.”
Nation-state is a creation of the 18th century. There is no nation-state before that.
It’s like people are not even trying to process any information that I’m giving them. A hint: try to avoid the meaningless word “society”. It does nothing but confuse you.
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Ah, Clarissa, some of your readers STRONGLY disagree with your definition of what constitutes a “nation-state” — and when such entities began, and how long they will endure.
There’s no point debating this again, we’re been through it amicably. But in all due modesty, we can process information very well, and reach our own conclusions. 🙂
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“Ah, Clarissa, some of your readers STRONGLY disagree with your definition of what constitutes a “nation-state””
This is the equivalent of saying “Some of your readers strongly disagree with your belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun.”
This is not my definition. This is not a matter of debate. This is a fact of objective reality.
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Now how can I possibly disagree with a statement this back and white?? 🙂 🙂
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Christianity and Islam have been developing on the same planet, surrounded by the same civilizations and cultural events, as those events unfolded during the centuries.
A 600 year age gap necessarily means the same events haven’t surrounded the two. The fall of the Roman Republic, the rise and the fall of the Roman empire are hugely important to Christianity’s rise and spread. This all occurred before Islam even existed.
I just find it incredibly funny that Christians and Muslims talk about their religions as religions of peace when the spread of those religions is intimately tied to successions of powerful empires.
The very idea of a nation-state, and a secular one at that, is so new and so young, it’s a blink in history, that even today large numbers of people in these secular nation-states strenuously resist. The very conception of some practitioner saying “My religion is a religion of peace because my personal practices have nothing to do with these other people who share my religion/nationality with their armies” is something that only arises in secular nation states.
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What is especially funny is that as a practicing Christian, I have absolutely no trouble recognizing that we have all messed up royally and nobody here is superior, in terms of religion or lack thereof, to anybody else. Yet the people who don’t practice (as they well shouldn’t if that’s what they prefer) seem super offended by any suggestion that the trajectory of the major monotheistic religions is quite similar.
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You can’t compare the trajectory of two cultures or religions without taking into account the environment and the times in which they’re developing. Barbaric behavior that was considered acceptable in the 1400s isn’t acceptable today, period.
As for the Muslim terrorists, it isn’t the two-year-olds that are doing the killing!
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What about Islam’s role in intellectual growth in the Medieval period? Here a younger religion appeared to be far more ahead than the older religion.
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The Christian king Alfonso the Wise invited the Jewish and the Muslim scholars to his court to participate in the joint project of creation and dissemination of knowledge. That was a high point for the European Middle Ages. Since then, the tradition of scholarship and learning has not done well in Muslim societies, to put it very mildly. The gap has become especially wide since the Enlightenment era.
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This seems like a post-facto justification. There is no reason why Christianity and Islam should develop at the same pace and in the same direction.
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And there is no reason why they shouldn’t. Especially given the shared roots and the enormous similarities.
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I feel you want to have it both ways here. On the one hand, you compare Christianity with Islam and talk about Islam’s development as having something to do with horrible violence in the Muslim world. On the other hand, you talk how Islam should not be blamed for terrorism, how ISIS terrorists aren’t truly devout but hate women and flock to any ideology letting them kill, rape and steal.
(Obviously, even if one says Muslim violence is connected to Islam too, not only to political & economic situation, it does not relieve terrorists of one ounce of responsibility.)
I do not think your description about Islam’s development is the whole truth. Many terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, lived in non-Muslim democratic countries for protracted periods of time. Many Western people, who join ISIS, don’t do it because of being super religious and, most likely, it is true for Muslims from Muslim countries who travel to Syria to join the organization. Why not compare ISIS to modern fascists, instead of medieval crusaders?
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I want people to gain some perspective and get off their self-righteous soapbox. There’s so much smugness going on here and no recognition that young religions tend to act out in all kinds of way. This is how it’s always been, and nobody is better than anybody else.
And of course, the overwhelming majority of medieval Christians were too stupid to understand Christianity, that’s a given.
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