[Calgaryborn]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

You are going to need to elaborate on the bolded section for me. As I understand the accounts of herem warfare from the Old Testament in their actual cultural and historical context, the mandate to completely obliterate every living thing in the Canaanite city-states was indeed issued by God, and championed by the Torah.

I said most because clearly God sanctioned the people of Israel to start wars to gain land he decided was Israels. These were site specific orders rather than general orders to kill all unbelievers everywhere. He also sanctioned capital punishment and war for self protection.

Having said that, I believe that both the expansion of Christian states spreading out from Rome and certainly the crusades caused more deaths than those tribal wars of ancient Israel. In both cases, we have men claiming they were doing God's work when clearly God nowhere calls them to war. You could also throw in the tens of thousands of deaths of Jews, anabaptists, christian splinter groups, ect within christian nations.

Originally Posted by Textcritic

Much like your insistence that there is no Christian mandate for Christian's to kill in God's name, I suspect that such opinions as they are derived from the Quran are a matter of interpretation. As usual, you seem to be of the opinion that the Muslim scriptures are just like the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and that their meaning and correct application is a straightforward, simple and plain matter. I know there are Muslim posters on this board, and I would be very interested to hear their take on your generalization. I suspect that they would take issue with this characterization.

I'm not going to post the specific Koran scriptures which both I and apparently many Muslims believe sanction the killing of non-believers. I have in the past and only got that I was taking them out of context. When I protested that I did look for context they then point to the fact that there are several different translations into english and some are not very good. The conversation usually ends when I ask for the name of a reliable translation.

Do you deny that the jihadists of today behave a lot like the followers of Islam in Mohammed's day? It's not like its founding was one of peace and tolerance.

Originally Posted by Textcritic

Are you attempting to draw an analogy between the reaction of the population in a secular nation with that in an Arab theocracy? Do you really think that these responses are comparable?

I think people are people. There are human responses that are natural. Like the old Willie Nelson song; "Forgiving you is easy but forgetting takes the longest time".

In an Arab theocracy innocent christians would have died for what others did in the name of God. In America many tolerant Americans thought that a new Mosque shouldn't be built so near the site of so many innocent deaths in Allah's name.