Nice Try: The "Christian Fitna"

Via Jammie Wearing Fool with a nod to this critique by none other than Allah himself.

The obvious point here? Yes, you can drag violent passages out of the Bible. (Admittedly, I was a little taken aback by the ones quoted -- I had heard the Old Testament was a bit blood and thunder, but I didn't realize the passages were that violent-minded.)

The trouble with this entire line of rebuttal is, however, that no Christians (or Jews) take such passages seriously. Ask a Christian or Jew about the passages and you will not get the response, "Yes, indeed, the Lord our God counsels us to kill all the boys and take the virgin girls for our own." The response will be an embarrassed "Well you must understand things were different then, and not everything is necessarily literal." Those passages provoke an uneasy response of attempting to mitigate them. They are not cited as actually authoritative.

Not so with the more violent passages of Islam, which are still very much taken seriously by a significant minority of its followers (and here I am being charitable: in many countries it seems this "significant minority" is very significant indeed, up to the level of the 60% "minority" or thereabouts).

The other silliness is that the Warrior of God language is all taken from the same documentary, produced in the West to embarrass and mock the practicioners of warrior-minded Christians. One hardly hears this sort of nonsense on television as if it's a widespread ethic in the West. Hardly. That's the whole point of the documentary, to scorn such folks.

And, on top of that, what these people are talking about by and large is in fact a metaphorical sense of being "Warriors for Christ." And even that metaphorical use of the language of war is enough to make most Christians squeamish, and, indeed, mock their correligionists as lunatic.

If only the command to "jihad" were in fact taken metaphorically by more adherents of the Religion of Peace, rather than the quite-literal command to kill (and rape) nonbelievers.

Video below the fold. This is just a blogger putting together a quickie response, true, but it is telling the examples of Violent Warriors for Christ are so limited in number.

The first step in curing a problem is admitting you have one. This sort of defensive silliness about a real problem infecting Islamic culture is not helping anyone.

posted by Ace at 03:11 PM

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