Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
There are at least a couple of reasons for that. One being that Christianity happens to have a strong traditional taboo against suicide, though no proscription against it is explicitly spelled out in the bible.
Another is that Christianity is a zombie religion. No, not because they worship a guy who rose from the dead-- the religion itself. A very few centuries back, Christianity wasn't much less intense than Islam is today-- everyone was expected to attend church regularly or be shunned or worse. Punishments for breaking religious rules or being suspected of not being a Christian were severe, up to and including torture and death. Most people really, really believed the religion.
Today, people as a whole in the West are much "richer" and better educated than the people of a few centuries ago, and have less need for a security blanket against the abject misery that is no longer a part of daily life. Yes, there are still pockets of people really fervent about their Christianity, but they are outliers, looked at strangely by even the bulk of people who identify themselves as Christian. For most of the world, most of Christendom is a social club where you associate with good friends and play at comforting rituals, and when they step outside their church, they act and are mostly indistinguishable from the secular world. The fire-and-brimstone passion and certainty of the religion is dead except for a few pockets of embers, mostly in poor third-world countries and the United States.
Islam, though, still has much fire left in it, and is widespread in parts of the world where a large percentage of the population is little better off educationally or financially than a medieval European peasant. They don't have a strong education, they don't have physical comfort-- they have a strength of belief that usually can come only from a combination of being miserable and pig-ignorant.
You want to see what living Christianity was like for over a thousand years? Look at Islam today. The Christianity of today is a shuffling corpse. And given time to catch up to the Western world (decades, centuries?) serious Islam will fade away just as serious Christianity has mostly faded away.
(On a slightly different focus, nice article here.) |
I have to agree. If present day Muslims are on the whole more dangerous than present day Christians, it's because they still believe their religion, and still take their holy book literally. There's much in the Bible that if taken literally would be just cause to be locked away.