Every day on these threads we see some proposition or other debating a fine point of Christian theology and that is all to the good. Sometimes Catholics seek to undermine Protestant doctrine and sometimes Protestants counterattack. Sometimes passions rise but it is more than the separation of technology that keeps us from violence; somewhere in our culture we have come to assume that the other fellow has a right to be wrong about his religion.
We have considered in thread after thread that how one believes, how one regards the essential nature of man whether as a child of God or not, has the most profound influence of any factor in determining that man's politics. We say we are in a culture war in American and the roots of that war comes from an understanding or a misunderstanding of the relationship of God and man (or whether there is even a God) but our war so far is not a shooting war. We are exercised, for example, over homosexual marriage but there is a cultural consensus that no matter how wrongheaded the next Supreme Court's decision might be, we will not resort to an inquisition-as close to an inquisition as recent actions seeking to punish people who will not provide services to homosexuals' in their marriage ceremonies, that is still centuries away from the Inquisition and light years away from stoning homosexuals in the world of Islam.
I like to pretend to wit and sometimes observe: Unitarians don't care what the faithful believe as long as they don't believe it very much and charismatics don't care what the faithful believe as long as they believe it a whole lot. My point is that these groups have a different approach to rigidity of doctrine than do, for example, Southern Baptists who care very much about what one believes. Nevertheless, we have come to a consensus in this country and indeed since the Holocaust in Europe, that people by and large should be left alone to believe as they will. Yes, there are obviously tensions about growing anti-Semitism and there is certainly a reaction to Muslim immigration but the official position of the governments in Europe and the modus vivendi in these countries is one of toleration.
The West, that is the Christian West did not emerge from the Middle Ages to this place without real bumps in the road. The Reformation was bloody, the religious wars of the 15th and 16th century were brutal (my ancestors' town near Heidelberg from which they emigrated to America claims in its webpage that only one of the wars after the 30 Years War was more devastating than World War II!). But the Christian West experienced more than just a Reformation-that was a quarrel about the true understanding of God and therefore how life and faith should be organized-it experienced the Enlightenment which shifted man's understanding of the world from a system of Revelation to a system of scientific inquiry. Reformation alone was a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for the modern age, we needed the enlightenment as well.
Islam has never benefited from an enlightenment it still operates under a belief system that all true knowledge is revelatory. This not only deprives Islam of modernity in the technological sense, it fetters Islam to ignorance, intolerance, brutality, and stupidity. It condemns Islam to unremitting, unrelenting war against infidels and apostates. It condemns 1 billion people to a miserable life in a dark age. It threatens us.
