[walford]

I’m going to entertain these digressions away from the main subject, because it speaks to the larger issue — the social and political one.

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1. “Christianity is simply superior to the pagan belief systems.”

2. “It’s a really poor starting point for discussion when the author conflates choices by political and military leaders with religious theology and teaching.”

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Any religion that holds that their God is the only God and their religion is the only valid religion has a significant POLITICAL advantage over those that hold that there are many facets to the Divine and that there are many paths to God.

Slaughter the unbeliever who will not convert is going to win against a willingness to live in peace with many Gods and religion every time.

Those who hold that practitioners of every other religion on the planet are kneeling before false idols are going to be tempted to believe that such people are by definition damned anyway, so killing, raping and plundering such Infidels is nothing compared to what awaits them in the afterlife. The mere existence of such people are an abomination that must not be tolerated by the truly faithful.

Christianity has gone past this. Islam has not — and may not ever.

[Mount Athos]

Your view of Christian theology is so totally divorced from reality that I’m going to bow out of the discussion as being useless

[Cronos]

Christianity is simply superior to the pagan belief systems -- it is definitely superior in the wider sense to the pre-Christian European pagan systems, as I illustrated above. Compared to Zoroastrianism or Buddhism or Hinduism, Christianity doesnt' have this "secular superiority in terms of philosophy, future glories etc." - it has other, spiritual advantages

[Cronos]

Walford, Christian philosophy is basically built on love. Jesus talks of love, of forgiveness and of not throwing stones at others if one is sinful (which all of us are) - an internal review.

Islam is built on submission to Allah who follows no rules and has no logic -- humans are to obey with no sense of love or of being allah's children.

This is a fundamental difference.

Example -- you cannot remove the expansionism from communism. When that was done, as in Kerala or West Bengal, communism was gutted and destroyed.

the same way with Islam. At the core, this is a dangerous philosophy.