Which is worse, Christianity or Islam?

For the last few months we’ve been running the best posts from years past, posts that will be new to most of our subscribers. This is a slightly revised and expanded post from January 2015.

Given the spate of near-daily Islamic-fanatic atrocities, and the wholesale pandering of the Trump administration to its deranged theofascist base, this post seems especially relevant now. Indeed, who today can’t be wondering, “Which is worse, Christianity or Islam?”

Let’s take a look at some of the worst structures and practices in both Islamic and Christian lands, both current and historic:

Slavery

Slavery is still practiced in many Islamic nations. The most notorious recent example is the enslavement of thousands of Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq. The Nigerian fundamentalist group Boko Haram is also notorious for enslavement of its victims.

At the same time, slavery persisted in widespread form in Christian lands until 1888 (Brazil) and in perhaps its most brutal form ever in the most religiously devout part of the United States until 1865. And enslavement of prisoners in the United States is still very widespread, currently involving at minimum hundreds of thousands of prisoners “paid” a few pennies per hour by for-profit corporations.

There is plenty of justification for slavery in both the Bible and the Koran, and not one word against it in either book.  (If you doubt this, run a search on Google or Bing. In fact, you’ll find justification for all of the horrors listed in this post.)

So, which is worse in regard to slavery, Christianity or Islam?

Islam “wins” this one based on the sheer brutality of some current Islamist groups.

Terrorism

At present, the most vicious and most active terrorist groups are Islamic (ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Taliban, and MILF — this is for real: the acronym stands for Moro Islamic Liberation Front). These groups are responsible for the murder of uncounted thousands of innocent people across the globe in recent years.

But Christian terrorism also exists, though in more subdued form.  In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan is a proudly Christian organization. As well, “right to life” Christian fanatics occasionally murder abortion providers and bomb abortion clinics; and they routinely stalk and anonymously threaten abortion providers, providing a dictionary definition of terrorism: they’re trying to frighten and intimidate — terrorize — abortion providers into no longer providing this constitutionally protected medical procedure.

Still, there’s no question that at present Islam “wins” this one hands down.

Internecine Warfare

By far the worst current example of internecine warfare is the Sunni-Shia mass bloodletting in Syria and Yemen, with thousands of casualties every single month.

But historically, Islamic internecine warfare has nothing on Christian internecine warfare. Just go back a few hundred years. Consider the Beziers massacre of 10,000 to 20,000 Albigensian heretics in 1209 by a crusader army commanded by papal legate Arnaud Amalric. Justifying the mass murder of helpless prisoners, Amalric famously said, “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”

Then go forward just over 400 years to the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) for religiously motivated (Catholic vs. Protestant)  murder and mayhem on a mass scale. Then if you add in all of the nonreligiously motivated internecine warfare between Christian nations (Hundred Years War, U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, etc.), Christianity “wins” this one going away.

Subjugation of Women

The situation of women is unquestionably worse in Islamic lands than Christian lands. In some Islamic countries, the barbaric practices of female genital mutilation and child marriage are still very common, with the number of victims up in the tens, probably hundreds of millions. In far more Islamic countries, women are still very much second class citizens. Their testimony in court is accorded less weight than that of men, Islamic fanatics seek (sometimes successfully) to deny them education, they’re forced to wear head-to-toe coverings, they’re forced into arranged marriages, and “honor” killings are common and culturally accepted.

In the West, women still earn less than men, face street harassment and domestic violence, face a glass ceiling in employment, and rape is still a major and under-acknowledged problem. Go back a few hundred years, and you’ll find religiously inspired witch burnings all over Europe. And nearer to the present, denial of property rights, denial of the rights to contraception and abortion, and systematic denial of employment in many, many professions.

But bad as all this is, the situation of women in Islamic countries has been and is far worse than in Western lands. Islam “wins” here.

Persecution of Nonbelievers

In Islamic countries, it is simply unsafe (often deathly unsafe) for Muslims to abandon Islam. Many of their fellow Muslims will feel completely justified in murdering those who abandon the faith, and far more will condone such killings. Going beyond this, as the Charlies Hebdo atrocity in Paris demonstrates, Islamists feel entirely justified in murdering nonbelievers who were never Muslims, simply for criticizing Islam. And it’s not just unofficial Islamic thugs doing the killing. In Saudi Arabia, it’s a capital offense to be an atheist or an apostate, and the Saudi authorities are notorious for imprisoning and brutally whipping atheists and apostates, and threatening them with execution.

In the Western countries, it’s been several hundred years since the torture and murder of apostates and heretics was commonplace. There are still unconstitutional laws on the books in several U.S. states denying atheists the right to hold elected office or serve on juries, and high-profile atheists are sometimes stalked and threatened, but the situation of nonbelievers in Muslim countries is undeniably far worse. Islam “wins” again.

In Sum

At present, there’s no denying that Islam, which Bill Maher calls “the mother lode of bad ideas,”  is worse than Christianity. But why should this be so? Consider the above: the worst examples of Islamic barbarism are current, and the worst examples of Christian barbarism are in the past, mostly centuries in the past.

What happened? In a word, science. In the West, science with its question-test-and-logically-analyze attitude has flourished and has eaten away at traditional religious beliefs. This has resulted in a good majority of “believers” being “cafeteria Christians” who pick and choose their “beliefs,” and reject those which are too ridiculous or too inhumane.  Hence the slow but fairly steady social progress over the last few centuries. This social evolution never happened in Muslim lands.

To put this another way, religions are toxic to the extent that their basic tents are toxic and to the extent that their members follow their teachings literally.

Many of the teachings in  the Bible are every bit as barbaric as those in the Koran. But a hell of a lot more Muslims than Christians take those teachings literally.

 

Religious Attack on Charlie Hebdo (verbal, this time)

The Catholic Church is back at it in the wake of the new Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon of God beneath the caption, “One Year On, The Assassin Remains at Large.” This time, Osservatore Romano. the official Vatican newspaper,  wrote, “Behind the deceptive flag of uncompromising secularism, the weekly [Charlie Hebdo] is forgetting once more what religious leaders of every faith unceasingly repeat to reject violence in the name of religion . . .”

“Unceasingly repeat”? Well, that certainly is news.

One needn’t go back centuries to see how this “unceasing” rejection of violence has manifested itself, but we’ll do so anyway.  Shall we start with the crusades? Better, let’s start with the Beziers massacre of ten thousand Albigensian heretics in 1209 by a returning crusader army, at which abbot and papal agent Arnaud Amalric famously told the rampaging crusaders, “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”

Then there was the Inquisition and its brutal torture of uncounted people during the Middle Ages. Let’s also consider the wave of torture, coerced confessions, and witch burnings that swept across Europe for centuries, which resulted in the horrific deaths of at minimum tens of thousands of unfortunate women, and which was largely inspired by Pope Innocent VIII’s encyclical Summis Desiderantes, and the subsequent appointment of witch-finding Inquisitors.

Then, following the Reformation, there were all of the religious wars in Europe, continuation of the millennium-long orgy of pogroms against “Christ killer” Jews, and the Christian slave trade–which no pope said a word against–and the list goes on.

To cite but one non-Christian example, following their trek to Utah, Mormon “prophet” Brigham Young instituted a reign of terror, which reached its high point in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 in which 120 non-Mormon men, women, and children were murdered on the orders of Young. (Mormons, despite their official name, are about as Christian as Muslims are.)

In more modern times in the West, churches have largely relied on the institutional violence of the state to do their dirty work for them. They’ve been behind laws banning contraceptives, abortion, sexually explicit materials, and homosexual acts. Those imprisoned for violating these intrusive laws were direct victims of  institutional violence inspired by religion. Religious leaders not only didn’t denounce this institutional violence, they were responsible for it.

In the Islamic world, there’s not only daily institutional religion-inspired violence, but direct religious violence continues unabated, with uncounted victims (undoubtedly in the thousands) being murdered annually for “crimes” such as adultery, fornication, atheism, and homosexuality. Muslim religious “leaders” not only haven’t spoken out against these atrocities, they’ve ordered a great many of them.

How all this fits with the Osservatore‘s assertion that “religious leaders of every faith unceasingly repeat to reject violence in the name of religion” remains a mystery.

 

Charlie Hebdo one year later

In case you missed it, here’s the cover from the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo, one year after the brutal attack by religious fanatics. The title above the caricature of The Almighty reads, “One year on, the assassin remains at large.”

The cover is a timely reminder that since time immemorial religious fanatics, goaded on by the words in their holy books, have been in the business of wholesale slaughter. However, in one way the cover is wrong: God doesn’t exist, so it isn’t the assassin. The assassins are those who follow the bloody commands of the Iron Age, goat-herding  slaveholders, and the illiterate  medieval pedophile and apparent schizophrenic who wrote, respectively, the Bible and the Quran.

Slaughter in the name of religion will continue with sickening regularity as long as religious fanatics continue to use God as a three-letter justification for murder.

Related articles

• Criticising Islam: A Message to Religious Critics of the Muslim Faith

The “Yelling Fire” Fallacy

by Chaz Bufe, publisher See Sharp Press

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the enemies of free speech have been worming their way up through the floorboard. They range from religious fanatics openly supporting murder, to those who say–nudge, nudge, wink, wink–that those who exercise free speech should expect consequences. They range from PC multiculturalists, to Fox News commentators, to the pope. His comments were typical. He likened insults to religion to insults to his mother, and balling his fist said that those who make such comments should “expect to be hit.” He added that free speech doesn’t extend to ridicule of religion.

These remarks are very similar to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s  famous aphorism about yelling fire in a crowded theater, which he used as justification to restrict free speech in Schenck v. United States (1919), which upheld the Espionage Act. That Act had nothing to do with espionage, but was instead designed and used to suppress opposition to World War I.  Under it, thousands were prosecuted and jailed, often for years, for exercising the supposedly sacred right of free speech.

But do Holmes, the pope, et al., have a point? No, they don’t. They’re using argument by analogy, the weakest form of argument. Its weakness lies in that argument by analogy treats two dissimilar things as if they were identical, and then prescribes the “remedy” for one as if it were the “remedy” for the other. This only holds if those making the analogy can demonstrate that the two things are identical, or so similar that the differences between them are trivial. But they never do this, because they can’t. They’re attempting to arouse an emotional response, and hoping that listeners will be caught up in the emotion and will overlook the obvious fallacious nature of their argument.

If you doubt this, please notice that both Holmes and the pope used two of the most inflammatory, emotion-rousing analogies imaginable.

Also please notice that they don’t even attempt to demonstrate that “yelling fire in a crowded theater,” insults to one’s mother, and critical political and religious speech are the same, and so should be treated the same. Again, they simply can’t do this, so they rely on assertion and the inattention and  emotionality of their listeners.

If they want to outlaw yelling fire in a crowded theater, fine. Let them say so. And if they want to outlaw critical political and religious speech, fine. Let them say so, and let’s see them produce some actual justification for doing that rather than hiding behind false analogies.

If they want to outlaw certain types of speech, they need to demonstrate that those types of speech are threats to the public. But they can’t, and they don’t want to be open about what they’re up to, so they rely on weak arguments and emotional manipulation.

There are only two reasons why people advance the “yelling fire” fallacy. There are only two reasons why they advance this tired half-witticism: 1) They’re too dumb to know what they’re doing; or 2) They’re deliberately trying to manipulate and mislead.

Finally, regarding the pope’s comments: once past grade school, most people do not respond to comments about their mothers with physical violence. That’s called growing up, acting like an adult.

Related

• 2. Bill Maher on Terrorism and the Charlie Hebdo Attack
• Charlie Hebdo Editor’s Widow to MSNBC: ‘I Would Like to Die’
• Bill Maher talking Charlie Hebdo: There are No Great Religions. They’re All Stupid and Dangerous.
• Bill Maher On Islam: ‘When There’s This Many Bad Apples, There’s Something Wrong With The Orchard’
• Social media honors slain Charlie Hebdo employees
• Bill Maher: Hundreds of Millions of Muslims Support Attack on Charlie Hebdo
• Fox’s Eric Bolling: Liberals Are More Like Al Qaeda Than Charlie Hebdo
• Bill Maher on Terrorism and the Charlie Hebdo Attack……
• Bill Maher on Islam: “When There’s This Many Bad Apples, There’s Something Wrong with the Orchard”