Mumbai

[Kirkland Laing]

ok, your point is taken. Not 100% taken, but somewhat taken. I would say that far fewer christians are prepared to kill to support their beliefs. And they would tend to target their victims more carefully. Note the use of the word tend.

There is still the issue of concepts of jihad and martyrdom in modern society and religion. I've made my point there.

Right now far fewer Christians are terrorists compared to Muslims but that's only because they're not living under oppression caused by other nations/religions. American Christians have had half a century of unprecedented peace, prosperity and freedom of religion, yet they're still fine with bombing or nuking other countries preemptively when those countries have done nothing to them. Their leaders, such as radical cleric Pat Robertson, routinely call for military action, the assassination of democratically elected foreign heads of state etc. Imagine how angry they'd be if they'd been living under a dictatorship backed by a Muslim superpower for decades. There's endless stuff in the Old Testament which would justify suicide bombings and similar stuff. After decades under a dictator there'd be really radical clerics who'd tell huge numbers of radicalised completely uneducated/impoverished Chjristians that suicide bombings/similar was Holy and good. It's actually amazing it took Muslim terrorism so long to get started, not that it's actually happening.

I don't have too much problem with much of what you say about christian terrorism, except that it's largely hypothetical. And I don't know that these days there are many more Muslims living under Christian based dictatorships than there are Christians living under Muslim based dictatorships. And I'm not really up on the finer points of the Old testament, except that lots of it is open to interpretation. and it's questionable to whether or not it is all still widely applicable.

Your comments about USA and other countries touches upon a grey area. Putting aside Japan in WWII, it's a legit question whether or not the USA and other countries including Britain and yes even Canada have any kind of a role in policing the world or protecting other countries. But that's not something I intend to debate here. Maybe sometime down the road. Someone else might want to take it up though.

A few weeks ago I saw a political programme on the BBC which was a bunch of conservative/centre-left/liberal politicians sitting round a table answering questions from the audience. One question was about Iran and their nuclear ambitions, and the historical starting point of the answer of all those guys was 1979, the Iranian revolution, and all the answers were versions of being worried that these radical revolutionaries might get their hands on a nuke and what they might do with it. Not one of them mentioned the british calling for and backing a 1953 US coup of a democratically-elected Iranian government and the installation of a dictator complete with US/British-trained secret police force. Nobody considered that living thirty years under that because you had the audacitiy to nationalise your oil reserves and kick the British/US oil company that was extracting all the oil and paying you 8% of the proceeds out of the country might cause those Iranians to get upset.

It's the same all over the Arab world. We invaded Iraq to bring them freedom yet we prop up dicattors in four of the countries which border Iraq and used to prop up dictators in the other two till they kicked us out. All the 300 million Arabs live under a dictator we prop up to some extent apart from Syria, one of the countries bordering Iraq we used to guarantee. And living under that kind of repression leads to some of those people decising to violently disagree with the established order of things. Can you imagine Texas being occupied for the past 40 years like Palestine? If Texans fought back against their occupier would they consider themselves freedom fighters or terrorists?

So you need to do unto others what you's like done unto you, otherwise people can get upset and decide to blow you up. Who was it originally came up with that do unto others line again ?