@iamjc you seem to think christians aren't the same. Your complete bias and hatred claiming they're ALL extremists is no better than christians claiming we are all terrible people. Honestly I'm more scared of you after that hateful rant than I am of Imam. Radical and hateful atheists like you are no better than isis.

Here in the UK there is a good community spirit and although tensions exist still and it has risen with Brexit and Trump / May there is an awareness generally that Muslim people are on the whole peaceful. People in my experience freaked out are already affected by mental health / emotional problems and are easily influenced! I know some lovely Muslim folks.. Have done whole life. Good and bad in all groups of people. I do think the religion has some odd ideas but no odder than christianity really.

@iamjc fewer than you think support isis. We are done talking.

I quite agree.

When talking about Islam raise a false equivocation in order to pretend you answered the question. Good job at not answering a question!

A reasonable reply might have looked like this: IDK or Maybe it is all the killing and bigotry that the Quran instructs its followers to do.
You could have said: I don't know enough about Islam to give an intelligent answer.
This is for the purpose of making you think critically and logically. Don't get upset you're not the only one that does it!

Hear, hear!

@MichaelSpinler when people were learning to read, that wasn't an advantage, it was a gift. that gift prevented further radical indoctrination. education ruins religion. the next few generations will show you that to be true. give it 30 years then read this again. i didn't mention a career or anything to do with jobs and that nonsense.

i also said educated people are much more likely to keep the religion but in a more useless form and just say they're part of the religion, effectively creating a denomination unique to the individual.

reading the bible for ones self is the best way to become an atheist, the same should go for every other religion based on a book.

Your reply only raises more questions.
How many Christians are killed each year for apostasy?
How many gays are thrown off a high building by Christians?
How many honor killings do the Christians do every year?
How many Christians kill other denominations within Christianity for not believing their particular doctrine?
What other religions kill people for not believing their religious doctrine?
Apparently, there is a high murder rate amongst Buddist. Oh no! wait a second that would be ISLAM
When someone asks a question about the effects of Islam people need to stop equivocating other religions. When the question is asked, Why does Islamic extremism have such a high murder rate your next statement shouldn't be "but the crusades"

@Proslice56 I don't know why you avoid the unforced commonalities between all religious beliefs. Islam is, at this point, more dominantly fundamentalist on a worldwide basis than, say, Christianity. We can argue to what extent this is a function of influences like poverty, or inherent to the religion. But all religion is a toxic fulcrum of control for some privileged group (the clergy), and often, the clergy is just a proxy for government control, particularly where religion is not well-separated from the state, and where the government is, in fact, theocratic in nature.

So that leaves us with the question: is Christianity less "on the hook" for being authoritarian and otherizing just because it doesn't physically throw gays off of roofs in public executions? Is it okay that they just quietly lynch them in private, or harm them in subtle and semi-deniable ways through social exclusion and denial of equal rights?

We're unbelievers here, so we're not (or shouldn't be, at least) interested in justifying the otherizing of one group as "worse" than another. That's being just as tribal as the different religious factions.

American Muslims are, on average, wealthier, more educated and more law-abiding than most other minority groups. It's unintelligent to paint them with the same brush as the generally more impoverished, uneducated and radicalized Muslims in, say, Europe. The only disavowal of radical Islam I can legitimately expect from them is the only disavowal that matters, and the one they're already providing: living respectfully and peacefully within our society. At least, until we radicalize them by treating them as if they weren't doing those things, and as if every mosque were a hotbed of covert subversion.

Finally, if you believe that Islam is the ONLY religion that kills for not believing their doctrines, you must have been living under a rock and/or ignorant of history. And yes, the crusades are entirely relevant to that. But it's far from the only example (the church was burning heretics at the stake long after the crusades, and there's the paranoia of the Salem witch trials), and it's not like there aren't contemporary instances, either, for example, the persecution of Buddhists by Christians: [en.wikipedia.org]

Because of secular laws the Churches now have more difficulty in persecuting heretics, but persecution is still part of mainstream Christian thought. The oath taken by Roman Catholic bishops at their consecration includes the following: "undertaking with all my power I will persecute and make war upon heretics".

So what it comes down to is that ALL religions end up, where they can get away with it, forcing conformity at the point of a sword. I would submit that Muslims just reside in countries where there is little distinction between religion and government, and thus they can get away with it.

@mordant I see by your carefully long thought out response, you really don't get it. Please allow me to highlight the key portion of my post!

We are talking about frigging ISLAM FFS!

So you want to make it about Christianity.
"THUS" you show how little you know about Islam as you draw a false equivalence.

I responded to your diatribe in under 100 words.

@Proslice56 That was not a response, it was a restatement of your original post that studiously avoided actually engaging a single point that I raised. "Frigging Islam FFS" is just a primal scream, with no substantiation at all, that Islam is both a monolith AND an especially inherently heinous religion.

I will leave it to the reader to decide whose is the less reasoned argument, and which qualifies as "diatribe".

@mordant Wow! What an overly dramatic way of saying nothing. I agree with one thing you said! Leave this here for everyone to form an opinion. Unfortunately, there will be those that think you actually made a point!

@Annie45 Christianity is just as dedicated to world domination as Islam. It has just been gentled (for sufficiently white and/or affluent societies) by the Enlightenment, which Islam bypassed (or rather its own version of it was stillborn because the fundamentalists won). Don't forget about the Crusades. Don't forget the Christian rationalization of and embrace of white supremacy and Trumpism. Just because Christians don't generally operate with suicide vests doesn't make their ideology less violent or arrogant.

Also don't mistake my lack of special pleading for Christianity as endorsing or ignoring Islamic threats. The threats exist. But if you try to address them by fingering Islam itself rather than the underlying forces -- populist resentments, basically -- then you're going to come up with the wrong cure. You're also playing into the same tribalist ideologies that are making civil society circle the drain -- whether the tribalism is dressed up in Islamic ideology, or to your abreaction thereto.

@Annie45 Okay then, how about the Inquisition? What's your rationalization for that? Or the apologetic for slavery on the part of the church, particularly in the US? Or the Bible's moral failure to teach against slavery -- in fact, telling you (even in the NT!) how to be a "good" slave owner or slave and just assuming it as a matter of course? Surely you're not going to give me the tired old chestnut that "slavery was different back then". The Bible leads from behind there, and with respect to gender equality, and any number of other things. If the Bible were divinely inspired we would expect it to be consistently and coherently pointing the way toward better moral sensibilities than those of the bronze and iron ages -- in fact, to better moral sensibilities than the information age.

Christianity fails to own the excesses of its fundamentalist wing, so while my critique of Christianity embracing white supremacy applies mostly to fundamentalists, it is an open and unaddressed shame on Christianity generally. Liberal Christians often tend to treat fundamentalists as the crazy uncle in the basement rather than really call it out for what it is.

Yeah when I was a believer I heard the standard BS about how Christianity enabled science rather than what it really does, which is to tolerate it only when it doesn't contradict asserted dogma. And that is what modern Christians do, historic Christianity is notably Luddite in orientation. Just ask Galileo how that went for him. It's a facile circumlocution by Christian apologists that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The Bible teaches that we should love one another and welcome the stranger and help widows and orphans, but it also argues that the armies of the righteous should utterly destroy its enemies down to the last man, woman and child, except that you can take the young virgins captive as "wives". And it argues that women should shut up in church and not have leadership roles.

Each sect cherry-picks what it wants to pay attention to and ignores the rest. If you're an authoritarian believer then you pay a great deal of attention to the wrath of god and to patriarchy, if you're more kum-by-ah then you don't. But it's all there for those with eyes to see. The inconvenient and inconsistent parts of the Bible are supposed to be the Word of God, too.

You also exhibit the standard-issue evangelical revisionism about what globalism, communism and socialism are and aren't. Globalism is not communism, socialism is not communism, socialism is not democratic socialism, and Islam is none of those things. You are just lumping bogeymen together without understanding any of them. To you it is just your tribe and all the amalgamated Forces Of Evil [tm] arrayed against it.