[mburbank]

"The Church, and Christianity in general, has all gone through its dark and primitive phases. "

Wow. Thank God for that. If not for the fact that all religous practice progresses steadily toward tolerance and away from atrocity, I might get scared. It's GONE through it? You're certain about that? I mean, I'm not predicting a return to auto dafe I think you're being pretty cocky. Everybody always thinks the way things are in their time is hwere everything has always been headed and that history can just stop changing now.

AND if it was correct to determine that a religion had something inherently evil in it, would you agree that Christianity should have thrown out with the bathwater during the Inquisition?

ABC may be correct that there is something sytemically wrong, but I would say the system os organized religion on a world scale. AND I don't even really think that. But there's barbarism a plenty in most of your religous texts, and even when there isn't much, there are always swaths of people ready to read it in.

"Christians may believe all sorts of things from the Bible, but it's really their compulsion to act on those things and accept those things that distinguishes them from good and bad, right? "

I homestly don't know what you mean, here.

I don't know how strong a majority feels a need for a separeation between church and state, as long as it's the true real actual church they belong to as opposed to some violent heathen farce. Right now all three branches of government are controlled by a party headed by a man who does not seem to think the church/state divide is all that important and at very least is due for some serious ventilation.

"It seems like a lot of Muslim nations haven't quite reached the latter two points as of yet, which would seem to make all of the textual comparisons sort of moot, imo."

I think that has just as much to do with colonialism, economics and battles won and lost as it does with religion. If you turned the world around, made Islam the historically more powerful and Christianity a third world religion, do you honestly believe that Christianity would be way more civil just do to it's inherent goodness?

I think violent fundamentalists are a very bad thing. On the other hand, I think superpowers completely sure of their moral superiority also present certain dangers and can be pretty scary. Osama on his worst day would be ahrd pressed to end life on earth. We can do it whenever we please. I'm pretty sure we won't, but it's got to be scary on the other end of that kind of power, espcially when we reserve the right to bomb anyone back to the stoneage.

I think violent fundamentalism is a problem all it's own, a poisonous, contageous mental sickness that grafts itself to religion. I think historically there is evidence that strong religous belief makes people vulnerable to fundamentalism. But religion isn't all it likes. It likes nationalism too, and even patriotism.

I think believing that it's their religion that makes fundamentalists evil, that the religion itself is poison, especially in the absence of a really in depth understanding, is the first step into becoming fundamentalists ourselves. A large portion of americans are able to stomach colateral death in Iraq (30,000 says the President like he's talking about fishsticks instead of people) because we know they are not human the way we are. After all, they want us dead, they will stop at nothing, and if we don't have a really clear idea of who they are, well, we know they're all Muslims. Why not just call them Orcs and have done with it?