Whistling in the dark

No matter how crazy a few Christian figures may occasionally seem, it is hard to imagine any Christians these days calling for the death of an actor who seemed to doubt Christianity, or murdering a filmmaker that made an anti-Christian film, or stabbing the translator of an anti-Christian book. However, according to this (admittedly biased and anti-Islamic) article, those are things that Islamic radicals have done in the past couple decades. This doesn't make Islam a "violent religion"; the people doing those things in no way represent the majority of Muslims. But it does mean that radical Islam is a heck of a lot scarier than radical Christianity these days, especially for those of us who support things like free speech and freedom of religion. Christianity long ago gave up spreading its creed through violence and blood, and switched to handing out Bibles and asking you if you've found Jesus.

Radical Christians may annoy you, but unless you are one of a small handful of very unlucky abortion doctors, they are unlikely to leave you lying in a bloody mess on the sidewalk. Much of the extremely religious Islamic world, in contrast, has not yet received the message that religion is a personal choice, and that stabbing someone in the head is not an appropriate way of getting people to believe in your God. Give me Bible-pushers over head-stabbers any day. (Note: this contrast reminds me of the lyrics to a song...)

The world must make a concerted effort to get all major Muslim organizations to vigorously spread the idea that violence is not the answer, as radical Christians have realized. Of course, it's not as easy as that; one problem with that approach, according to my rampant uninformed speculation, is that many Muslims may feel that their countries have lost out in the grand competition between civilizations, and therefore might think that forsaking violence would be "locking in" the current inequities between their nations and the rich West. Forsaking violence as a tool would thus be tantamount to accepting the Muslim world's second-class status. Of course, anyone who reads the news about China knows that that assessment is flawed; non-Western societies can "catch up" and overtake the West much faster if they use hard work and peaceful capitalism instead of random spurts of savage violence. Let's just hope, for Omar Sharif's sake, that people realize that soon...