And I'll say it again. Paul was a vicious, hateful self-promoting used car salesman. The fact that he also had a convert's zeal doesn't excuse him from anything. Circumcision? Follow G-d's Law? Only if it makes other people feel better. Otherwise it's do what Paul says. Jew-hatred? You betcha. Let's talk about the "synagogues of Satan". It's a wonder James wasn't completely expunged from the canonical Bible.
And he isn't the worst the Church has offered up over the centuries to the horror of the world. Leaving aside their internecine atrocities the attitude of, say, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church towards anyone who didn't practice their particular brand of Christianity has always been "Comply or die." And if you're a Jew, a Muslim or a Pagan you didn't always get the first option. According to Papal Bull spoken ex cathedra and which is therefore binding on all Catholics for all time the killing of a Jew or Muslim guarantees Paradise and the remission of all sins. In fact it was only Pope John XXIII who removed the line calling down "G-d's curse upon the perfidious Jew" from the liturgy and who ended the ritual yearly humiliation of Rome's Chief Rabbi at the hands of the Pope. Like Mohammed Luther loved the Jews right up until the point where it was clear that they wanted to remain Jews and not convert. Then it was time for fire and sword.
I could go on from the Albigensians, the Waldenses, the Hugenots, the incalculable atrocities of the conquest of the New World, the Opium Wars, North American slavery (much worse than the Muslim variety - cf. Islam's Black Slaves), the traditional Christian treatment of women, the Klan and on and on and on.
Christianity has no right whatsoever to hold itself up as morally superior to any religion with exceptions like the Thuggee, Scientology and Jim Jones. It's no better or worse than Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or the worship of the Aesir. And like all of them it's a few laps behind the Buddhists and Bahais overall. In all fairness the Bahais have never really had a chance to oppress anyone.
The only reason it isn't worse now is that there are still secular forces and tendencies around. But look at the people who have the President's strings - Dobson, Kennedy, Reed, Falwell, La Haye, Haggard until it turned out that he was a closeted bottom and a tweaker, the Dispensationalists, Dominionists, Reconstructionists, Millenialists and the rest of that vile crew of theo-fascist whack jobs. They're every bit as bad as Bin Laden and Iwannajihad. Just as extreme, just as murderous, just as evil towards women if not more so.
As for the idea that we should concentrate on who is killing whom, let's consider it. By the time we had finished moving into Afghanistan we had killed - by our own official estimates - at least ten times as many as had been killed in the embassy bombings, the Cole and the 9/11 attacks. The numbers haven't exactly gone down since. The war in Iraq which was entirely our own making conservatively killed about a quarter million Iraqis from the end of Gulf I to the beginning of Chimpy's Great Adventure. Since then the best estimates we have are 100,000 refugees a month and upwards of half a million dead civilians. That doesn't include the disappeared, those kidnapped and tortured to death by US troops or the Iraqi government, the deaths that will certainly come as the Iraqi Civil War drags on and the thousands tortured, raped and humiliated as part of our new human rights policy.
Do I love the jihadis, the Iranian government or the rest of the mullah ****ers? No. They would kill me for being a Jew and for being a Sufi. But there is an ocean of innocent blood on my country's hands, and the fundamentalists here would kill me for being a Sufi. While they wouldn't necessarily kill me for being a Jew the Dispensationalist et al doctrine is that the Jews have to be shipped off to Israel to be killed by Arabs so that Jesus will be allowed to come back. Presumably he'll run into the Mahdi while the Hidden Twelfth Imam is crawling out of his well.
Whichever brand of jingoistic racist clods wins I die. My only hope is that the lights of reason and progress will not be completely extinguished by the Marching Morons.
