AEON said:
Earlier you talked about the "success" of the spread of Islam in the Middle East and Africa as if someone was walking around holding revivals in a tent. The truth is - Islam was spread by force.
And for the first several centuries - Christianity spread underground at the risk of death. It was not until Constantine that Christians were safe to practice their faith without fear of persecution. Unfortunately - it also marks the beginning of the state taking over the church - and there were, and still are, consequences for this.
The two religions have much different histories.
The history of Islam is not much different than the Israelites' violent conquering of Canaan, is it not? Islam just happened to accept more converts and kill proportionately fewer people in the process.
"When you march up to attack a city, first offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to your terms of peace and opens its gates to you, all the people to be found in it shall serve you in forced labor. But if it refuses to make peace with you and instead offers you battle, lay siege to it, and when the LORD, your God, delivers it into your hand, put every male in it to the sword; but the women and children and livestock and all else in it that is worth plundering you may take as your booty, and you may use this plunder of your enemies which the LORD, your God, has given you. 'That is how you shall deal with any city at a considerable distance from you, which does not belong to the peoples of this land. But in the cities of those nations which the LORD, your God, is giving you as your heritage, you shall not leave a single soul alive. You must doom them all-the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites-as the LORD, your God, has commanded you, lest they teach you to make any such abominable offerings as they make to their gods, and you thus sin against the LORD, your God. 'When you are at war with a city and have to lay siege to it for a long time before you capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them. You may eat their fruit, but you must not cut down the trees. After all, are the trees of the field men, that they should be included in your siege?" -- Deuteronomy 20:10-19
Nice to see, though, that "God" loves trees.
As far as I'm concerned, the early pre-Constantinian Christian church is a completely different religion, because it bares little resemblance to the patriarchal blather that has existed since then.
Speaking of patriarchal blather, I once mentioned "original sin" and how it is mostly a construction of St. Augustine of Hippo, rather than the Bible. I'm not sure if you believed me, but it is one of the defining differences between Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Eastern Orthodoxy acknowledges that the introduction of ancestral sin into the human race affected the subsequent environment for mankind, but denies (or rather never accepted) Augustine of Hippo's notions of original sin and hereditary guilt. The act of Adam is not the responsibility of all humanity, but the consequences of that act changed the reality of this present age of the cosmos.
Just thought I'd follow up.
I don't have a lot of love for Islam, don't get me wrong. However, I hate it when people make extra effort to demonize Islam, while glossing over all the violence in Christian history.