I find the rules of the religion impossible to make sense:
1. Death Penalty for blasphemy and apostasy.
2. Playing victim after committing a crime
3. Blurring the lines between defense and violence, good and bad?
4. Being both a religion and a state.
Lots of Muslims are wonderful people just like people of many other religions are humanitarian despite the religious teachings themselves. But the core of their beliefs is extraordinarily medieval and completely unamenable to reforms. Anyone else who is wondering the same?
I don't consider Islam significantly different from Christianity on paper.
Christians and Muslims each revere a Semitic desert god, Yahweh and Allah, that is an angry, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, sadistic, prudish, strongman that requires worship and submission.
Believers of both attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.
Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.
Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.
Each has its now centuries old holy book of internal contradictions, failed prophecies, and errors of history and science. I'm not as sure about the Qur'an, but it likely also contain vengeance, hatred, tribalism, violence, and failed morals that endorse slavery, rape, infanticide, and incest.
They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to diddle whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.
Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.
Each consider faith a virtue and reason a problem.
Each has a history of opposing human rights and science.
Each advocates theocracy over democracy.
With all of these similarities - and that is a lot of parallels, most not found elsewhere - why should these two appear so differently in the regions where they predominate? The differences are in the rendering, which reflects the history and the culture of the areas in which each has flourished over the last few centuries. The Christian West has been under the influence of the secular democracies that emerged from the rise of Enlightenment values and secular humanism and has been dramatically influenced by its rational ethics. Hence, Christians no longer execute people for homosexuality, adultery, witchcraft, fornication, apostasy, impiety, blasphemy, and other crimes against Yahweh, whereas Muslims are still free to kill such people. They have largely accepted democracy, human rights, individual freedom, and secular government, all of which lags behind in the Middle East.
If you extract Christianity and Islam from their surrounding cultures, they appear very similar, as outlined above. If you traded the ideologies out, and put Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Islam in America, the results would be the same: Christian Arabs still relatively sheltered from the influences of secular humanism would still be cutting off hands and heads, pushing homosexuals off of Towers, doing honor killings, genital mutilation, suicide bombings, and flying buildings into airplanes.
And Americans would still be going door to door asking if you know Mohammed rather than Jesus. America would still be a secular state with a Muslim majority forced to tolerate "infidels" thanks to humanist values, and Saudi Arabia and Iran would still be a brutal, intolerant theocracies, but Christian ones instead. You might be blown up for drawing a picture of Jesus, or have a fatwa placed on you for speaking ill of St. Paul.
If you consider Christianity less brutal, less medieval than Islam, thank those that led us from the Age of Faith into the Age of Reason - the scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment, and those who implemented their ideas.
