John wrote:
Islam is just as much a religion as Christianity is. Or, if you like, Christianity is also just an ideology, in view of Christian Nazis who killed Jews and other Christians, or Irish Protestants who killed Catholics.
[...]
Why would such temporal differences exist?
John, like others I highly value your work and insights but I think you are missing something about Islam.
Islam is both a religion and a political system. Other religions are just religions. The other religions to not include a form of government or political ideology, at least not now. There is a clear separation of church and state, except in the case of Islam. Political systems mean laws, courts, force, and punishment. Political systems control all people in some terrotory, not just believers. In most religions the most serious punishment they would do is excomunication or shunning and that only to followers. Islam's Sharia law specifies death for all sorts of things for both followers and non followers. About the most agressive thing we outsiders ever see from other religions is a friendly Mormon or Jahova's Witness knocking on the door. There is a non-zero chance that some Muslim sees something I post on facebook and decides to kill me. This is very different, at least to the current versions of other religions.
I think the reason there is a temporal change in the Christians and not in the Muslims is that while the Bible is older and written in a language that few people today can read, the Koran is in Arabic which a high fraction of the followers can read today. So while it is easy for people reading the Bible to think, "something got twisted in the translation" and not take it literally with the Koran there is no such out. So it is much easier for Christians to adapt over time to modern views.
I recommend this video that is available by torrent:
Islam - What the West Needs to Know
The ideology in the Koran is a plan to conquer the whole world. The goal is complete control by Sharia law of the whole planet. Making lots of babies and harassing non-muslims in an area with lots of muslims is a method of taking over territory gradually. It works. Intimidating people so they don't critisize Islam is part of the system.
It has grown to over 1 billion people and it is growing fast compared to the West. Long term there is a chance that it does take over the world (I don't really think so, but the trend is there). If so, it would not be as nice a world for free thinkers or women.
We used to talk of a "Cold War" that did not have as many deaths most years as Islam inflicts on the West or the West inflicts on Islam.
My one big hope comes from the Internet and the Streisand Effect. My hope is that the Islamic method of silencing critics by killing some of them no longer works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect