Theodore wrote:1.
meanwhile Islamist terror is the predominant form of terror in Europe since 2004, it has not been like that before, neither in attacks nor in numbers of death:
And 90% of terrorism victims in Western Europe before the 90s were from the Troubles, when the IRA and the British govt were in armed conflict. The rest are probably victims of Basque/ETA terrorism. Neither could be understood as being motivated by extremist Christianism or mostly religion, although in the case of the Northern Ireland conflict there are religious undertones. If you added USA to that graph, you'd get a huge candle in 2001 of 2977 victims, that would pretty much extend out of the picture by 5 more lengths.
People who claim Christianity to be superior and the most important basis of "Western" culture, are mostly not Christians. They are definitely not the important Christians.
How would that be a problem? Christianity has been secularised and its values have become part of the common European culture. They are one of the reasons why human rights appeared here and nowhere else on earth. You know those things that some people claim are universal and are enforced by the UN, even though, naturally, they are not recognised by Arab states or by China. It makes sense, this actually proves these values are not universal at all, and yet those who migrate to the West blackmail the West in order to get social advantages by using their own values against them.
If you migrated to Saudi Arabia and asked the authorities to recognise your Christian faith (or lack of faith) and your right to build a church, how do you think they would react? You might get your head chopped off.
The churches in Germany were heavily criticised for giving the "church asylum" by a conservative Christian party (CSU = christian-social union). It is mostly right-wing / conservative thinkers who emphasise Christian superiority.
Again, it makes sense, because the left is usually atheist. And right wing politics, ever since the first meeting of the French National Assembly, has been associated with conservatism. Is this supposed to be something that should be held against them?
I think the reasonable thing to start with is that it is an interpretation of Islam that causes problems (not "Islam" itself), and that might be a form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism. At least this is the interpretation many Islamist terrorist work with. This makes already a big difference in the debate, because you do not constantly speaking about "the Muslims".
And yet we don't have any forms of Buddhist extremist terrorism in the West or Sikhist terrorism. Wahhabism wouldn't exist without Islamism. It's a natural development of Islamism. It could be argued that it's Islamism in its purest, unadulterated, unmoderated, unmodernised form. It's a movement that goes back to the roots of Islamism, it aims at recovering that Medieval purity. It's a rejection of any form of modernity, even by using modern weaponry. And it's part and parcel of Islamism, it couldn't have evolved in any other religion, as evidence stands to support this.
Christianity was tamed over hundreds of years in Europe. It took some revolutions, the enlightenment and heavy interventions from states to make Christianity what it is today. In general, it has become a liberal, tolerant school of thought. Thanks to interpretation, but definitely not because any church planned it that way (separation of powers, divorce, abortion etc.). There have also been positive influences of the churches (concept of human dignity is much easier explained when humans are alike god).
Yep, and that's exactly the process that Islamism never went through. And there are reasons why that never happened.