Reply #23: The Muslim lunatic fringe is a bit more lunatic and a hell of a lot less fringe. [View All]

The Republicans are, by and large, wishy-washy bleeding-heart liberals compared with
the governments of many (although by no means all) Islamic countries.

It is by no means the case that all Muslims are less liberal than all Christians, but if you select a random Muslim and a random Christian from around the world then on average the views of the Muslim on women's rights, gay rights, religious freedom, abortion, crime and punishment, freedom of speech etc will be quite a lot more conservative (and in my view quite a lot more wrong) than those of the Christian.

One big difference is that the vast majority (although not all) Christians support at least some degree of separation of church and state - there are plenty of nominally-Christian countries, but the Vatican is the only one which is actually run by Christian clerics. On the other hand, a relatively large (I'm ashamed to say I don't know how large) fraction of Muslims live, and want to live, in countries run by Islam.

The Bible contains generic moral precepts; the Koran contains (deeply misguided, in my view) direct instructions on how to run a society and live one's life (the OT contains those too, to be fair, but the NT makes it clear that most of those no longer apply).

It's deeply unpopular on DU to say it, but I think it's fairly clear that Islam (by which I mean "the religion practiced by Muslims", not "some notional platonic form of Islam based on an interpretation of the Koran by wester liberals, from which most real Muslims are deviating", to forestall a common objection) is on aggregate a non-trivially more unpleasant religion than Christianity. They're *not* just as bad as one another, much as many DUers would like to claim it.