I don’t know of any Christian law that recommends the death penalty for people who want to leave the religion…. and it is quite telling that one has to go back hundreds of years to find relevant examples.
Besides, we don’t have public surveys from the 18th century (say). So, we can only speculate about how many ordinary Christians wanted to put apostates to death.
Also, even if we were to discover that 17th century Christians were hateful people, to me it would prove that Christianity is a hateful ideology too, not prove that everything is okay with Islam !
I do agree that American muslims are very tolerant. I will take your word that Indian muslims are tolerant too. So ?
Muslims, like all people, will inevitably be influenced by the culture of their home country. To judge Islam, I must look at countries where the vast majority of people are muslims, right ?
If we discover that muslims are most tolerant in those countries where the influence of Islam on the culture is least, that would be a huge indictment of Islam. Don’t you agree ?
I can’t agree with the thesis that India’s development is responsible for the tolerance of Indian muslims. I looked up the list of countries by GDP per capita and India, despite the recent surge, is pretty low on the list.
Were Indian muslims less tolerant in say… 1980 when the country was poorer ? I don’t think so.
The regional thesis is hard to digest as well. Israel is in the middle east too and Israelis, to my knowledge are not into beheading people who leave Judaism (Heck, most Israelis I know are atheists)
“We do know that most of the Arab nations are not even Democratic.”
Democracy has nothing to do with tolerance.
And given that other data point, it might be a good thing that they are not democratic.
When a majority of people in a country are intolerant, intolerance will be the law of the land.
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Stop Islam 247 