Saturday, July 17, 2004

When I first read Jesus and Jihad by Nicholas Kristof I thought, "Wow, he's right".  Then I woke up this morning and thought, no - there's a huge difference between Jesus and Jihad.
 
In jihad, Islamic fundamentalists are told to kill the infidels right now.  Humans killing humans with the hope of getting to heaven.  It's even better if you commit suicide while killing infidels!
 
The evangelical "End of Days" has non-believers dying of super-natural causes in an event that can only happen if they turned out to be 100% correct in their prophecies.  Not only that, evangelicals don't want everyone to die, they want everyone to have everlasting life by believing in Jesus.   Bigots may shun those of other religions instead of trying to convince them to convert, but I honestly believe this is a minority.  And, having my choice, I'd rather be pestered to death than have my head lopped off.
 
And if evangelical prophecies are correct, and the End Times come, I will have been wrong as a Jew and if Jesus thinks I should get death, that's His decision to make. 
 
Luckily for me, others who are more thoughtful than I have summed it up quite nicely:
 
This kind of theological equivalence is the idiot stepchild of the moral equivalence that the learned pundits used to preach regarding the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And just as moral equivalence played into the bloody hands of the Communists, so theological equivalence plays into the hands of the jihadists, attempting as it does to blunt the force of the moral argument against them.
 

  
 

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