Barbarism and bigotry; nothing like projecting your own personality into the 5th through the 15th centuries. Loonies who justifiied barbarism on the basis of their "magic book" . Nuts !! and crap !!.

This is a Wikipedia presentation of the middle ages which considers it in balance and hopefully you can learn something about these times . the Renaissance occurred via a return to Grecian ideals and specifically the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, et al..... Good times but the spiritual depth of the Middle ages with Aquinas and the Scholastics and the Islamic scholars such as Averroes was compelling even if you don't attempt to comprehend with today's superficiality.

This is our age and the looming difficulty with Islam stands and the difficulties have to be addressed via cogent and reasonable thought bereft of an emotional appeal to what some believe to be goodness.

The Christian ideal, that to which you live in whether you believe it or not, is not and was not a war mongering belligerent religion at any time ; history can be strange but be sure as to who your enemy really is. to generalize all religions, ala Dawkins, is egregious and merely a sign of abject ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages

Also, speak to this :

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12...es-dozens.html

I'm not generalizing all religions just christianity and islam at certain points in time.
I agree that right now islam is 100% the worst and most dangerous of the desert cults

You can talk christian ideals all you want but the spread of the faith, or a particular version of it, was mostly through the sword, similar to islam.
Combine that with the inquisition, centuries of persecutions of jews, burning of sodomites and supposed witches, cutting out tongues of blasphemers, etc.

1000 years worth ?? Man's inhumanity to man is more to the point ; you can't brush Christianity with he same stroke as Islam; it would be more to the point to perceive and characterize the differences .

The middle ages , as with any historical epoch, stands on its own moral considerations and to clarify anything would be to characterize it. A broad picture is needed without projecting present mores on another time. Mankind can rise or fall in any given cultural epoch and to state that we are superior to those times betrays an intellectual lack of clarity.

I need not state the difficulties of our times including the two great wars which killed millions along with the savior science which gave us the means to destroy the same. I guess we can go on and on with this and so I'll stop but if you want to learn of Christianity, which is individual imbued , then go to the Gospels , on your own, and gain relief from the destructive forces within our times.

Not proselytizing, but present man is so crestfallen with authority that he has great difficulty working within his own forces which are far superior to the "group enslavement" of thought in our age. LOL

Would you agree that moral progress is a gradual process and that different parts of the world differ by the speed with which this process takes place? Various viruses of the mind with different degrees of pathogenicity ****** this progress.
Fundamentalist islam takes the top spot but why do you think the dark ages are called the dark ages in Europe but not in other parts of the world?

You can keep your Gospels to yourself

Group speech again; religion is not a virus but who cares about bull **** so long as you can get it walking. The so called "dark ages" have even been reidentified by modern scholarship and the term "middle ages" is more appropriate though I dislike referencing that brand of intelligence.

"Dark ages" is more of the projecting modern hubris into the past without cause. We are so proud that the self centering glare blinds us to any semblance of truth. It makes for easy facile thinking by nondescripts who then say things like "virus" or "dark" without cause as it was learned in the alleyways of civilization, which by the way, is "group speech" of the modern man.

It would be better to look at the past without judgment and to use the past to judge in a negative sense by stating Christianity was like Islam and therefore we should wait 500 years for relief is dunderbelly thought, or no thought at all.

Morality is about the individual human being; nations and races are not within our moral sphere, only the individual. I suppose its much easier to rail against this and that group but at least speak to the individual expression of the group when passing your condemnation. As you said its done and further discussion can only go further into the quagmire.

Waiting around did not help christianity; christianity was enlightened from the outside.

Morality progresses or downgresses within societies, as a result of various factors.
Basing your morality on an ancient book is not the best path for moral progress. Thankfully most denominations of christianity have learned to pick the good parts and leave out the bad parts of their book.

When and how did they stop taking their magic book literally and why could they do it yet islam is somehow doomed to barbarism for eternity?

https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...days-refugees/

It's self-selection bias. Some people have already mentioned it with regard to Muslims in America. The people who voluntarily decide to move to the pinnacle of western civilization are of the more liberal, tolerant kind themselves; they are willing to work hard and probably already have a job lined up in many cases. I have met some of these Muslims when I was there, they are great.

So I don't really know what conclusion you wished to draw from this information.

Education leads to secularization. I don't see why it would work in the U.S. and other places with the abolition of the coverture system, but it wouldn't work in Muslim nations. The Muslims didn't invent the oppression of women, nor is it unique to them.

Pretty much my position on this whole thing.

Islam is clearly the worst of the major religions and a dangerous ideology for poor people who feel oppressed by the West to have. A lot of people seem scared to criticize it because it's not politically correct to do so. There's a large degree of intellectual dishonesty going on from the Liberals who defend it, imo. I don't know why it's so hard to admit that a predisposition towards violence does exist within Islam. That being said, I do think that poverty and ignorance are the root causes for Islamic extremism and extremism in general. Blaming it all on Islam is just too simplistic of a view, when dealing with the complexities of the real world a monocausal stance is almost certainly wrong.