sr. member
Activity: 378
Merit: 250
When the Middle and Dark Ages ended, and the Renaissance came about (much, in part, to the Arab Caliphates and Sultanates that had preserved the works of Aristotle, Plato and others and passed them, after their conquest of Constantinople to Christian scholars in the west) then the Church reflected the excesses of the Renaissance, both in positive and negative fashion. The Christian Church has certainly impacted the development of Western Europe, but Western Europe's development (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel comes to mind here: make the connections) impacted the Church far more. KC asks which we'd rather live in--Christian or Islamic countries--with the implication that the religion is responsible for the successful development of Christian countries versus those of Islam, but Diamond's thesis is, trust me, far safer than any psychotic screed that KC might manage to pen.
The same is true of Islam. Islam has followed the development of the countries it has spread to. The military strength of the west was enough to save Europe, the steppes of the lower Russias was enough to prevent massive invasions north after the Mongols and the Golden Khanate, and so Christianity was preserved. But where Islam could spread, it encountered societies barely advanced beyond stone age implements, and had a hard enough job laying the least veneer of civilization on them. And of course, in things like female circumcision, it adopted stone age customs as a consequence, in those areas, of being molded by those societies.
These societies ranged from the Berbers in Morocco to the Mongols and Turks coming in from the Eurasian plains. Christianity appeared, and was adopted into and radically transformed, by the highest civilization running in the world at that time (China's Han Dynasty having collapsed right about the time Augustus ruled and Christ was born). Islam, instead, bore the brunt of the eastern invasions, and as those semi-civilized invaders were tamed, in order to tame them sufficiently to live amongst civilized Arabs, some of their customs were accepted into Islam. These customs, of course, were those of peoples living an extremely harsh life by comparison with the civilized Romans, so to expect Islam to have been able to adopt, from the Turks or Berbers, the same sort of thought and theology that the Christians were able to adopt from the Greek philosophers is simply silly.
The primary impetus for Islam today is drawn from the alienation, backwardness and repression of the states in which it operates. Saddam wasn't an Islamist, he crushed them, and when his hand was removed, we see the reaction of the people in that country, broken down not along religious lines, really, but amongst their natural ethnicities and territorial locales: it is not religion driving the conflict; it is merely the excuse for various power groupings to dance their way to the ultimate fate of the state of Iraq, as many surmise, a breakup into three states. When the Shia kill the Sunnis, that's not Islam at work, that's politics at work, with Islam being a convenient cloak.