{"id":1793,"date":"2005-08-21T13:15:55","date_gmt":"2005-08-21T20:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/21\/no-big-difference-between-the-two\/"},"modified":"2005-08-21T13:15:55","modified_gmt":"2005-08-21T20:15:55","slug":"no-big-difference-between-the-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1793","title":{"rendered":"No big difference between the two"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me personally, there are really only very few differences between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Race and ethnicity are the obvious ones, then there’s the language gap, fashion, and location of course of where you are likely to find them. Pretty much both are laden with extremism, hatred, intolerance, misogyny, and an appetite for a little war-mongering good time. Oh and they’re both monotheistic, patriarchal, with rigid social expectations and standards, carved out of their religious dogma. And not forgetting the elephant in the room, both clearly think that they are correct in their faiths and god<\/em> is on their side, no matter what they do. Anyway, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon<\/a><\/strong> goes further into detail on this, by noting the current situation in Iraq and its key-players on both fundie sides….<\/p>\n

Now that it looks like Iraq is going to go the way of Iran and Saudi Arabia and have the government run by misogynistic fundamentalists, I think it’s time to reconsider the roles of the religions known as Christianity and Islam in this entire fiasco. The hateful, scary, sexist fundamentalists of both religions are dead sure that the other religion is the opposite of theirs but I would argue that in fact fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam differ only in the details. Both worship the same deity–male-dominated authoritarianism. The theological dressing is just a means to that end.<\/p>\n

If you look at it from that angle–that fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians are just two flavors of the same patriarchal religion–then one thing becomes quite obvious. The winners of the Iraqi War are not the Americans and not the Iraqis, but the fundamentalists. On both sides of the conflict, fundamentalists have been able to use this war as leverage to make progress towards their ideal society–a strict hierarchy where the men on top of society have absolute power over other men and men have absolute power over women.<\/p>\n

From that viewpoint, the war ended up being a win-win situation for pious power-mongerers both both nations. If I were conspiratorially minded, I would almost think they planned it that way. But I’m not. Instead I’d suggest that the fundie power-mongerers in both nations simply and accurately concluded that there was no downside to escalating the hate on both sides.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So it’s the Crusades meets Jihad deja vu<\/em>, all over again? Yes, this is a ‘win-win’ for both fundie groups, because they want that hatred to thrive and become even stronger, in order to meet their desired ends to this conflict. Because you know, both think their<\/em> side is right in all of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me personally, there are really only very few differences between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Race and ethnicity are the obvious ones, then there’s the language gap, fashion, and location of course of where you are likely to find … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,40,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservative-zaniness-right-wingers-etc","category-international-issues","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}