No Clean Hands – the Rise of the Christian and Islamic “Empires”…

If you check out the following graph that depicts the breakdown of world religions, two clear winners emerge….eating up over half of the “pie.” Christianity and Islam.  Together they account for 55% of the world’s population.  That is a big chunk. 

 

 

An article in the Huffington Post (the namesake of this series) claims the reason is

....both Christianity and Islam owe their global success not so much to the magic words in their scriptures as to their effectiveness in practicing forced conversions. Oh, yes, we all know about the growth of the Islamic Empire, whose berobed foot-soldiers held a scimitar in one hand and the Quran in the other. But pull that beam out of your eye, dear Christian reader, and remember the Celts, the West Africans, the Indians of the Plains, the Hawaiians, and countless other peoples whose religions and languages were violently suppressed that they might know salvation through “our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In my journeys around the internet…while reading up on the controversy of the “mosque at ground zero”…. I came across many articles, comments and blog posts warning that the goal of Islam is to take over the US and institute Sharia Law. Many see this as a real threat.

Recently, I’ve been revisiting a topic I first ran across a while back (and wrote about here on this blog)…the Dominionists….the Christian Reconstructionists…the “take America back for God” folks. They  come in many flavors and degrees..but their goal is to make American a theocracy and institute Biblical Law.  Their interpretation of Biblical Law is very literal and very narrow.  Some advocate reinstituting Biblical punishments like the stoning of homosexuals, adulterers etc. (Sound similar to the oppression found in many middle eastern countries?  The Taliban by another name is still the Taliban.)

And the thing is…the history of both religions is tainted with forced conversions, tyranny, oppression, and theocratic rule. 

Pot…meet kettle.