Intolerance

Submitted by Ronald Ng (Singapore), Dec 30, 2011 at 21:24

I have never argued against the fact of the the many, many intolerant acts of militant Islam. i was trying to say the well spring of what happened in history, when one group of people did terrible things to other groups, the people usually were imbued with an intolerant sense of their own righteousness and correct actions. The religious wars of the West, the burning of witches, the punishment for apostasy in the West, didn't these take place as well, and was during a time when there was absolute belief in the correctness of the Church? If you read Kramer and Sprenger's "Malleus Maleficarum", the handbook for witch hunters of the 15th century, you will find a similar mindset to many of the mind sets that are occurring in the more fundamental Islamic world today.

In feudal China, there was a well known law of executing relations of the 9th degree for treason. During the Qing dynasty, there was a class of crime known as "literary crime" and a famous case was of an examiner who set an Imperial Exam question with four letter, and unfortunately, of the four letters, two of them happened to be very similar to the Emperor's name except that the top part of the name were not there. (I can't explain it to you without writing this in Chinese, which I will be most happy to do so if you tell me you can read Chinese.). He was beheaded because he was accused of secretly beheading the Emperor in his essay question!

Read the conquest of Central America by the Spaniards, of the forced conversion of the native Americans by the Catholic priests. Were they not similar to the forced conversion of the people conquered by Islamic nation around the time of the expansion of the Islamic empire?

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".