Pajamas Putziness.

Please make it stop.

Despite all of the rhetoric that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, the two religions have very different, even incompatible, conceptions of who He is.

In Christianity, God does not break his promises. In Islam, God is mercurial. He is all powerful and not constrained by things he said earlier. Christ said he was the son of God, enjoined Peter not to fight the Romans who had come to take him hostage and sacrificed himself to lift God’s punishment from the rest of humanity. Islam denies that God has a son, Muhammed led a war against other Arab tribes, and Allah can be both compassionate and vengeful. And so on. The differences between these two religions on the fundamental nature of God are powerful and significant.

We do ourselves no favors by putting on politically correct blinders. Islam is not to Christianity as Methodism is to Episcopalianism. Islam deserves our intellectual respect and understanding. Multiculturalists, in their desire to reduce Islam to hippie platitudes, do themselves, Muslims and the rest of us no service.

I'm no expert on Islam, but Dick is obviously totally ignorant of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament God, who is exceedingly vengeful and mercurial. And it should be noted that Republican pro-war Christianists seem much more aligned with that God, in all his Levitican glory, than the pacifist carpenter who preached turning the other cheek and feeding the poor.

Besides, these details of the various beliefs Dick describes are irrelevant -- it comes down to how, if at all, these beliefs inform actual practice. Did the fact that Christians believe that God has a son lead to Crusaders to behead Muslim women and children or torture Spanish Jews?