Religious Zealotry Quotes
It is this verse that for some Muslims justifies terrorism against non-Muslims. See {584354} for a specific example. There are similar provisions in the Old Testament which a few extremely conservative Jews and Christians have used to advocate for blasphemy being a capital crime. Note that if an unbeliever repents and becomes a Muslim, he should be spared.
Pascal was himself a very religious man, but observed this phenomenon about many religious people.
This quotation demonstrates that religious persecution of non Muslims was a duty, This has been a characteristic of all religious persecution regardless of religion. The quotation also shows that after 600 years, the original limited tolerance the Prophet had urged for People of the Book (Jews and Christians) was waning. Instead of non-believers being tolerated if they paid the special tax and were second class citizens, leaders were urged to convert or eliminate “infidels.”
He was referring to President George W. Bush, who was not only a fundamentalist, born again Christian himself, but included people in his administration and as beneficiaries of his administration specifically because they were religious fundamentalists and in some cases kept other out even filtering for religious belief in the civil service jobs of the Justice Department itself.
Commenting on the murder of a Chinese woman:
Different Christian European powers moved in and out of alliances with each other and with the Islamic Ottoman Empire. So Christians were not unified and whenever a Christian country was at war with the Muslims some Christians perceived it as an assault on Christianity—except that there were Christian allies of the Muslims. Later many Muslims would see any conflict with a Christian country as an attack in Islam even when Muslim nations were allied with the Christians as was Turkey at the end of the 20th century. Turkey was a member of NATO and was therefore seen as traitors to Islam by some Muslims. There has always been this tendency to see conflict in terms of religious or ethnic hostility where convenient.
