Comparative religion

For a provocative take on the differences between the great religions, you can't get much better and more succinct than this paragraph from a Christmas article in American Spectator:

All religions are not alike. Christianity, as it happens, is religion built around forgiveness. "Turn the other cheek," "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" -- you don't have to look very far. All this may seems natural, routine, inevitable -- maybe even boring to educated people -- but it is not universal. Hinduism is a religion that established a caste system and revolves around helping people escape the great chain of being. Buddhism is a reform of Hinduism that rejected the caste system but still seeks escape from the suffering of being by attaining non-being. Islam is a religion built on forced conversion and conquest. It does not put a value on forgiveness. The Shi'ia have still not forgiven the Sunni for the death of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D.

Well, I am betting that characterisation of Islam would have Karen Armstrong frothing at the mouth, and to be honest, I don't really know how fair it is. All of the article is interesting, though, and worth reading.

It does seem to me, as I may have said somewhere here before, that Christianity and Islam as religions must have had to approach violence from two opposite directions. In the former, being founded by a "peacenik" whose closest brush with violence was overturning some tables, the religion that follows him had to rationalise against pacificism as the apparent default position.

Islam, on the other hand, being created by a political warrior figure, has to come up with reasons why not to resort to violence as a legitimate way of promoting itself. (Of course there are parts of the Koran that emphasize the merits of peace, and Armstrong claims - with questionable accuracy, apparently - that at the end of his life Mohammed renounced violence, but my point is still valid I reckon.)

I am surely not the first person to make this point, but what the heck.