Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Poll: Christians Are Much More Likely to Condone Violence Than Muslims or Atheists
Preface: I personally come from a Judeo-Christian background, and am not Muslim. This post is not criticizing Christians as whole as being violent, nor to promote atheism or any particular religion.
As Christian writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck explained, there are different stages of spiritual maturity. Fundamentalism - whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu fundamentalism - is an immature stage of development. There are peaceful, contemplative Muslim sects - think the poet Rumi the poet and Sufis - and violent sects, just as there are contemplative Christian orders and violent Christian groups (and peaceful and violent atheists).
Muslims do not hold a monopoly on terrorism, as the Norwegian mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh, Adolph Hitler and those pushing for nuclear war against Arab countries (and torture of Arab suspects) show.
The Egyptian revolution demonstrated that most Arabic peoples want the same things we do: a freedom, prosperity and stability.
A major new poll reinforces these facts.
As Raw Story reports today:
New data from polling firm Gallup shows that out of all the religious groups in the U.S., Muslims are most likely to reject violence, followed by the non-religious atheists and agnostics.
Through interviews with 2,482 Americans, Gallup found that 78 percent of Muslims believe violence which kills civilians is never justified, whereas just 38 percent of Protestant Christians and 39 percent of Catholics agreed with that sentiment. Fifty-six percent of atheists answered similarly.
When Gallup put the question a bit more pointedly, asking if it would be justified for "an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians," the responses were a bit more uniform. Respondents from nearly all groups were widely opposed to such tactics, with Protestants and Catholics at 71 percent against. Muslims still had the highest number opposed, at 89 percent. Seventy-six percent of atheists were also opposed.
2 comments:
→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).
→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).
→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:
-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over
-- Comments that explicitly call for violence
→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.
Posts
Usually I like reading your blog but today I have to say that this is a bad post.
ReplyDeleteEven a second grade student would recognize that such an all-encompassing statement is wrong. It really does not matter whether you are talking about Christians or Muslims in this respect.
In summary: this post is wrong, the poll is wrong and you do not need this to prove your point that Muslims do not have a monopoly on terror.
The most important major difference between Christianity and Islam is simply how long it took them to go from faiths to institutions - Islam did in a generation what it took Christianity several hundred years.
ReplyDeletehttp://tremblethedevil.com/?p=1590