France is a nanny state, seemingly overly protective of its citizens, as so many other countries with high standards of living, particularly superior health and education systems, and publics willing to pay for them.
For all that, I was surprised 10 or 12 years ago when a major Canadian private family corporation, world leader McCains, said France was the best of the 42 countries they do business with: slow, bureaucratic but ethical.
Miller, I admire persons of faith, either way. Christians, Jews and Muslims abide generally by their holy books. Heretics thrive among Catholics and Protestants, Shias and Sunnis etc by reading The Word differently for their purposes.
There’s a lot of similarity within the three Abrahamic religions. As in many Jewish texts, the Qu’ran recognizes Jesus as a prophet but not His divinity because---according to some scholars ---it would be a renunciation of monotheism.
The Qu’ran mentions the flood and the aborted sacrifice of Abraham’s son (although he’s not given a name) and, perhaps more germane to our discussion, nowhere does the Qu’ran refer to jihad in the sense of holy war or a legal system called sharia.
Muslim terrorism casualties are less than a gnat’s eyelash compared to those of colonization and “regime change“ of British, French, Portuguese, Spanish and American empires now all in decline, and the West has given up on having kids.
So, yes, by democratic means Muslims may have sovereignty, doing as they do in my province, working hard as community leaders, where Arabic is the second language in the capital of Halifax, the last time I looked. We’re proud of them.
Where to begin....
First King, the problem IS that Muslims are abiding generally by their holy book. That, in a nutshell, is the problem. Because their holy book and their prophet are both rather specific about what they are supposed to do with us infidels.
And secondly, it is disingenuous to compare the behavior of colonizing Christians over the last 450 years with Islamic terrorists' killing over the last 30-40.
How about we compare outward Islamic aggression against non Islamic cultures since 800 AD and the same for Christians. Forgetting the Islamic aggression towards Europe, unprovoked Islamic genocide against Hindus on the Indian subcontinent over the last 900 years makes everything else pale in comparison.
Additionally, the Christian Reformation and then the Enlightenment set Christians on a path of denouncing their past excesses and, said in a more modern vernacular, cleaning up our act. Muslims are centuries away from that kind of thinking. And those Muslims that do, do so because of the example of Western Christian morality.
