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In fact, the further I get from my childhood Chrisitan indocrination, the less difference I can see among the various branches of the Abrahmaic religion.
In fact, I've just realised that if you want to run around splitting the world up into cultural groups then Europe and the Mediterranean basin and stretching through the Arab world is a natural grouping: shared religion, significant ancient trading and political links, shared philosophical and political heritage to a large extent until very recently. Then you'd end up with Asia as the other significant cultural group with India as a bridge between the two.
I suppose you'd then need American and Australian groupings, both of them significantly less linked to the rest of the world than the mainstream Asian and Western groups.
I read a novel called The Last Templar by Raymound Khoury, a "The Da Vinci Code"-esque religious conspiracy thriller (and thus of little or no historical accuracy), in which the author speculates the Knights Templar were attempting to unite the three religions into a single religion. I thought it was a pretty interesting plot line. "The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde
I would differentiate between Islam and "radical Islam. I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell. _ Blood Sweat & Tears
The West™ doesn't. Oh, they try to be polite about it, talk about "radicals", "rotten apples" yada yada, but basicially it's Islam that's "them", except for some suitably innocuous examples that can be embraced to show unprejudiced the West™ is.
In fact, I've just realised that if you want to run around splitting the world up into cultural groups then Europe and the Mediterranean basin and stretching through the Arab world is a natural grouping: shared religion, significant ancient trading and political links, shared philosophical and political heritage to a large extent until very recently.
Greek philosophy was kept alive in Arab (and persian) lands for centuries before they communicated it to the Europeans in time for the Renaissance.
Secularism ? See Turkey, and a fair share of the Arab world was ready to secularize 50 years ago. Except the people willing to secularize were commies, so the west funded the religious fundies.
Treatment of women? 30 years ago a wife couldn't open her own bank account without the husband agreeing, in France.
Most of the Arab and muslim world is undergoing a fundamentalist propaganda campaign funded by Saoudian oil. If a similar amount of money was poured into religious organisations in the West, it would very quickly unsecularise.
I'm not sure about 400 years ago, but Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
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