A Christian Fatwa?

Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/):

Nicolas Almeida, a Catholic and former Mumbai municipal councillor, offered a reward of 1.1 million rupees ($25,000) for the head of author Brown, leading a Catholic journalist to compare Almeida to the Taliban.

This is obviously disturbing on its face.

It also serves as evidence for a point that I make in my classroom- all religions are, at times, taken to extremes by some individuals and groups. Since 9/11 there has been a tendency by some to characterize Islam as, by its very nature, a violent religion. Pat Robertson, for example, in his ignorance sited a certain number of passages in the Quran that dealt with violence or war. As if one could not find similar passages in the Bible. If I sited the number of such passages in the Bible, would I be justified in saying Christianity is inherently violent? Of course not.

Violence is wrong. Violence based upon religious justifications is a perversion. We need to be wary of the sense of righteousness that some can develop from their religious experience. Nothing is so dangerous as absolute certainty.

GP