I bet you’ll look cool in a burka.

So your defence of Christianity amounts to the No True Scotsman fallacy and the fact that you’re a vegetarian?

You’re mistaking the rules set up by an Islamic state for rules defined by Islam – the two are not the same. And defining a religion by the actions of a few people is simply risible.

If you’re going to wilfully misrepresent statistics, let’s play at that for a while. America imprisons a greater proportion of its population than China and North Korea, thus communist dictatorships are more open societies than America’s. You see how this works?

I think the major problem is your insistence on a faulty double standard born through you being misinformed and hence prejudiced.

Religious labels are self-selecting, meaning that you apply the label to yourself, and that’s pretty much how it comes about. Labels are, after all, just words, and words are only wind.

Muslim can’t mean “follows the Koran to the letter” if Christian doesn’t mean “follows the Bible to the letter”. A Muslim is, by the standard of the Koran, anyone who believes, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad was His prophet.” Saying this in front of witnesses, an act called “Shahada” is what makes one a Muslim. This is the equivalent to the Lord’s Prayer, and the singular act required for conversion to Islam.

“Islam” in Arabic means, “surrender” with different meanings. For conservative Muslims (the minority) this means, “The women surrender to men, the men surrender to their prophet and the prophet surrenders to God and children are beneath everyone.” For moderate, liberal and the vast majority of American-Muslims this means surrendering to God through daily prayer, fasting once a year, charity to those less fortunate, the daily struggle to recognize and be faithful to God’s teachings and pilgrimage to Mecca once in your life (which is no less than visiting Rome or Jerusalem/ Bethlehem).

X-Number Daily Prayer of “Shahada” et alia, Fasting during Ramadan, Charity to the Poor, The Daily Struggle to be Faithful, and Pilgrimage to Mecca, are known as the Five Pillars of Islam. They are ultimately more the basis for what is and is not a Muslim than the Koran could be as the vast majority of Muslims do not understand Classical Arabic, much like most Christians do not understand Hebrew, Greek or Latin. What I’ve just described, these Five Pillars, I find to be completely compatible and in no way offensive to my own Christian faith. While I do not observe any of these myself apart from perhaps pilgrimage and then certainly not to Mecca, I find them to all be admirable.

You claim to follow the teachings of Christ, and then you spill forth nothing but hate and fear, two emotions that are the antithesis of the teachings of Christ. I’m not going to assert that you’re not a Christian, because, as written before, these are only self-selecting labels. Although, depending on what particular type of Christianity you subscribe to, other Christians may consider you an apostate and a heretic. Personally, I believe that Jesus teaches us to love our fellow man (on whatever level we are able to) no matter what they believe.

I would love to fulfill your request that I provide actual Bible verses, but you haven’t complied with my request to provide actual examples of “the majority of Muslims are going to start demanding that Sharia law be instituted, and violence will break out.” Furthermore, just as a little logic test, if Jesus renders the Old Testament moot, what becomes of the Ten Commandments?

There’s a wonderful counter example to “the majority of Muslims are going to start demanding that Sharia law be instituted, and violence will break out”. In Canada, the government proposed passing a law that would have allowed religious communities to govern themselves by their own religious laws (ergo Muslims could institute Sharia law). Canadian-Muslims actively campaigned against this proposed law, saying that if this law were passed, they would move to America, where legally no such thing could ever happen.

Instead of me just giving the verses in question to you, I request that you do some biblical scholarship, and look at the differences between Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. All four were written either decades and leagues apart from one another, each for wildly different audiences, and all four contradict one another. You shouldn’t have any problem with this request, as all I’m asking you, from one Christian to another, is for you to read the Good Book more closely, or barring that, read the thoughts of some biblical scholars on the Bible.

“The reason the things you mentioned were abolished is because brave people stood up for justice.” Yes, even though similar things still happen in America, “brave people” includes people of all faiths, and “justice” means basic human rights. Also, that one sentence is an incredibly poor response to what I’ve said, lacking in both rigor and usefulness. What does that have to do with anything, anyways?

Do you agree that Christians and Jews also commit horrific acts? There are consistent reports of human rights abuses committed by Israel. The history of the Christian religion is so full of bloodshed that simply trying to recount each major act of violence in an exhaustive fashion would be beyond exhausting, and likely impossible. There’s this English guy called Cromwell, he was SUPER Christian (at least in his own mind), and he slaughtered thousands.

Muslims will never be control of America. Religions cannot control America. Our Constitution prohibits this. If you are unfamiliar with why exactly this is, you should read the Constitution sometime. The rest of your hypothetical exercise is grounded entirely in gross speculation and paranoia, and I find myself incapable of taking it seriously.

Christians make up the vast majority of our prison population, a higher percentage in fact than the percentage of the general population that self-identifies as Christian. Should I declare that all criminals in America are Christian, or worse, that all Christians in America are (at least statistically more likely to be) criminals? No. This would be stupid, counter-productive, and above all else, prejudicial.

Algebra, modern medicine (including surgery and especially pharmacology), and nearly every piece of scientific information the Greeks and Romans learned that we still have today, we have largely because of Islam, which has historically taught that God gave us a brain in order to further our knowledge of His Universe. When Christians were splitting open the skull and salting the brain to kill a demon in order to treat headaches, the Muslims were prescribing the direct precursor to aspirin.

While Christians ignored mathematics for nigh on a millennium, Muslims invented Algebra (which is derived from an Arabic word meaning “restoration”). A large part of the scientific and mathematical information gleaned from the Greeks was kept in Cordoba, Spain. Christians only retrieved this information when the Moors were chased out of Spain. When we were dumping our feces into the streets, the Muslims had running water, and sophisticate water filtration system.

This was our (Europeans’) dark age. Currently Islam is in a bit of a dark age (apart from controlling the majority of global oil production). In a century or so, Muslims could be caught up with the rest of the world, and truly ready to join our modern secular societies. This “Arab Spring” and what’s going on in Libya may be their “Boston Tea Party” and “Boston Massacre”. Instead of saying things that boil down to, “All Muslims are violent maniacs”, it is far more productive to encourage them to catch up with us. Some Muslim countries, like Turkey, already extend basically the same rights to women that America does. Your “What oppressive theocracy? The theocracy found in the Koran, the Muslim’s Holy Book?” argument is demonstrably rooted in ignorance. Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, are all democracies with large numbers of Muslims. Yes, they have some draconian laws, and their governments are completely [expletive deleted] up, but name a country you couldn’t say this about.

I will fully admit that Muslims are capable of great evil, but only because Homo Sapiens as a species are capable of great evil. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Rastafarian, Pastafarian, Zoroastrian, Pagan, Agnostic, Jain, Sikh, and all of the other thousand religions I’m forgetting, all of these peoples are capable of evil. All of these groups have committed evil acts. They are all also capable of goodness and compassion, and for that, I will not condemn them all. This is something I personally learned from the teachings of Jesus Christ. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and in our global world, all of these people are our neighbors. Not all Muslim men beat their wives, just like not all, but some Christian men beat their wives. I would be equally fair in asserting that Christianity tells men to beat their wives as I would Islam.

This is the biggest cop-out I have ever seen in an argument. You ignore all of my points (likely because I’ve torn your argument to pieces, but you lack the courage to admit defeat), and instead write, “Oh yeah, well it takes one to know one!” This called a “Tu Quoque” and it is a horrible logical fallacy.

“Also, you are obviously very close-minded.” Yes, I’m close-minded for using facts to expose your ignorance. Also, how closed or open-minded I am has nothing to do with the validity of my argument. This is called an “ad hominem” attack, and it is another logical fallacy.

I was really impressed for awhile there, you were debating with more skill than I usually see from people who spout this nonsense, which was all the more impressive because of your young age. Initially I was doubtful that you actually were just a middle school student. Then you made this response, and it became pretty clear you’re still a child.

Being intelligent isn’t about never being wrong; it’s about having the courage to admit when you’ve been incorrect or misinformed.