Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

I'm not glossing over the atrocities being committed especially against women in Muslim countries, TEEEJ. Do you remember that I started that thread about a young woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes because she had been raped when she had accepted a ride in a car which was not driven by one of her male relatives?

However, while I'm very interested in why the oppression of women is so severe in many Muslim countries, it is true that my interest in how Christianity treats women is even greater. And the reason for why I'm so interested is that I grew up very close to people who were, in some respects, flaming fundamentalists. Except they weren't flaming and fuming, exactly. You can't get past the fact that my relatives lived and live in Sweden, which is a massively secular country. As a Christian fundamentalist in Sweden, you can be only so angry in public until all the secular Swedes start laughing at you. And since nobody wants to be laughed at all my relatives were well-behaved, but their beliefs were no less scary in spite of that.

And do you know what, TEEEJ? When the revolution happened in Iran in 1979, when the Shah had to flee and the U.S. Embassy was occupied and all those seemingly millions of people took to the streets and screamed and shouted and demanded a Muslim revolution, then I watched the spectacle in absolute horror:



I was so horrified because I realized that those screaming and shouting people who were dead set on taking the law in their own hands in the name of God and punish others and have their own way in the name of their religion, they could have been my own relatives. Yes, this is exactly what could have happened in my own back yard if Sweden hadn't been the secularized, modern society that it is.

I grew up terrified of my relatives. I felt that I could never quite foresee when I had done something that could make them sentence me to hell. Like when I had sewn a button on a blouse on a Sunday. Or when I formulated a forbidden word in my mind, never saying it, but thinking it. What if my relatives could read my mind? And what about the fact that my mother had contacted a children's theater group and made me join it? We performed an H.C. Andersen fairy tale on stage. And yet my mother impressed on me that I must never, ever, ever let my relatives know that I was doing this, because they would be horrified beyond belief and perhaps renounce our entire family for ever.

When I was eight years old my grandfather told me that Jesus was coming back any night now to bring his faithful ones to heaven. I knew without a doubt that I would never be let in there. I slept badly for months, wondering if it was tonight that Jesus would come and take my parents away from me.

Occasionally, very occasionally, my parents forced me to go to a Pentecostalist service with my relatives, for my relatives' sake. I was petrified with fear. The church was packed with people, everyone swaying and murmuring and shouting and crying. What if they suddenly "sensed" me, like a predator might sense a prey? What would they do to me if they suddenly sensed me sitting among them?

The reason why fundamentalist religions interest and frighten me so much is that I grew up so very close to such a group of people myself. And my impression remains that Christian fundamentalists are not so different from Muslim fundamentalists in their religous zest, and maybe in their wish to punish others. What separates the Christian fundamentalists in the West from the Muslim fundamentalists - what really, really separates them - is that they want to fit in a society that is basically secular, and that doesn't respect the kind of religious zeal that goes beyond a certain level. Western societies and western thoughts and traditions rein its Christian fundamentalists in. Muslim societies don't always do that with its Muslim fundamentalists, for a variety of reasons.

But when I was a kid I kept hoping that if my relatives and their Pentecostalist congregation finally "sensed" me, like a predator may sense a prey, then my parents would see what they tried to do to me and call the police. I trusted that there was a police force out there which wouldn't let the Pentecostalist do whatever they wanted with me, even though they may have felt that they had been given religious authority from God himself to deal with sinners here on Earth.

And that is why the separation between church and state is so incredibly important to me.

Ann