Balkan Crusader wrote:Unitaristic Regions wrote:The Slavs migrated to your homeland and massacred and/or assimilated the original population. And I was talking about Christianity in general, since you referred to Islam in general.
They did not went there in a genocide spree. They intermixed with the native Illyrian population and in fact assimilated to them by accepting Christianity. It was not otherwise.
I was refering primarly to the forms in which Islam tried to penetrated to Europe and that was violent. The Ottomans were the one who tried convert as many to Islam in a violent way and even enslaved the native population, killing much natives.
And yes, Islam spreaded generally on such way. In India for instance they killed 400 million of Hindus. Christianity on ther hand had spreading in most times voluntarily. It is a great difference with Islam.
The entire American continent was Christianized by conquest. Russia and Prussia were christianized by conquest. Spain was reconquered on the Muslims and then Christianized. The Spaniards always used their superior faith as an argument to decimate indigenous populations. Russia loved using her status of 'protector of Orthodox christians' to expand the state.
I'll forgive you for misrepresenting me. I already admitted that the Slavs either assimilated or massacred the original population. What is that a process of? Colonization. Don't skewer the argument: I was saying that you were holding a double standard by hating Islam for colonizing Slavic provinces, which the Slavs themselves colonized years and years before.
And, of course, the Ottomans weren't about violent conversion. That's just something you're shouting. The only violent mass conversion they indulged in was that of the Devshirme, otherwise they tried persuasion:
In the past, Christian missionaries sometimes worked hand-in-hand with colonialism, for example during the European colonization of the Americas, Africa and Asia. There is no record of a Muslim organization corresponding to the Christian mission system under the Ottoman Empire. According to Thomas Walker Arnold, Islam was not spread by force in the areas under the control of the Ottoman Sultan.[10] Rather, Arnold concludes by quoting a 17th-century author:
Meanwhile he (the Turk) wins (converts) by craft more than by force, and snatches away Christ by fraud out of the hearts of men. For the Turk, it is true, at the present time compels no country by violence to apostatise; but he uses other means whereby imperceptibly he roots out Christianity...[10]
But on the subject of India you do seem to be right:
https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/20 ... n-history/.
I agree that Islam has had a brutally violent history. But so has Christianity. Consider the Reformation, the Albigensian crusades, the normal crusades, the colonization legitimized by faith. I'm not attacking your faith, or your people. I'm merely saying that, whatever the history of a given thing, nothing is unchangeable. Ideas are subject to change throughout time. What the history of a thing is, doesn't really matter: it's more about the question whether it has an acceptable future.
Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2016 5:56 pm
. The Crusades are a speck on history.