We shall not be moved

We've all said before that Islam is a religion that's stuck in the seventh century, and it refuses to budge. That's why it comes in for such a panning on questioning blogs such as this.

But now a theologian has come out and said it. According to The Times, "Professor Hans Kung, a leading Roman Catholic and theologian from Germany, warned in a lecture of a 'deadly threat to all humankind unless new efforts are made to build bridges with Islam'."

This is a problem, he said in London, because, unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam has never undergone a "serious religious reformation".

"In the face of the deadly threat to all humankind," he tells the paper, "instead of building new dams of hatred, revenge and enmity, we should tear down the walls of prejudice stone by stone and thus build bridges of dialogue, bridges particularly towards Islam."

But how do you do that with a religion that wants to see gays killed in cruel ways, that sees women as way down the scale of importance, that moans and whinges as soon as someone draws an image of its founding mojo man? Do you just do what local authorities and police forces and other agencies have done, and simply kowtow to its increasing demands?

Many of its adherents won't be happy till British and other Western laws change to accommodate Islamic practices, and one sometimes wonders how long it will be before Islam rules the roost and the other Abrahamic religions are told to bugger off.

Just how do you engage in give and take with a religion like that? We'll stone a poof if you let us draw a cartoon? We'll all eat cruelly slaughtered animals if you promise not to wail in the streets on Fridays?

Professor Kung is being overoptimistic.

Then there's the issue of doctrinal differences. As a letter writer in today's Independent points out (he's talking, though, about Tony Blair's Faith Foundation):

[T]he Jewish faith holds that the Messiah has yet to come, the Christians assert that he has already come, in the person of Jesus Christ, and the Muslims accept that Jesus was a prophet, but believe that the Koran is God's last word on the subject, a view denied by both Jews and Christians.

That's a pretty fundamental disagreement.

You can say that again!