"Patrick, take a moment to examine the world around you from
outside of your owl fishbowl. Some terrible things have been done in the name of Islam (and in the name of everything else ever conceived)"
Tell me when Christians start flying planes into buildings, sparky, and then we'll talk. Your "owl fishbowl" is pure projecting. You're the one who's been feed bullshit by the dhimmedia about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance and love and all the nasty extremists stirred up by the evil West (the culture which gave you and me the Oddworld games, human rights, freedom of speech, and virtually all cultural advancements since 1800.
"and yet there are still devout believers who stand against all that, and have to defend their religion against the terrorists and war criminals who shame them, and those like you who paint them all with the same brush because of them."
BOOHOO! I'M A BIG MEANIE BRUSH MAN! WAAAA!
(
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=6421)
"Ask yourself- why do they do that?"
Because they feel embarrased that their faith and a significant minority to large majority are totally batshit nuts.
"It's because they believe that there is something worth defending in their faith. Please, please
please, for a nonspecific deity's sake, try looking at it from an angle other than your own. Examine the beauty in it, what is good, rather than simply condemning it."
I suppose I should look at the beauty of NAMBA too? The beauty of the Church of Satan? Virtually all good in Islam was lifted from other religions.
"To view the world in black and white is as bad a philosophy as that which you see in that black."
Asking a religious believer to not see things in black and white is like asking a smoker to stop smoking.
Also, Zerox, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jack Chick, infanticide clinic bombers, Fred Phelps, James Dobson, Jim Robinson (Freerepublic guy) are all Protestants. Mother Theresa, St Augustine, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, are all Catholics. Catholics do not believe gays must burn or Muslims should be shot. That's a total strawman.