re: #356 NC Gray

I am curious, have any of the folks who claim this is a constitutional issue ever tried to build a church? Because it seems to me that this project is being fast tracked in a way that even a Christian church would not be…

In the relatively small suburban southern city where I live it took my church 4 years of planning and nearly $300,000 cost (survey, architectural etc.) before we ever broke ground. After approval came we had to purchase two other parcels of land and make our paved parking area approximately 85% of the size it needed to be for our congregation size.

It never occurred to us complain to the city/county planning board that we were entitled to build where we wanted in the manor that we saw fit.

What I see here relating to the Islamic faith is a large amount of cognitive dissidence related to what Muslims believe regarding the level to which they can impose their believes on other Muslims or non Muslims. I wonder if liberal / progressives simply view issues like this as triangulation (the enemy of my enemy is my friend). And if so if one day we have Sharia law here in the US and women are forced to where burqas and Jews, liberal Christians (conservative Christians will be dead) other faiths have to pay the jizyah, will you guys look back and think the conservatives might have had a point?

If conservatives are ever to have a point, it has to be a reality-based point. Liberals absolutely have the high ground when it comes to wanting a better world. The only objection that can be raised is that wishing something true doesn’t make it so, and that liberal wish-lists have repeatedly gone terribly awry.

Your scenario is implausible. How will a nation that is, apart from trace ingredients, a mix of resolute adherents to faiths other than Islam, and liberals who rate freedom highly and religion as suspect, embrace Islam? Neither of our two major camps has core beliefs that are compatible with that.

Supposing we go ahead with our old plan, the one we’ve had all along, to let religions recruit by any means short of kidnapping and brainwashing. Suppose Saudi Arabia funds the establishment of mighty mosques at the heart of all our cities, as well as recruitment drives in prisons, shopping centers, and county fairs. So what? The Muslim recruiter in the U.S. is tilling stony ground. The fanatical Islamist Muslim recruiter is trying to grow canteloupes in Death Valley.

The prospect of Sharia law in the U.S., along with mass execution of conservative Christians, is just not realistic. It even ignores the doctrinal point that if somehow Islam came to mastery, conservative Christians would be more tolerable to our hypothetical new masters than would liberal Christians, much less liberal atheists.