Doesn't Play Well With Others

is one of those notices you hate to have sent home with your kindergartener. It's an implicit threat that your child might be destined to be unpopular, an outcast, a criminal, or perhaps even a Republican. Most kids do learn at least a bit about getting along eventually, though, and few become serial killers.

The religions born of Abraham have a bit of nasty history in that regard, perhaps not so surprisingly given their origin in the worship of a tribal war god. Like many such, he was infernally jealous and intolerant of any competition, frequently commanding the extermination of whole peoples some of whom might have strayed in their devotion or not had the right accent. Check out Exodus for examples.

As his cult fragmented, as popular cults do, the various branches fell to extermination of each other, with occasional bouts of limited toleration. The rise of liberal democracy made necessary a more tolerant practice, and eventually a substantial portion of Christianity signed on, albeit grudgingly, to the notion of religious tolerance. Abe's original homeboys, dispersed and few in numbers, could also summon up at least lip service. The half-bros from the other side of the tracks had a different history, and powerful strains of intolerance still hold sway in much of the Muslim world.

One can find radically intolerant statements in Islamic law and writing, but that's not really different from Christianity and Judaism. In practice, though, at the present epoch of history, Islams intolerance is much more extreme. Neither Christians or Jews today would broadly sanction the murder of apostates, but Islam does.

In the broader panorama of history, though, Islam has frequently been quite tolerant compared to the Christianity of the day, so it's hard to believe that tolerance can't happen.

I think that the current Conservative devotion to a war against so-called "Islamfascism" is as phony and hypocritcal as Larry Craig's war against gays, but there is no doubt that there are fanatics motivated by religion trying to wage war on the West. Religious intolerance is almost certainly a fundamental obstacle to Islamic countries' freedom, modernization and adoption of democratic political institutions. It's a problem that they will probably need to solve if they aren't to be swept away, vast oil wealth notwithstanding.

Or not.