Exactly correct.
And it completely defeats your argument that Islam is simply behaving as Christianity did, and is in the same phase Christianity was 600 years ago......
That wasn't quite my argument, but it's close. All the evils of Islam you list in other posts here were implicit in it from the beginning, just as all the evils done in the name of Christianity were in Christianity, and you need only listen to Christian extremists to know that they still are. It's the loss of secular power that civilized Christianity, and there was certainly no inevitability about it, I wasn't making an argument about developmental phases. There's been nothing equivalent to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason in the Islamic world. Islam's golden age was due mostly to an unusual succession of remarkably enlightened (for their time) individuals running things, and when they were gone the more usual human follies reasserted themselves. It's as Jacob Bronowski said standing in the pond at Auschwitz: when people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave, which I would qualify by adding, when they have the power to do so. It's crucial to civilization that religion not have that power, a lesson the Islamic world hasn't learned, and it'll be much harder for it to learn that because it's quite clear in Islamic scripture that the state and the church are the same institutions, no separation is possible.
