[breppp]

Jordan political system is much older than Iran, as well as the Saudis and others. Iran theocracy is a new phenomena in the Middle East, ushering the implementation era of political Islam, later continued by ISIS, Hamas and the milder Qatar and current Turkey

[reactordev]

Not debating who came first. I’m also not debating that Saudi’s are equivalent to the French to the Iranians (if they were England in my UK analogy, or Texas for the US one).

I also don’t think that, in general, there’s any animosity there just talking size and influence over the region. Iran and Saudi are/were it. It’s a really interesting dynamic of faith, tradition, authoritarianism, and manipulation.

[tomjakubowski]

> Muslims who move to Christian-majority lands do not assimilate

this is a ridiculous and false generalization, disproved by my own experience living in the United States and being friends with Muslim immigrants.

[mullingitover]

> Modern Western Christians are centuries removed from experiencing religion-as-politics.

That's news for those of us that are living through the decades-long effort by christian dominionists to take over the US.

> Western atheists, who share Christian values

It's the other way around: Christians share basic morality with people operating on morality from first principles. Plenty of western christian values are orthogonal to morality.

> Muslims who move to Christian-majority lands do not assimilate or convert.

This is false and flat-out defamatory. It's also the type of statement that gets used before bad people do a bunch of bad things.

[dj_rock]

The Catholic Church exerted strong influence in Quebec until the 1950s. Of course since then Quebec has become the most secular region in North America.