Dueling Religions

 ISLAM CND CHRISTIANITY, the two dominant religions on Earth, enjoy a combined following of nearly four billion souls. Of the two, Christianity has the slightly larger following, but with the next generation Islam will almost certainly surpass its rival, since Islam is growing and Christianity is not. In Europe and North America the Christian faith is actually declining in numbers as secularization accompanies modernization, and the non religious millennial generation comes of age. They share in common many fundamental characteristics, including the ultimate source of their origins. Many of the same fundamental tenets are enshrined within the scriptural dogma of both; these two Abrahamic traditions are far more similar then different. This makes what is doubtless their most dramatic, tragic, and destructive common characteristic all the more senseless and inexplicable; their mutual and extreme historical antipathy for each other, historical and contemporary. They more appropriately should consider each other as separate denominations of the same religion. In the Islamic scripture, Jesus is mentioned twenty seven times, each time as a great prophet. That alone should be sufficient to endear Islam to Christians. And yet, from the moment of Islam's genesis in the seventh century, the Christian world has responded to the younger faith with violent opposition, as a usurping upstart of which to be jealous and for which to have nothing but utter contempt. Thus confronted, Islam, which like Christianity embraces the dubious doctrine that all faiths but its own are heretical and false, was forced, in a sense, to respond in kind, to defend itself from Christian aggression. Their mutual enmity has never waned, and flourishes in the supposedly more civilized twenty first century. That neither perceives the reality that each is nothing other than one of many vastly imperfect systems of embracing creation's creator in a world in which thousands of such religions flourish is the greatest testament to the primitive barbarity of both. The mostly overlooked reality that no religion on Earth of the thousands extent offers in its dogma anything remotely resembling a reasonably accurate explanation for the existence of and description of nature by twenty first century standards, and indeed by seventeenth century standards, should be sufficient reason to discard them all, and to simply accept modern science as our best vehicle, though yet imperfect, for an elucidation and the admiration of the universe and its mysterious, unknown creator. If not, the senseless, vicious, never ending internecine violence assuredly is.