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Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword.

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And on a related note:

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From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.

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Ack! so much to dispute, so little time! Thanks for posting this, al-Q.

On thing that particularly struck me was the way he equated massacres and looting of European Jews with "collateral damage" in American bombings of Iraqi targets. Of course, as a military policy, they "don't want" to kill and maim women, children and non-combatants, but they do...Jesus....

And as a former evangelical, it angers me to see how the movement has become integrated with militarism and power...it didn't used to be that way, believe me. We used to think that if Christianity had survived over the centuries, it was in spite of stuff like the Crusades, the Inquisition, mercantilism, splintering into various sects etc. - not because of it. Chrisse...

I adored this sentence in the last link you provided:

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The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally.

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