“Forced Conversions? Hey, no prob, man!”

Hey, that Spanish Inquisition, that was pretty bad, what with forcing folks to convert to Catholicism or die, huh?

Good thing stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore…or, you know, if it does it’s no big deal! It’s not like they’re burning people at the stake or anything, right? It’s not like during the Crusades when a captured Christian soldier might have his feet boiled in oil unless he claimed “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet…”

It’s all so civilized, now. Sure, you might get kidnapped and terrorized a little…they might point a gun at a guy’s head and videotape him with his face in the dirt, but really, who’s it hurting? It’s not really hurting anyone, right?

LaShawn observes the weirdness of our time: that one might be forcibly converted and still say, “I learned a lot of good things about Islam…” from the very Islamofascists who taught it to him at gunpoint.

It is easy to say I would not be so confused were my head under the sword the terrorists would like to hold over me (and you). I think I would make the right choice, I believe I would de-capitate before I’d capitulate. But if they held the sword over my one of my son’s necks, then what?

Related: Faith and Reason and Forced Conversions

This war is either going to be won, in a long hard slog, or it’s going to be lost. It’s as simple as that. I’m voting for winning it. The alternative is unappealing.

March Hare has a thoughtful and touching post on the subject. And the four shrinks of the Sanity Squad are talking about it in their podcast.