Germans and Reformation

Last night.....Channel One (ARD) of Germany.....ran a chat-forum show (Sandra Mashingberger's People and Politics).

Normally, I don't care for it.  For some reason, I was channel-flipping late and hit the show early on for a while, and came back to it later.

It was an odd group to sit and chat on a significant topic.....Islam.  Two were big players of the Greens and the CDU.  Both were within their zone and probably worth listening to.  A TV journalist got into the mix, with limited background.  Then you had two comedians (a Turkish comedian and a Swiss comedian).

The thing I've figured out over the past few years about comedians in Germany....some are awful bright individuals and are leaning more toward satire than raw comedy.

Around the second point of the chat forum that I came back to the chat.....the Swiss comedian made a fairly blunt point.  He's read the Quran three times.  He's not stupid and it's apparent in his discussion.  As he kinda points out.....Christianity and the Catholic Church had the reformation period.   They cleaned up their religions and society realized the problems with the religion that came out of the early ages.

So, the Swiss comedian.....Andreas Thiel....came to this blunt point.  The Quran as he's suggested is loaded with violence....it's a planning document for war and oppression.  In his mind, the Quran and the religion needs a reformation period, and the Quran itself needs some type of re-write.

Just to suggest the re-write idea.....you get into difficult territory.  It's a document designed to be iron-clad and unable to be revised in any shape or fashion.  Just convincing folks to work it into other religions....was hard enough.  To suggest that you might take it and remove some of the violent language or suggested outcomes for offenders?  It is near impossible to suggest this in a group chat situation.

Presently in Germany, the trend is going negative about Islam and society.  More than fifty percent of German society believes it's a violent religion presently and they fear it.  It's not the kind of fear that you have with the global warming crowd, the Nazi crowd, or the Greek economic failure crowd.  This is a fear where people see someone on the street and have an image in their mind, and it's not a happy image.

The thing with these chat forums.....especially late at night....I doubt if more than 300,000 Germans out of eighty million probably watched it.  Maybe half will sit there and make a mental note over what was suggested about a reformation-type period required.  But it's simply an untouchable thing.  People would take it in the wrong fashion, and then they'd say we were all confused about the Catholics and Christians of the 1600s.....different type....different society....different outcome.  They'd suggest that Islam is different....built with the right incentives.

The thing....reformation fixed a bad thing, and no one argues about that today.  It's hard to find a single person who is in favor of life and Christian-Catholic infighting prior to the Thirty-Years-War.  That's reality.