The Pope's Faulty Thesis (in regards to Islam)

What else is the Pope supposed to do? Islam is his #1 competitor. Obviously he can't just come out and say that a religion his religion says is idolatry is just as good.The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and the position of the Church is that the only God is the God of the Bible. What else is possible from that but conflict?This is why secularism exists, people. It's the only way to run governments in the face of religions who all mutually disavow the legitimacy of the others. Secularism is religious neutrality. It's the only way different religions can co-exist in the same society, period.

Your evidence that they don't assimilate?The simple fact is, Mexican immigrants assimilate faster than almost any other ethnic immigrant group. Within a generation they're speaking English fluently; within another hardly any of them know much Spanish.You need to turn off Glenn Beck, and if you're still listening to Michael Weiner you need to have your head examined. (Enjoying his show, that's the mental disorder.) The truth is that there's no divide; there's no future where the US becomes North Mexico. How hard are you looking? It's all to easy for conservatives to say "I don't see..." when it turns out that they have absolutely no idea what's going on in those communities, or what's being debated in those circles. But then, if they didn't argue from a position of invulnerable ignorance, they just wouldn't be conservatives, would they?

That's swell. Every major city in the US still has a Chinatown, and a Little Italy. Somehow, we avoided becoming adjuncts to either of those countries, but that didn't stop the complaining of the racists then, either.The fact that you can go downtown and get a decent taco isn't evidence that they're not assimilating. The studies are very clear that within two generations Mexican immigrant families are as American as Bluejays baseball and the enchilada supreme. They speak fluent English, they're moving in the same circles, they're inhabiting roughly the same economic strata. Almost nobody assimilates faster than Mexican immigrant populations.If you're worried about a non-assimilating population, look to the Muslims. I know that in Minnesota the Somalian immigrants are still practicing female genital mutilation amongst their daughters, and it's pretty clear in Europe that a lot of Muslims believe that, no matter where they immigrate, they have a right to force that culture to adopt Muslim traditions, no matter what that country had in mind for itself. Well, what do you expect? Their employers refuse to pay them a living wage, so they wind up on welfare.Look, if you're pissed off about it, target the employers who are taking advantage of these people. Don't demonize good people who are simply trying to do right by their families. People have a right to do what it takes not to starve. Sounds like assimilation to me, in the country with the largest incarcerated porportion worldwide. I'm actually a classical liberal, in the sense that I believe that the freedom of the individual should be at a maximum, and that the purpose of the government is to restrait itself and corporations from infringing on that freedom wherever possible. The rise of American political Christian fascism and the spread of fanatical Islam are the two greatest threats to that freedom that I can percieve. No surprise that they're both driven by religion.