Don’t remember.

China has a high Islamic population in its Xinjiang Autonomous Region, in the West.

It’s home to the Uyghurs, a primarily Turkic people.

It’s mostly Eurasian steppe and desert.

Not too many people live out there.

It’s similar to Tibet, in that there’s been a lot of separatist sentiment in the area because it’s ethnic people and culture are very different to the ruling Han Chinese.

Thus the reason it gets a lot of autonomy.

However, while Islam itself is a gov’t-protected religion, Native Islamic Uyghurs in Xinjiang so face a lot of persecution by the non-Uyghurs living there.

Mainly because they’ve been a pain in the PRC’s side since the late 40’s when they annexed the then independent Xinjiang warlord state, the last warlord state of the Chinese Civil War to be reintegrated into a unified China.

There are still very Christian countries in the West that cling onto the religion quite firmly, most of them being Mediterranean counties like Italy, Spain and Greece, along with the vast majority of Latin American states as well.

America’s a mixed bag. Atheism is popular in large metropolitan areas while religion holds strong in the countryside, very similarly to the Democrat/Republican divide.

In the UK, it’s just dying everywhere.

Yep.

Islam.

I mean, I’m an atheist myself, but I just find it... sad, to say the least.

It’s the tradition of the West we’re losing.

I probably wouldn’t care if the entire world abandoned religion, but abandoning Christianity in the west just leaves other religions with the opportunity to take its place.

Like the aforementioned Islam.

That’s why so many are still religious, yeah.

What I find even more frustrating is that people here in the west claim that they’re “against all religion”, but only beat up on Christianity because they don’t want to hurt some poor Arab or Indian’s feelings.

I’m indifferent.

There’s also the feminists that campaign for the women’s rights that they already have here in the West while the Middle East isn’t even touched despite the fuckload of human rights violations against woman they have there.

It’s almost sickening how hypocritical we are.

“muh crusades, muh kkk, muh westboro baptist church”

The crusades part especially pisses me off.

Ex

Fucking

actly

On top of that, most people don’t even know shit about the Crusades other than “Christians murdered a bunch of poor Arabs”.

Heeeeell no.

The crusades were wars of reconquest, retaliatory invasions after hundreds of years of Islamic aggression

The 4th Crusade, as much as it makes my inner Greek salty as hell, wasn’t even against Islamic powers.

? Yes it was

It escalated into a war against the Byzantines, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is fucking Christian.

It changed partway through

It did, yeah.

But it was a call against Islamic aggression by the Pope

Don't know enough about it to know why they went to Byzantium though

By the orders of the Pope it was, however the Venetians steered it into a land grab by dropping the Crusaders off the coast of Croatia and later Constantinople, the latter without giving the Crusaders a ride to anywhere else.

Therefore the Crusaders pillaged the shit out of Constantinople, effectively killing off the Byzantines and leaving the door wide open for the Ottomans to take over 200 years later.