Declaring a country's religious leanings

Several Muslims (usually (extreme) fundamentalists) have in recent times started talking about "Muslim countries" or "Muslim lands" - as in "The West should stop interfering in Muslim countries/lands" usw (corollary phrase - "and if you do we reserve the right to behead you, even (or especially!) if you are only there trying to help people in need).

Fine.

There are two sides to that coin.

Try Thailand. Thailand is theoretically a secular country with a massive Buddhist majority. 84% of the population are practising Buddhists. Assume Thailand imposed a law calling itself a "Buddhist country" - essentially outlawing the right to religious dissent, obliging the believers of other faiths to follow the creed at the risk of penalties (however severe).

Thailand's second biggest religious grouping comprises Muslims, mainly in the South of the country. What would they think of such an imposition? Would they like it? Would they like the idea of being forced to believe summat else or be executed for their faith (well, I suppose that they would hence become martyrs ....)?

Buddhism has the immense advantage over the jihadist version of Islam (not the Islam practised by most of its adherents or encouraged by its leading teachers, I would add) in that it believes in persuasion not force and finding the answers in yourself with the guidance of the teachings of the Buddha - not enforcement of a set of rules by people who think that they can impose regulations no matter how severe and how severely! Peace and understanding are the principal tools of Buddhist teaching, not imposition. Anything else is bad karma and needs to be discouraged.

Europe in turn could also look to its traditions and European countries could declare themselves "Christian" countries. Spain could bring back the inquisition (including the torture of non-believers), Portugal could bring back the auto-da-fe, the UK could reintroduce the burning of heretics at the stake. Muslims of course are heretics by the definition involved here, so prepare yourself for 3,000,000 pyres to be built to deal with the problem! I am not sure why my usual calm, quiet, unexcitable, intellectual personality is suddenly excited at the prospect of Anjem Choudary being burned at the stake, but anyway ......

Of course being an atheist I would have problems myself with this (though given the time it would take to deal with all the Muslims first, we would probably get leave while they dealt with the real problem). Staying in Germany would probably anyway make sense - some 40-odd percent of people here are atheists and agnostics, so there is strength in numbers. And again there are some 4 million Muslims to deal with first (starting with the 6,000 or so Salafists).

And the mention of Germany as a Christian country recalls the religious wars in the 17th century when Catholics and Protestants proved that "loving your neighbour" was definitely not a principle to follow if they were members of the other belief system!

The best answer to all this, of course, is live and let live. An end to this nonsense about "Muslim countries" and the like ("Christian countries", "Jewish countries", "Buddhist countries" would be just as bad - you just never seem to hear much about such!), an end to "apostasy" being a criminal offence anywhere in the world, the right of all individuals to dissent.

Some hope, particularly when you see what is happening in Syria at the moment - but that should be an objective to achieve, everywhere in the world in the 21st century. Die Zeiten des Mittelalters sind vorbei! ("The Middle Ages have gone" - nearest translation I can come up with!).