Dear Ibrahim,
First, I know, I get an unfair advantage, deciding which of your comments get posted up top. Since you are using a pseudonym, I trust you don’t mind. However, if you do, let me know why and I will consider taking this down to the comments level. Your comments to my original post are in italics in their substantive entirety.
Ibrahim: I’d be very hesitant to label the beliefs of a billion people as hinging on a ‘document’ that revolves around violence.
I did not label Islam as “hinging” on a document that “revolves” around violence. I only said that the Qu’ran permits and advocates physical violence in a way that the New Testament does not. In the New Testament, there is not a single instance of approval of physical violence. Indeed, Jesus stopped his disciple Peter when he cut off the ear of one of His captors . This is one of only two instances in the entire New Testament where a believer attempts to use physical violence, and Jesus reacts, “Put away your sword!” (John 18:10-11) In the second instance, Jesus, angry that people were doing business in a temple, overturned tables. The crowd attempted to attack Him, but He ran away.
I also said that there are plenty of verses in the Qu’ran that advocate peaceful living with neighbors, filial-piety, protecting orphans and widows, and lots of other good stuff. But it is also clear in the Qu’ran that physical violence when Allah is attacked is permissible, and will be rewarded. Muslims can, and many do, choose not to live by those passages, but they are there, in the core document on which their faith is based.
Ibrahim: Islam has lasted for a long time; if it’s built on a violent foundation, I fail to see why it’s never launched a Crusade nor a Holocaust, or why Muslims haven’t been at constant war with non-Muslims since 622.
First, I did not say that Islam is built on a “violent foundation.” I did observe that the Qu’ran permits and rewards physical violence in defense of Allah and the Islamic way of life. Second, you are mistaken if you believe that there has not been great violence in the history of Islam. Indeed, Islam spread primarily through the sword in its early days, despite verses in the Qu’ran that also say, “And if your Lord had pleased, surely all those who are in the earth would have believed, all of them; will you then force men till they become believers?” (Yunus: 99). This verse too is in conflict with verses that force nonbelievers to pay tribute to Allah.
As for the Holocaust, Hitler was an atheist.
Ibrahim: Nor are Islamic societies the ones that are drowning in a sea of handgun deaths.
I suspect that your point is that Islamic societies are not violent. I think if you look at the practice of suicide bombing and honor killing in some Islamic societies, you will quickly realise that this more than compensates for handgun deaths in America. But more to the point, I never said that America or non-Islamic societies are not violent. They are.
Here I ought make the distinction between culture and faith. Culture breeds all sorts of things (including violence) in the name of love, God, expediency, whatever. We can judge culture purely by actions, but we should judge the merits of a faith by its proposed ideas and what the likely consequences will be. Which is why, rather than fault Islam for violence by looking at what people do in the name of Allah, I was interested in seeing whether the Qu’ran and other foundational documents of Islam and Christianity themselves endorse physical violence.
“Make the necessary distinction between truth and truth-bearer. We rightly expect people who believe something to act in accordance with that belief. But we are all terribly imperfect, and that guarantees there will be failures. At such times it is important to remember that I am the contradiction, not God. I may have proven myself a hypocrite, but I’ve proven nothing about God.” (from Divine Complication by Matt Rogers in Relevant Magazine)
Ibrahim: As far as I can tell, Islamic radicals have only appeared within the last 30 years, engendered by colonialism and post-colonialism. American Muslims are no more violent than American Buddhists–so I suspect it’s environment not genetics in this case.
I did not suggest that it’s genetics. People are not genetically born Muslims. Muslims are born into cultures that teach them the Islamic faith, and they at some point choose to believe that faith or not to believe that faith, and, if they believe, which tenets of the faith to believe and by which to act. So I would agree that it’s environment. My original post is not a commentary about what Muslims by nature or genetics are. This is a commentary comparing the core documents of two faiths. Whether or not people follow those core documents faithfully is another issue.
Muslims who are peaceful and do not believe in physical jihad have as much right to say that terrorists fighting in the name of Allah are not faithful representatives of Islam as much as Christians have a right to say that the Crusaders and abortion bombers were not faithful representatives of Christianity. But, the main point of my post is that the disavowel of physical violence by a Christian is completely and unambiguously supported by the core document of the her faith.
Ibrahim: In any case, I do think people generally are good, and find it hard to believe that 1/7th of the world’s population follows a blood-thirsty faith.
Considering all of human history, I have a hard time thinking that people are “generally good” and leaving it at that. I struggled with that question a lot before I became a Christian. I knew plenty of nice, kind, people, and tried to be one myself. Then again, I didn’t live in Nazi Germany or even some violent urban ghetto. The Bible says that we are made in the image of God, who is Himself goodness, but we are ourselves sinful. These two things suggest to me that while His goodness is evident in us, all of us have the potential for evil. History has proven too often that this evil is plentifully realised. We are left with the choice to give in to our sin by temptation, or to choose His goodness. For a Christian, this is a lifelong struggle, to be refined more in the image of God’s goodness and less in our original fallen state. Also, “blood-thirsty faith” is not a phrase I can claim as my own and I would never use it to describe Islam.
Ibrahim: Then again, evangelicals follow a faith that sends 6/7ths of the world to eternal hell, so maybe writing off a mere billion fellow humans shouldn’t be such a big deal to me.
You might be interested to know that the Qu’ran clearly teaches that all nonbelievers are going to hell: “Do jihad against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be harsh to them; and their abode is hell, an evil destination.” (9.73) [Madinite.]
The same concept is found nowhere as such in the Bible.
Jesus does say that there is “no way to the Father but through me,” and that He is “the way, the truth, and the life.” The New Testament also supports throughout Paul’s writing that “Justification is by grace alone,” (Galatians 2:15-16) “for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (That is, if we could earn our way to heaven Christ sacrificed himself for no reason.) It is through these and other similar passages that believing, Bible-reading Christians have concluded that an acknowledgement of a need for grace and belief that Jesus’s loving sacrifice for us was sufficient to reconcile us to God, are necessary to be with God (presumably in “heaven”) after our physical death. As for who is going to hell, I think we can fairly say that only God knows for sure.
If a holy and just God exists at all, this makes sense. We are all prone to sin, however hard we try (Christians are not excluded from this), and God is holy. We cannot act or be holy enough to earn our way to heaven, and God made the ultimate sacrifice to give us a way out, to demonstrate to us our sinfulness, and to humble our hearts, which in turn should help us to do what is right.
glasses off. 
